Astronomy And Physics Thread

Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum

Help Support Loneliness, Depression & Relationship Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

IncolaVacui

Well-known member
Joined
Jan 7, 2019
Messages
266
Reaction score
2
Location
Southeast, U.S.A.
I love astronomy and astrophysics. It's really fascinating to me and people have asked me questions about science stuff so I decided to make a thread full of links for people to see and talk about. Plus, visual digital art for astronomy is really cool art. Equations aside (because, let's face it, math will make your head hurt) the stuff is awesome. The scientific community over the years has become really forgiving and humbling to the general public so that people can better understand what they're doing.

We'll start with the LIGO detection of gravitational waves with a short video giving you the gist of it. There's a slightly longer video that I will post beneath it explaining how LIGO detected the gravitational waves from the merging black holes.

(oh, and holy crap that's a lot of power...)



Video 1:
[youtube]366_xfP_PtI[/youtube]

Video 2:
[youtube]iphcyNWFD10[/youtube]
 
I think I've seen the 'Absurdity of Detecting Gravitational Waves'. I often watch things like this myself but I forget a lot of it since it's not something I use in everyday life. I used to take books to work about physics, quantum mechanics, space and even quantum computing, but because I'm not talking about football, porn and explosions people think you're a weirdo.

I used to think "black holes" were unimaginably compact planets, similar to Neutron Stars but even more dense. I believed that light couldn't escape but didn't believe that it was a singularity. It didn't seem to add up for me. But the problem with this subject is that there's only so far you can go until it becomes heavily dependent on the math and it's where people (in general) loose interest because it's simply unfathomable to 'normal' people.
 
Yeah, I don't "people" well...I never have. I can only bullshit it for so long before a long slimy tentacle slips out and someone pokes me and says: "Umm, your Cthulhu is showing..." And I'm like: "Gah! fresia! >_<" That's about the extent of it.

Recently, we've taken photos of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, however the data of those photos has to be reconstructed together and it's a lot of work because it's about a petabyte in size...which, they don't really sell petabyte-sized drives to people, I think you need  a quantum computer and a special license for that kind of hardware. They're working on reconstructing the photo though, it's interesting.
 
I don't think organisations like NASA will have trouble with space or computing power. I read that it wasn't possible to "take pictures" of the center because of the galactic plane, but years back I did see them simulate about 12 of the largest stars that are currently orbiting the black hole. A few of them has brutal elliptical orbits travelling so fast it was a wonder they didn't get ripped apart. I think from the observed sizes and orbital speeds they were able to calculate the actual size of the black hole.
 
They're using this, which I actually think is a really interesting solution to the problem of visibility:

[youtube]hMsNd1W_lmE[/youtube]



Obviously, it'll take forever before the public gets to see it, but I'm quite marveled at the idea to even come up with something like that. It's almost as if you have a team of astronomers who are all like: "Pics or it didn't happen!" :p xD.

I'm not quite sure more of what I'm excited about with it. I'm not sure if I'm more excited to see a black hole, or to discover something entirely new that would alter pretty much everything we know and understand. That's part of why I like learning about these things though, because you don't get that kind of a thing very often.
 
Whats inside a black hole? A portal to another universe?
 
Azariah said:
Whats inside a black hole? A portal to another universe?

Nobody actually knows, that's part of why they're so fascinating. There's no one actual known answer, only many possibilities.


[youtube]FoExPq04OQQ[/youtube]
 

Latest posts

Back
Top