China Jon's Syncretic Journal

The New Horizons space probe was in the news lately and is going a long way to check out Pluto. Then it will continue out to see the place where comets are born. This will be happening in about 8 years. That is how far away Pluto is at the speed New Horizons is traveling. As New Horizons passed Jupiter, it was going about 52,000 miles per hour. When it was launched from Earth it reached a record speed of 35,800 miles per hour.

So, how does this speedster compare to the other spacecraft speed records? Do you know what the fastest speed of any man made object is and where and when it occurred?

I'll give you a clue. Why is the New horizons space probe going faster now than when it was launched? Gravity! Jupiter's gravity has been pulling the New Horizons space probe faster and faster towards Jupiter. So, Jupiter has the most gravity of any planet in the Solar System, but what has more gravity than all the planets put together?

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Beyond our imagination lies... nothing.

This is the galaxy Chanson d'Amista, so named because of the fundamental harmony of friendhip.

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From APOD:
The Outskirts of M77
Credit & Copyright: Ken Crawford (Rancho Del Sol Observatory)
Explanation: Face-on spiral galaxy M77 lies a mere 60 million light-years away toward the aquatic constellation Cetus. Also known as NGC 1068, its very bright core is well studied by astronomers exploring the mysteries of super-massive black holes in active galaxies. While M77 is also seen at x-ray, ultraviolet, infrared, and radio wavelengths, this visible light image highlights another remarkable aspect of the galaxy. In the picture, the data has been enhanced to show outer faint details, following spiral arms and structures that reach far beyond the galaxy's brighter central regions. Including the fainter outskirts, the galaxy's diameter is well over 100 thousand light-years at M77's estimated distance, making it larger than our own spiral Milky Way.

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In school, most of us were taught the Earth is in orbit around the Sun, and the Moon is in orbit around the Earth, sort of like little circles on the chalk board or a piece of paper.

But the Earth and Sun and Moon, in fact all the pieces of the Solar System are zooming through space together, in orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy!

Can you guess how fast they are traveling in one second?

Well, let me tell you ....

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Have you heard of 'Dark Energy?'

Dark Energy is a theoretical tool based on the need to explain observations of the Universe.

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Here is a good site to see, hear, and read about the night sky.
The Flash Movies are short and well done.

November 2006
Mercury makes a rare transit across the face of the Sun.

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I only saw the little shot made by the Mars Rover as it looked into the big crater, but I have not checked back. I think this crater will help answer a lot of questions about Mars the same way that the Grand Canyon did about Earth's. I hope so anyway.

I like looking at the Grand Canyon. The Earth's history is layered so interestingly! I am linking to two pics. One shows the grand view of the layers, and the other a close-up. The close-up reveals both the layers below the surface, and the various rates of erosion / water power / climate scenario at the time the river was eroding that layer.

They are sort of big files. Not too big though ;-D


Links here to full size pics:
http://www.photo.net/photo/pcd2882/grand-canyon-64.4.jpg
http://www.atpm.com/9.10/grand-canyon/images/grand-canyon-7.jpg


Jon

It is often asked: How big is the Universe? Is it expanding?

The universe is expanding only in our perception.
The universe used to be a perfect sphere surrounding the Earth, and the Sun and all the heavens revolved around the Earth.
Then the Sun became the center of the universe, and the heavens, including the Earth, revolved around the Sun.

Telescopes added the idea that the Solar System revolves around a massive thing called a galaxy.

Then, some nebulosities were recognized to be galaxies, and the universe got really big. In the 1920s Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way was just one of a vast number of galaxies scattered throughout the universe.
They tried counting the galaxies to see if there were more in one direction than another. No luck.
Then they took a long long look into the deepest depths of the universe. They found thousands of more galaxies.
Since they can now see galaxies that are 13 billion years old, they want to conclude that the universe is 13 billion years old.

Again, they want to assume that we are at the center of the universe and so the light we see is coming from the 'edge' of the universe. They want to conclude that the universe is expanding (away from us at the center) in all directions.

Do you not find this laughable?

The Theory of Relativity, (or is it the Special Theory of Relativity?) states that nothing can go faster than light, and that no matter how fast you are traveling, you have a 'frame of reference,' and that if you measure the speed of light, it will always be the same constant. Light will have the same speed even if you are traveling at 90% of the speed of light, not 190%. These illogical conclusions are a result of the mathematical gymnastics that is used in these theories.

It is my opinion that gravity is faster than light, otherwise light would be able to escape from a black hole. I am very skeptical about the whole scenario. There is too much we don't know about time, gravity and electromagnetic energies under high acceleration and gravity. If gravity can decelerate light in some way and trap it in a black hole, then why can't gravity accelerate light that is passing very near but not into the event horizon? Why is the red shift considered to be only a measure of distance and not a measure of the effect of gravity?

How can the gravity of a galaxy create a 'galactic lens' that creates 4 images of a farther galaxy. If light from a far object can be bent toward a galaxy then why is there not an apparent ring of galaxies around the galactic lens rather than 4 images? Why 4 rather than 360? Light from the Sun is refracted into a circular image by the droplets of water in the air. This is because the droplets are spheres that refract the light in all directions. Is he gravity from a distant galaxy spherical? Or does the gravity strength reflect the disk shape or globular cluster shape of the galaxy? What gravity shape could produce 4 images of a further galaxy? Does this have something to do with the true nature of time?

Thanks for reading this far! Do you like these ramblings of mine?

Is there water or ice on the other planets in the Solar System?

The Solar System is basically disk shaped. In Einstein's mathematical view it can be thought of as a frictionless plane with indentations at the locations of objects with mass. The larger the mass, the larger the indentation. The whole thing is moving through space together and the objects are in orbits of the Sun and each other. An orbit is a balance point between the inertia or forward motion of an object and the gravitic moment, or average 'down' of all the mass in the universe. The Sun is the master of this locality in space. Its gravity field extends outward to infinity. But the gravitic moment which bows to the Sun ends way out in space beyond pluto. At that distance, 'down' swings away and points toward the center of the Milky Way. This 'down' has the Sun and its system in its grasp. The Solar system itself is in orbit around the Milky Way's center of mass.

So what does this have to do with water on the Solar System's (SS) planets? As the SS moves through space its gravity well captures dust and ice from the void of space. Most of this take up an orbit way out beyond pluto. But some of it enters the inner SS. This ice and dust has accreted over billions of years into more or less - usually less - solid balls of ice and dust with no real core. Like 3D snowflakes, they drift in space. When the gravitic moment in their location shifts to point down at the SS, they begin to move toward the SS. What happens to them depends on where they are relative to the SS and how big they are. The first 'dimples' in the gravitic moment that they react to are the outer giants of the SS: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with Jupiter being the biggest.

These icy balls fall into the SS following the pull of gravity. Like a constant fall of snow, they are gathered up by all the planets and the Sun. What happens then depends on the mass and temperature of what ever they hit, and the mass of the ice ball.

We saw one of them, which was quite large, impact on Jupiter in 1994. On July 16 to 22 of that year, over twenty fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with the planet Jupiter. [1]

If in our lifetimes we can see comets impact a planet, then over the life of the Solar System, there has been enough impacts and captures to provide water and dust to every member of the solar System. What happens to it is just Physics.

Depending on the impact, the icy ball could blast a crater, sink into the gaseous depths, fall as dusty rain, or become trapped in orbit around the planet. Probably there is a complicated formula to determine how much dusty ice has fallen on each planet depending on its mass and orbital position. Another formula could determine what happened to the water. It could freeze, or evaporate back into space, or become a liquid and react chemically with the material of the planet depending on local environments.

Suffice it to say that all the planets in the Solar System have received their share - whatever that means gravitationally - of dusty ice. What they did with it, depends on what they are. We now have pictures of all the planets and many of the larger moons. If there is a constant surface, rather than a gaseous or liquid one, we can see countless craters. [2]


This false colored image of Callisto’s surface shows how cratered it is. Bright scars on a darker surface show Callisto’s long history of impacts.

Image by the Galileo spacecraft. [3]

;-D Everything in the Solar System - including the Sun - came from the icy dust of outer space. If you have a gold cap in a tooth, that gold originally came from the nova of a star which blasted the heavier elements into space. So did the Calcium in your bones. We are truly made of stardust!

Sources

1 - http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/en/kids/ice/page_11.shtml
2 - http://www.seds.org/sl9-impact/INDEX_20.html
3 - http://spaceplace.jpl.nasa.gov/en/kids/ice/page_13.shtml