SETIQuest Goes Live

As of February 11th, 2010 you are now able to officially join the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by heading to the SETIQuest site. The site is sponsored by the SETI Institute and TED and is the result of a request made by Jill Tarter after she won the Ted Prize in 2009. Her request was:

empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company

The site is making large amounts of SETI data available for the first time and allowing developers as well as non-developers access to it. Apparently there will be a way to visualize the signals such that non-programmers can actually try and visualize something of interest in the data, this seems a little ridiculous but should produce cool looking white noise pictures. For those that don't know, Carl Sagen used Jill Tarter as his model for the book Contact which later became a movie, Jody Foster player the role of Jill. Anyway, trying to extract a pattern from white noise is similar to the fiction of the movie where she (Jody=Jill) was listening for patterns.

STAR FORMATION

It seems as though star formation is still much of mystery to astronomers and cosmologists. This is a little surprising given what we claim to know about so many other, less ubiquitous celestial objects.

I've always wondered why our solar system forms such a perfect plane, especially with Pluto rightfully out of the picture as a planet. It seems that the planets would orbit much more like electrons around a nucleus instead of on a perfect (more or less) plane.

I've read several theories on star formation and most come down to the same basic requirement, a catalyst to get gravity going. According to what I've read there are many forces that can act as the catalyst to initiate star formation in a dense hydrogen cloud. In fact, many scientists believe that sound waves act in a way as to start the hydrogen collapsing process and form a star. It isn't hard to imagine a myriad of events that would cause gasous compression and ignite the nuclear fires.

How Big is the Universe? Well...that depends on how you model it.

I've attached a video to a Cosmic Journeys presentation on just this question. I've also included a link to a previous post that discusses the problem with he Big Bang and the perceived age of the Universe. All of the ideas presented in the video are radically different than the general understanding of the age and much more consistent with the requirements of the structure we see.

The video is 20 minutes long and has 3 embedded commercials (Sorry), it is an excellent presentation covering everything from the history to contemporary thinking and measurements. The video also reconciles the work at Brookhaven Labs with the cosmological theories. I recommend not just this video but any from the series. It is crazy how much information and intelligence is available.

So, how big is the Universe? Let's see...

Hubble originally looked and made the measurement that are now accepted as the size/age of the Universe - 13.7 Billion Light Years. Hubble was recalibrated and again looked at the most distant galaxies it could see, when the expansion rate was factored in the Universe is roughly 46 Billion Light Year to the south and to the north, translating to a size/age of roughly 92 Billion Light Years! Keep in mind that this measurement is based on a straight forward model of the Big Bang (which is almost certainly wrong!).

There are several sets of these videos, they are good in that they provide an alternative point of view and raise some interesting issues for the standard model. There are several problems with the Big Bang Theory (BBT) that are outlined in this video series, these are highlighted below:

Here are some video links that are worth watching. There is a link to the blog entry that describes the videos at the end of this article (below the last video).

It seems incredible that we see the amount of large scale structure we see and to believe that it was formed in just 13.73 billion years. I know, that's a really, really long time so why shouldn't it be enough? There are some great sites that describe the Universe in terms of scale and structure, the link here describes the large scale structure in terms of light. Here is the wikipedia article that explains the age of the universe.

The fact that Universe had to go through so many steps in order to generate such structure certainly leads me to believe that we have grossly underestimated the age of the Universe. The isn't a stretch by any means, determining the age of the Earth proved to be incredibly difficult so imagine trying to peg the Universe's birthday. That said, it would be nice if the scientific establishment owned up to the fact that there is a good chance they are wrong. Instead, people like Larry Krauss run around indicating (with such arrogance) that they have figured out the age of the Universe to 4 decimal places!

Here are three images that show the evolution of structure, the box is 43 million parsecs or 140 million light years - a pretty small portion of the sky but since the Universe is both isotropic and homogeneous it doesn't matter, any selection would produce the exact same results (on average).

part 2 (4 videos)

This is from the NPR show: Science Friday with Ira Flatow. The title of the program is the same as this entry, Big Questions in Cosmology. The heavy hitters came out to play including Krauss, Weinberg and Greene, the list is below:

Guests

Steven Weinberg
Professor of Physics and Astronomy
The University of Texas at Austin
Nobel Prize, 1979, Physics
Austin, Texas

Michael Turner
Professor, Departments of Astronomy and Astrophysics and Physics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

Brian Greene
Professor Mathematics and Physics
Columbia University
New York, New York

Lawrence Krauss
Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department
Inaugural Director, Origins Initiative
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona

These guys are all very articulate in terms of defining complex ideas, Larry Krauss is especially good at public speaking, he is almost a performer. The picture below represent a diagram of a collision from Fermi labs, these (I think) come out of CERN as well.

Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources

These are probably the coolest things in the Universe, they are absolutely the most energetic with outbound energy 1k times great than our entire Milky Way. In fact, the equivalent is solar energy would require about 1 trillion suns!  That's impressive considering the size is generally small, typically not larger then out solar system. The official description from Wikipedia is the following:

...there is now a scientific consensus that a quasar is a compact region in the center of a massive galaxy surrounding the central supermassive black hole. Its size is 10-10,000 times the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole. The quasar is powered by an accretion disc around the black hole.

So, as you can see there is apparently scientific consensus on what a Quasar is. From what I've gathered it doesn't seem as if the consensus is overwhelming as many (at least some) scientists still disagree on Quasars at least as far as a consensus goes. It seems as if there are some problems here but conveniently they've been addressed in a traditional way - voodoo.