Astronomers Gone Wild

Sensing government dollars, a university scientist slithers towards a grant.

These are the voyages of the University Grant-Seeking Astronomers. Their five-year mission: to explore strange new funding opportunities; to seek out a new government teat to suck on; to boldly go where no taxpayer-supported parasite has gone before."



From Yahoo News:

The award for strangest star in the universe just went to KIC 8462852.

And while some are saying that this star could be harboring a giant structure built by an advanced alien civilization, the scientists behind the hype are saying otherwise.

Business Insider recently spoke with two of these astronomers to find out what's really going on and if this structure really is proof of alien intelligence or a complete hoax.

For some background: A postdoctoral graduate at Yale, Tabby Boyajian, and Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, recently discovered a bizarre and mysteriously giant structure orbiting the star that's unlike anything they've ever seen.

And now they're doing what scientists do best: weighing all of the possible explanations until more data comes in that can rule out the wrong reasons in favor of the right one.

Right now, there are many options on the table, including a giant swarm of comets, left-over chunks from a broken-up planet, and last but certainly not least an alien-built megastructure. But we won't know for sure until more data is collected.

Used to be, professional scientists would be too embarrassed to come out with crap like this; but ever since the climate change scam was perpetrated on the US taxpayer, nothing is over the top anymore.

Scientists, like politicians, realize that the American public is too damn stupid; like a five dollar whore, they'll swallow anything.

To be honest, one of the scientists said that the probability that an alien culture was responsible for this anomaly is very low, but he still said it was a possibility.

"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."

How the hell would he know what an alien society would build?

Galaxies

There is nothing like a view of the universe to make you realize just how small and insignificant you are. Even just a tiny portion of the universe is more than we can comprehend. Distances are so vast that the numbers are almost meaningless to us. The number of stars and planets boggles the imagination.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is part of a galactic group; there are three major galaxies in this group. Only 2.5 million light years away from Earth, the largest is Andromeda,which contains a trillion stars in a spiral approximately 200,000 light years from end to end. Next in size is the Milky Way, about half the size of Andromeda and 600 billion stars. Third largest is the Triangulum Galaxy, less than half the size of the Milky Way with about 40 billion stars. Everything else in this group orbits around these galaxies. Smaller galaxies in our local group are a mere 160,000 light years away.

Those are the galaxies closest to us. And what about those farthest away...

And yet, David writes in Psalms 8

Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:
All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;
The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.
O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!

Back To The Drawing Board

Just when scientists think they have God on the run and everything fits their cute little mathematical models, science happens....

Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood. They are the ultimate unknown – the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape. And as if they weren't bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don't exist.

By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.

"I'm still not over the shock," said Mersini-Houghton. "We've been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about."

[...]Many physicists and astronomers believe that our universe originated from a singularity that began expanding with the Big Bang. However, if singularities do not exist, then physicists have to rethink their ideas of the Big Bang and whether it ever happened.

Story here.

We Don't Know Anything! - Update

Questions, questions, questions...

So many questions about our destiny.

Jobs, healthcare, public safety, the economy, foreign relations, rumors and threats of war - it's enough to drive us all into bunkers before we go bonkers. So much ambiguity!

And now the laws of physics are toast as well.

Einstein's General  Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics fall apart in the presense of a black hole.

In a nutshell:

• The Theory of Relativity works beautifully with respect to planets, stars, solar systems and galaxies.
• Quantum Theory works wondrously with atoms, electrons and quarks.

Black holes blow it all up.

With respect to Relativity: The singularity in a  black hole (as predicted by Einstein's theory) predicts infinite gravity in an infinitely small point - no space at all.  As one physicist points out  - "Time stops [...] space makes no sense. It means the collapse of everything we know about the physical universe."

With respect to Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Gravity: The results are even worse when trying to create a model of Quantum Gravity. Trying to combine Relativity and Quantum Mechanics you get an infinite sequence of infinities. They are totally incompatible. The equations make no sense and theoretical physicists are stumped. As one physicists states, "There are no bigger questions than this." 

 It means we don't understand anything.

It is God rubbing our noses in His Creation.

It is spelled out in the following video clip.




UPDATE:
That's just black holes, we also found out that we  know less than we thought about how the galaxies in the universe are flying apart, going faster and faster.

From the WashPost:

Giant digital camera probes cosmic ‘dark energy,’ the universe’s deepest mystery

With the whir of a giant digital camera, the biggest mystery in the universe is about to become a bit less mysterious.

Fifteen years ago, the world of science was rocked by the discovery that, contrary to our notions of gravity, distant galaxies appeared to be flying apart at an ever-accelerating rate. The observation implied that space itself was stretching apart faster and faster. It was akin to watching a dropped ball reverse course, speed upward and disappear into the sky.

The discovery made many cosmologists — the scientists who probe the very nature of nature itself — acutely uncomfortable. For either our understanding of gravity is cockeyed, or some mysterious repulsive force — quickly and glibly dubbed “dark energy” — permeates the universe.

Now, after years of planning and construction, four new projects at telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and the South Pole are getting a handle on what, exactly, is doing this unseemly pushing.

Leading the way is the world’s most powerful digital camera, constructed at Fermilab, the Energy Department facility in Illinois. The $50 million Dark Energy Camera took a decade to plan and build, and it sports a resolution of 570 megapixels — about a hundredfold more pixels than a smartphone camera. Technicians installed it atop a telescope in Chile last year, and after initial jitters — the camera was so heavy it made the telescope jiggle — the camera has been “tested, tweaked and fine-tuned,” said Joshua Frieman, the Fermilab scientist leading the project, which has enlisted 120 scientists from 23 countries.

On Aug. 31, the big camera began snapping its way across a huge swath of the southern sky.