Sparky Kronkite
Spam Eater Extraordinare'
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2000
- Posts
- 8,921
Todd? This just in yesterday from the Washington Post. If you might be interested (but my hunch is, really not you are not) But I hope you please read the thing.
(Open mind and learning you know?)
But with this artical and quite a few other's like it of late -it just seems to me - that they (the scientists, the brains) are "dialing it in."
Sure - I still maintain that, "nobody knows really, they weren't there." And I damn sure think that there are plenty of informational holes to be filled. But, but, but - the further they go - the more knowledge they accumulate - "as time goes on," (Hey did Albert Einstien himself coin that phrase?) - a logical, scientific, mathmatical, chemical, answer, illuminating man as to the creation of the Universe and Life on Earth.........
At the very least, at the very least Todd - factually/logically - moves human perception and belief - further and further away from any biblical or religious beliefs on the same subject.
So, with that said - please.....
Read away -
Scientists See First Evidence Of How Planets Are Formed
Astronomers have seen the first direct evidence of the birth of a planet in the form of snowballing dust grains, helping to confirm the theoretical scenario for how Earth and the other planets formed around the infant sun.
Related observations suggest that the process of planet formation is so hazardous that planets may be rarer than many researchers had thought.
The findings, announced yesterday by a team using the Hubble Space Telescope, portray a life-and-death struggle for survival by baby planets forming in a giant cloud of gas and dust in the vast Orion Nebula, 1,500 light-years from Earth.
If the planetary seedlings don't grow rapidly enough, the researchers said, they get "blowtorched" to oblivion by a relentless blast of radiation from the nebula's largest star, Theta 1 Orionis C, which is visible through a small telescope in a formation known as the Trapezium cluster.
In findings released by the journal Science, a team led by John Bally of the University of !
Colorado in Boulder, and Henry Throop of the Southwest Research Institute there, used the Hubble telescope to detect the building blocks of planets as they formed inside the million-year-old dusty disks whirling around dozens of stars in the nebula, which is the closest star nursery to Earth.
"This is the first time that large growing grains have been seen in visible light in these protoplanetary disks," Throop said. "We're seeing the very first stages of planetary formation happening before our eyes."
The grains range from the size of smoke particles to that of sand grains, he said. The background light from the Orion Nebula bounces off different-sized dust particles, scattering the light in a way that allows observers to estimate particle sizes.
The first step is when the dust grains begin to stick together. "Then these bright stars are trying to tear everything apart," Throop added. "Which one wins is really a big question. It's like trying to build a skyscraper in th!
e middle of a tornado."
The Hubble observations show, for the first time, that it could be easy to start building planets, the researchers said. Conventional theory says that the grains will continue to snowball in size to form clumps 1,000 times larger than a single grain. Then gravity pulls them together until they build to the size of worlds. This is the scenario proposed for the formation of Earth and its neighbors some 4.5 billion years ago.
Previous observations from ground-based telescopes, as well as Hubble, had suggested that a planet growing to maturity is a tricky proposition in these nebulas, which are scattered across Earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way. "We're seeing that planet formation is a hazardous process," Bally said.
Depending on how quickly planets are able to form, he said, they may be rarer than previously estimated.
The dusty, planet-forming disks in Orion were first detected in 1992 and called "proplyds." At first, their existence seemed to gr!
eatly improve the odds for an abundance of planets, because they tended to confirm a common model of planet formation.
Subsequent Hubble images, however, revealed the proplyds being blasted relentlessly with ultraviolet radiation from the bright star, leaving guppie-like tails of gas boiling off the withering disk.
Within 100,000 years, the researchers predict, 90 percent of the youngest disks -- initially billions of miles in diameter -- will have been destroyed, leaving 10 percent of the disks, shielded from the radiation, as a haven for planet formation.
Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, proposed that if giant planets such as Jupiter could collapse quickly out of the gas disk, they might survive. "If we find lots of Jupiters around other stars," he said, "they will have managed to grow rapidly in Orion-type environments."
It seems that Jupiters must be formed either rapidly or rarely, Throop said. "It's a good bet that planetary systems in Orion !
will look nothing like our own. . . . Although they may have rocky planets like Earth and Mars, it looks hard to form either giant planets or comets."
So far, the researchers said, the hunt for planets beyond the sun has shown that about 5 percent of the stars in Earth's neighborhood have Jupiter-size planets in tight orbits.
(Open mind and learning you know?)
But with this artical and quite a few other's like it of late -it just seems to me - that they (the scientists, the brains) are "dialing it in."
Sure - I still maintain that, "nobody knows really, they weren't there." And I damn sure think that there are plenty of informational holes to be filled. But, but, but - the further they go - the more knowledge they accumulate - "as time goes on," (Hey did Albert Einstien himself coin that phrase?) - a logical, scientific, mathmatical, chemical, answer, illuminating man as to the creation of the Universe and Life on Earth.........
At the very least, at the very least Todd - factually/logically - moves human perception and belief - further and further away from any biblical or religious beliefs on the same subject.
So, with that said - please.....
Read away -
Scientists See First Evidence Of How Planets Are Formed
Astronomers have seen the first direct evidence of the birth of a planet in the form of snowballing dust grains, helping to confirm the theoretical scenario for how Earth and the other planets formed around the infant sun.
Related observations suggest that the process of planet formation is so hazardous that planets may be rarer than many researchers had thought.
The findings, announced yesterday by a team using the Hubble Space Telescope, portray a life-and-death struggle for survival by baby planets forming in a giant cloud of gas and dust in the vast Orion Nebula, 1,500 light-years from Earth.
If the planetary seedlings don't grow rapidly enough, the researchers said, they get "blowtorched" to oblivion by a relentless blast of radiation from the nebula's largest star, Theta 1 Orionis C, which is visible through a small telescope in a formation known as the Trapezium cluster.
In findings released by the journal Science, a team led by John Bally of the University of !
Colorado in Boulder, and Henry Throop of the Southwest Research Institute there, used the Hubble telescope to detect the building blocks of planets as they formed inside the million-year-old dusty disks whirling around dozens of stars in the nebula, which is the closest star nursery to Earth.
"This is the first time that large growing grains have been seen in visible light in these protoplanetary disks," Throop said. "We're seeing the very first stages of planetary formation happening before our eyes."
The grains range from the size of smoke particles to that of sand grains, he said. The background light from the Orion Nebula bounces off different-sized dust particles, scattering the light in a way that allows observers to estimate particle sizes.
The first step is when the dust grains begin to stick together. "Then these bright stars are trying to tear everything apart," Throop added. "Which one wins is really a big question. It's like trying to build a skyscraper in th!
e middle of a tornado."
The Hubble observations show, for the first time, that it could be easy to start building planets, the researchers said. Conventional theory says that the grains will continue to snowball in size to form clumps 1,000 times larger than a single grain. Then gravity pulls them together until they build to the size of worlds. This is the scenario proposed for the formation of Earth and its neighbors some 4.5 billion years ago.
Previous observations from ground-based telescopes, as well as Hubble, had suggested that a planet growing to maturity is a tricky proposition in these nebulas, which are scattered across Earth's home galaxy, the Milky Way. "We're seeing that planet formation is a hazardous process," Bally said.
Depending on how quickly planets are able to form, he said, they may be rarer than previously estimated.
The dusty, planet-forming disks in Orion were first detected in 1992 and called "proplyds." At first, their existence seemed to gr!
eatly improve the odds for an abundance of planets, because they tended to confirm a common model of planet formation.
Subsequent Hubble images, however, revealed the proplyds being blasted relentlessly with ultraviolet radiation from the bright star, leaving guppie-like tails of gas boiling off the withering disk.
Within 100,000 years, the researchers predict, 90 percent of the youngest disks -- initially billions of miles in diameter -- will have been destroyed, leaving 10 percent of the disks, shielded from the radiation, as a haven for planet formation.
Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, proposed that if giant planets such as Jupiter could collapse quickly out of the gas disk, they might survive. "If we find lots of Jupiters around other stars," he said, "they will have managed to grow rapidly in Orion-type environments."
It seems that Jupiters must be formed either rapidly or rarely, Throop said. "It's a good bet that planetary systems in Orion !
will look nothing like our own. . . . Although they may have rocky planets like Earth and Mars, it looks hard to form either giant planets or comets."
So far, the researchers said, the hunt for planets beyond the sun has shown that about 5 percent of the stars in Earth's neighborhood have Jupiter-size planets in tight orbits.
