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.

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.