HUBBLE turns TIME MACHINE: Sees GLINT in the Milk(yway)man's EYE Images from the Hubble space telescope suggest for the first time how our galaxy, the Milky Way, developed. And its scientists have put together a photo of how the night sky could have looked 11 billion years ago if humans and Earth had been around. Hubble's formation of galaxies over time Galaxies get better looking with …
The sun will NOT go supernova in 4 billion years. It isn't big enough. It will start turning into a red giant in approx 5.4 billion years, and will eventually become a white dwarf which will continue for trillions of years before fading to black.
Unless something big from Andromeda crashes into it first.
"It will start turning into a red giant in approx 5.4 billion years, and will eventually become a white dwarf which will continue for trillions of years before fading to black."
Recheck your numbers. It'll go red giant far sooner. Fade to black about the same time.
At one billion years, the planet will be barren.
Not a lot of time for humans, as so many technological obstacles remain to literally survive and hopefully thrive.
Recheck your numbers. It'll go red giant far sooner. Fade to black about the same time.
The Sun is very slowly increasing in brightness over the very long term (but far too slowly to be responsible for global warming that we are supposedly seeing) and will indeed make the Earth more and more inhospitable for life over the next billion years or so. It will be far from being a red giant then though, from memory 4 or 5 billion years is a realistic estimate for that.
As for the resulting white dwarf fading to black, that will take much, much longer than a few billion years. There are thought to be no black dwarfs in existence yet, simply because the universe is not old enough for any white dwarfs to have cooled enough to no longer emit any light.
I know this is an incredibly nerdy way to look at things, but in Star Trek they never left the galaxy (with a few wacky exceptions). They're flying along at Warp 9.x for 40 years and still in the Milky Way. Then you see pictures like this and the Deep Field images and it's fairly mind boggling how big it all is. I have trouble even trying to put it into perspective, there's really no basis for comparison.
The average person doesn't really have any idea what's within 10 miles of their own home. Science doesn't really know what's within our own solar system and nobody has the faintest idea about what's out even further. I wish we knew more.
"Science doesn't really know what's within our own solar system and nobody has the faintest idea about what's out even further. I wish we knew more."
As a US citizen that is rather well self-educated, I consider your view horrifically uneducated.
We DO have a lot of knowledge about our solar system. It's not immense. It's not even tolerable. But, it's decent enough to know what the hell is orbiting our sun.
You obviously missed the recent news of Hubble.
Oops, that is really ancient news.
Are you *really* from Earth?
Your comments suggest either being from the Tea Party or from another stellar system and didn't learn much yet.
Are you insane? I challenge your statement that you are reasonably well educated. But to my shame, you are definitely 'American'.
We know where most of the great big things are in our solar system, but with a few exceptions, we've known that for a few centuries. We don't really know much about the moon or our sun. That why we keep launching probes to investigate those things. We were discovering moons around Saturn as recently as 2009. We don't even understand how the Van Allen belts work, and that's about as close as stellar phenomenon come to Earth. We know nothing.
I suggest you take some time and go to school. You obviously know nothing of science and your efforts to educate yourself have failed miserably. I on the other hand, will continue to acknowledge our ignorance and apply my advanced degrees to making components in equipment that goes into space, and doing my part in the quest for knowledge.
"For the first time we have direct images of what the Milky Way looked like in the past," said study co-leader Pieter G. van Dokkum
NO WE DON'T. We have direct images of what similar galaxies looked like in the past, which is not the same thing as direct images of the Milky Way in the past. So he shouldn't say it.
He even admits as much himself later:
"Of course, we can't see the Milky Way itself in the past," van Dokkum acknowledged.
No even that good I think. They have a bunch of snaps of galaxies and have put together their best guess of how the ones further back in time have become more like the ones less far back in time. It doesn't mean that the galaxies in question actually did evolve in that way, because all they have is the one snapshot. You might postulate that, given current understanding it's quite likely that such and such happened. But the problem is that current understanding is highly likely to be shown to be flawed by future scientific discoveries.
With my Google news page science/technology already glutted with climate-change porn and more and more thermocalyptic drivel, it's depressing to see highly qualified scientists and researchers making such patently poor use of adjectives for something so fundamental as a COMPUTED imaging of the early galaxy.
'direct', my arze.
'First DIRECT image of a neutrino!'
'First DIRECT image of a T. Rex!'
Which was that ellipticals and spirals seem to evolve differently:
""These observations show that there are at least two galaxy-formation tracks," van Dokkum said. "Massive ellipticals form a very dense core early in the universe, including a black hole, presumably, and the rest of the galaxy slowly accretes around it, fueled by mergers with other galaxies. But from our survey we find that galaxies like our Milky Way show a different, more uniform path of growing into the majestic spirals we see today.""
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