Starship Asterisk*

And don't get me started on the stupid newspaper stories saying that the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole! Do newspaper journalists know more than scientists? Unfortunately, these stories were fuelled by scientists. Before the LHC started, I visit the CERN website and it was full with th...

At Quanta Magazine is another article, also presenting the sceptics point of view. It also makes clear that this experimental result is still far from being a "scientific breakthrough", as the Astronomy Now article writes.

How can this monstrosity be called an equation when it lacks an equal sign :?: Or, is it to be understood that it all adds up to zero? This is not exactly the "standard model equation". It's the Lagrangian of the standard model equation. So there's an implied "the Lagrangian equals&q...

"Rather than quantizing gravity, maybe we should try to gravitize quantum mechanics " … new paper by @seanmcarroll" There are several different approaches how to combine gravity and quantum mechanics. Some try it by modifying gravity in some way, others modify quantum mechanics. No a...

I had a friend from London visiting me and she was really amazed at the night sky. In my city you can see a few bright stars at night, but certainly no Milky Way and still fewer stars compared to the small town I grew up in.

It is quite doubtful about LIGO's claim of having detected gravity wave. If you imagine a tube of 1 light-year radius and 1.4 billion light years long you will have about 17.6 million solar starts inside the tube. For 100-200Hz gravity wave, the wave length would be 1500-3000km which are still much...

And then scientists are surprised when people complain that scientists don’t know what they are doing. Sure, these movie-trailer like videos get attention, but is it the attention that the mission really needs? The scientists at CERN found out the hard way, when, after hyping the creation of black h...

Ok. Presumably the chirp wave at the end marks the moment when the two black holes became one? Does there exist a theory / model explaining the general shape of this chirp? It would be nice to say that "this is what GR predicted the fusion of two black holes to sound like (on the GW spectrum) ...

Oh come on ! Conf is expected to start tomorrow (Wed) 10:15am PDT. That's like 13+ hours from now. Why waste today's (tonite's for us on US west coast) APOD for that ? Sorry for my ignorance or lack of knowledge, I am not sure if I understand the logic/thought process behind this. Whatever that exc...

I was a little bit confused by this graph. Yes, I realize that it is horribly hard to measure the expansion rate of the very early universe, but it seems to me that the results obtained by Okumara et al. don't agree all that well with previous results, or with Einstein's theory of general relativit...

Interesting but kind of puzzling. According to the Planck spacecraft, the latest estimated age of the universe is 13.82B years. Assuming that light speed is constant in the confines of space and hasn't changed over time, shouldn't we only be able to see back as far as first light? The graphic suppl...

A lot of nearby 4th magnitude "stars" change their positions vis-a-vis Jupiter from night to night. I don't get that :?: We see a lot of fixed stars in the night sky, i.e. stars that don't change their relative positions to each other (on a human time scale). Of course, they all change po...

It probably also didn't help that the Moons of Jupiter basically follow Jupiter but they were never in the same pattern from night to night. Naively, I would have thought that a "star" that changed from night to night would have drawn the attention of ancient sky gazers. After all, that's...

I have seen Jupiter and three of it's moons without a scope. I was quite amazed to spot those Jovian moons. Standing on my driveway on clear cold winter night, I wondered "Could one of Jupiter's moon really look to be that far away from it's planet? " Then... " Those three objects ar...

I think it's still worth one test of possibly the most direct validation of a fundamental property of relativity. From what I've found, believe it or not, it hasn't been directly tested. I'd really like to be shown otherwise for at least myself. What do you mean by "directly tested"? What...

Gravitons surely exist. The only reasonable question is whether gravitons are massless or not. They certainly might exist. But all theory around them is speculative, poorly developed, and untested. So I find the best approach is simply to treat gravitational radiation as gravitational radiation, an...

Did or did not [...] even James Clerk Maxwell (although he worked before Einstein) prove pretty convincingly that Einsteinian Relativity is a pig in a poke... Actually, it was Einstein who "rescued" Maxwell's equation by introducing his theory of relativity. There are dozens of alternativ...

If the Big Bang initiated a Calabi–Yau space which later expanded to our known cosmology could it still be reflected in our smallest known dimensions? That's the theory. (It is also reflected in the values for our fundamental physical constants.) The problem is that there are about 10^500 different...

As a first order approximation your thought can be right, but I think when you look at a more detailed simulation you do need the stars also. The black hole is about 70 million solar masses. This is about 0.07% (assuming only stars of solar mass..., probably it's a lot lower percentage) of the tota...

Are the white specks that are visible in the picture background stars or other bits of matter that the comet has in tow in addition to Rosetta? Some of the "white specks" appear more like streaks, so I would interpret them as trails of dust. Rosetta investigated the comet's "corona&q...

I recently attended a talk by a member of the Rosetta team. He showed data indicating that C67P might have formed from the "collision" of the two "lobes".

The first paragraph of my print article says, "...we USED to think that an astronaut falling past the point of no return -- the so-called event horizon -- would not feel anything special." [Emphasis mine on the operative word.] The article goes on to describe something different than you ...

Don't rely on rumours and press releases! It often takes months or years to properly analyse experimental data and often only the people working in the collaboration know the necessary details to really interpret the data. Hold your breath until a collaboration announces their findings at a public c...

bystander wrote:

Markus Schwarz wrote:Unfortunately, I cannot view the video from Germany

Try this one on youtube. It's the same video.

There is no technical problem but a legal issue, which is a lot more difficult to resolve

Unfortunately, I cannot view the video from Germany