Global Warming Climate Change

Mars has a thin atmosphere made up of 95 percent carbon dioxide (CO2). If carbon dioxide was such an effective greenhouse gas (where on Earth it only makes up 0.04 percent of the atmosphere) it should keep Mars nice and toasty at 95 percent! However, the average temperature on Mars is -63 degrees Celsius. So if Mars is so cold, despite carbon dioxide being the most prevalent component of its atmosphere, how effective is CO2 going to be as a warmer on Earth where the percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere is 4 hundredths of 1 percent?

As an example, imagine that the atmosphere is all the people in this "Where's Waldo" image and CO2 is Waldo. Where is Waldo's ability to warm up all these other people? It doesn't seem likely does it?

References
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html
https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/earth's_atmosphere.htm

Stunning Australian Night Sky

The following is a beautiful night-time, time-lapse video of the Australian night sky including the Milky Way Galaxy. It is so stunning that it almost doesn't look real. Watch for sporadic shooting stars! (hat tips to the Blaze via Wired)


Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

Goldilocks Planet May Not Even Exist

Gliese 581

About two weeks ago, I was one of the only voices on the Internet raising a skeptical eyebrow at all the fantastic claims surrounding the alleged new planet, Gliese 851g. Now it appears that another group of astronomers from Switzerland have questioned the supposed planet’s existence using some of the same data as the original researchers. Using an expanded data set from the HARPS instrument on the La Silla telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, this group was unable to find evidence for the planet at all.

In a Space.com interview, one of the original researchers, Steven Vogt said that he was confident in his conclusions and found it odd that the Swiss researchers didn’t use data from the HIRES instrument on the Keck telescope at Hawaii's Keck Observatory which he said was needed in addition to the other data to reliably detect the new planet.

The new information was announced at an astronomy conference, as many new discoveries are, but it is the actual published scientific paper which needs to be scrutinized by other scientists before any conclusion can be come to.

My point is that the chickens were counted way before they hatched regarding Gliese 851g, and even if the planet is found to exist, it is still just a tug on a star, and any other information is speculation.

Astronomers' Excitement Misleads the Press and the Public

Europa

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced findings by several astronomers on Wednesday that they have found a planet on which the "chances for life on this planet are 100 percent,” as was stated by Steven Vogt of the University of California at Santa Cruz, one of the co-discoverers of the planet, in an AP article.

Based on the paltry information these astronomers have to work with, this statement is ludicrous. Even if they were to say there is a fifty percent or even a twenty percent chance, that would still be pie-in-the-sky daydreaming.

The only things they “know” about Gliese 581g are its mass, its distance from its sun Gliese 581, and its orbital period. Everything else they know is inferred from these few facts.

And the reason they know so little is that they didn’t find this planet through the end of an optical telescope and see it, or send a space probe to look at it. Nope. Instead they used a sketchy (to me) twenty year-old technique, which surmises a planet’s existence by measuring variations in the star's radial velocity. This is basically the star’s velocity as it appears to astronomers in spectrographs, which can be affected by the tugs of planets as they circle the central star. It’s sort of like staring at a tree on the side of the crowded New Jersey Turnpike and watching the leaves blow, and then guessing what kind of vehicle just went by. And who was driving it.

So for all these astronomers (and media pundits) know, Gliese 581g is a rock like Mercury or the Moon, bigger, but still just a rock.

But because this planet, which is supposedly three times larger than Earth, resides in what they call the Goldilocks zone (a place in a solar system a certain distance from a sun where a planet could support liquid water), a lot of energy is being given to the idea that it might have some form of life on it.

Let us recognize that Venus, an extremely inhospitable planet in our solar system, resides in this solar system's Goldilock's zone. It is its poisonous and thick atmosphere that make it uninhabitable, not to mention its 800 degree surface temperature.

The planet Mars also resides in the Goldilocks zone and may have had life on it, or may have never had life on it. It would most likely have liquid water on it now if it had a slightly denser atmosphere, and were therefore warmer. This may have been true in the past. The point is, it doesn’t now.

There is a moon of the planet Jupiter called Europa which may very well have life on it in liquid oceans under its cracked, but frozen surface. This extremely cold place is well outside the sun's Goldilock's zone.

The Washington Post article concerning this story also says that there are six or seven planets including Gliese 581g closer to this star than Earth is to our own Sun, including at least one Jupiter-type planet.

The close orbital proximity of all these large planets may wreak upon Gliese 581g unknown effects due to gravitational interactions between them. For instance, very large planets tend to attract or divert more asteroids and comets, possibly causing life-killing sized asteroids to smash into the surface of said planet at a more frequent rate than happens on Earth. It has been suggested that the dinosaurs and other animals on Earth may have been killed at one or more times by asteroids which smashed into the planet like 10,000 nuclear bombs causing a dust induced winter which killed off all but the heartiest species. This would make things very inhospitable for life if it happens once, but if too often, then life will never have a chance to get going before the next global killer comet or asteroid.

The very idea of a Goldilock's zone is something which is misleading and the press and the public are eating it up because it makes for great press. There are so many factors to consider beyond saying "Here is a rock that's in the right place, so it must have water and life on it."

Since there is no evidence that this is anything but a rock at a supposedly propicious distance from its sun, inferences beyond this are irresponsible, media grabbing, and wild speculation. Let's wait until we have real evidence in hand before making claims like these or even suggesting them.

Galactic Black Holes: The Glue for All Galaxies

Galaxies are large collections of stars, comprised of millions and often billions of stars. Astronomers think there are billions of galaxies in the universe. What keeps the stars in a galaxy together? Gravity, or more specifically, gravitational orbits.

A black hole in its simplest form is a collapsed, dead star. Typically a huge star, many times the size of our sun and at the end of its life will explode as a supernova. If there is enough mass left after the explosion, the star’s remnant mass collapses quickly and catastrophically in on itself to something so extremely dense that not even light can escape its grasp. Black holes can and do grow in size all the time. They suck in and crush whatever matter, gas, stars, or other black holes that fall into their intense gravitational fields.

Astronomers have been reaching the conclusion in the past few years, based on their research, that our Milky Way galaxy and some other galaxies have at their centers black holes with masses equal to millions of suns. It is not only common for large black holes to be at the center of some galaxies, as astronomers are discovering, but in my opinion this is the only way that galaxies can exist in the universe. If the stars in a galaxy do indeed orbit or rotate around a center point, as the planets in our solar system rotate around their central sun, the galactic stars must rotate around a galactic center with enough mass, and hence gravity, to hold them in their orbits.

There is no one star or thousand stars massive enough to keep millions or billions of stars in orbit. One could argue that the million stars close to the galactic center of a galaxy could perform as a gravitational point of attraction for the rest of the galaxy, and they may indeed add to the center’s gravitational influence, but so many stars would themselves need a gravitational focus or they would have no orbits and would continuously fall into each other aggregating into black holes after reaching critical mass anyway.

Therefore it is my contention that every galaxy must have a huge black hole at its center acting as the central orbital focus for all the stars in the galaxy. Not just some galaxies -- each and every galaxy that exists. And the size of the galactic black hole (or holes) must be directly proportional to the size of the galaxy and the material in orbit about it.