Great documentary about entropy on BBC 4 last night
What was it called, Red? I'll try and catch it tonight on i-player tonight.
The science behind RHCs liver thread
- Thread starter Ivan Dobsky
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What was it called, Red? I'll try and catch it tonight on i-player tonight.
Can't remember mate. It was presented by that English guy with an Arabic sounding name
Can't remember mate. It was presented by that English guy with an Arabic sounding name
Jim al Khallili?
Seven Earth-sized planets orbit nearby supercool star
Three planets’ paths put them in TRAPPIST-1’s habitable zone
BY
ASHLEY YEAGER
1:00PM, FEBRUARY 22, 2017
PLANETARY LINEUP Seven Earth-sized planets orbit the star TRAPPIST-1 with short periods, from 1.5 to 20 Earth days. This artist’s illustration shows potential differences in the planets’ surfaces and sizes.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
A nearby ultracool star harbors seven Earth-sized planets, three with orbits that potentially put them in a habitable zone. That makes the system, around a star called TRAPPIST-1, a prime target in the search for signs of alien life. Its discovery also hints that many more cousins of Earth may be out there than astronomers thought.
“It’s rather stunning that the system has so many Earth-sized planets,” says Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park. It seems like every stable spot where a planet could be, there is an Earth-sized one. “That bodes well for finding habitable planets,” he says.
Michaël Gillon, an astrophysicist at University of Liège in Belgium, and colleagues announced last year that they had found three Earth-sized planets around TRAPPIST-1, an ultracool dwarf star previously called 2MASS J23062928−0502285 (SN: 05/28/16, p. 6). The star, about the size of Jupiter and much cooler than the sun, is 39 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes and the Spitzer Space Telescope now reveal that the third planet is actually four additional Earth-sized ones, three of which could be habitable. If those planets have Earthlike atmospheres, they may even have liquid water oceans on their surfaces, Gillon and colleagues report online February 22 in Nature. Data also revealed signs of a seventh outer planet in the system.
All seven planets were detected by watching how their star dims as the planets pass in front of it from Earth’s vantage point. Calculations of the amount of starlight blocked by each transit indicates that all seven have roughly the same radius as Earth. These dips in starlight can also reveal how fast the planets orbit the star: The innermost one makes a round trip in 1.5 Earth days, while it takes the outermost one about 20 days.
Story continues below slideshow
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
To calculate the planets’ masses, which range from about half to 1.5 times that of Earth, researchers looked at the way the six inner planets tug on each other. The mass and size data together then allowed the team to calculate the planets’ densities, suggesting that the inner six are rocky.
The length of each planet’s day may sync with its stellar orbit, so the innermost planet’s day lasts 1.5 Earth days and the outermost planet’s day lasts about 20 Earth days. That’s like Earth rotating once in 365 days instead of in 24 hours. Such a spin means the same side of a planet faces the star throughout the planet’s orbit, giving it a day side and a night side. Astronomers feared that would make the planets too hot on the day side and too cold on the night side to be habitable. But if they have Earthlike atmospheres, TRAPPIST-1e, TRAPPIST-1f and TRAPPIST-1g would be warm enough all over to have liquid water, making them ripe for life. The seventh planet, TRAPPIST-1h, is probably icy, Gillon says, maybe like Jupiter’s moon Europa.
EARTH’S COUSINS Detecting seven Earth-sized planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star is exotic. This video describes some of the data collected to make the discovery and what the analyses are revealing about these foreign worlds.JPL-CALTECH/NASA
Finding these seven planets suggests that Earth cousins may be more common than expected. “We are on the right angle to see this system and its Earth-sized planets,” says Deming, who was not involved in the study. “For every system we see, there are dozens more that we don’t.” Stars like TRAPPIST-1 with Earth-sized planets are probably not rare, he notes. If they were, it would have taken many more observations to find them. The fact that Gillon and colleagues’ pilot project to study ultracool dwarfs spotted planets so quickly indicates that it may be the norm for these stars to harbor planets similar to Earth.
Studying the atmospheres of such planets could reveal if they have life, especially if gases such as methane and oxygen are detected. It could be possible to study the planets’ atmospheres with the Hubble Space Telescope or its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2018. Deming is cautious, however, about how easy these atmospheric studies of the planets will be. Ultracool dwarfs’ starlight can vary, he notes. There are also atmospheric effects from the stars that astronomers don’t yet understand. Both could make it difficult to decipher what gases are in the planets’ atmospheres.
Didier Queloz, a study coauthor and an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, is a bit more optimistic. “We have no idea what these planets look like now. They could be wet or dry. We just don’t know,” he says. “But for the first time since the first exoplanet was discovered 25 years ago, we may be able to answer the question about life beyond our solar system.”
Three planets’ paths put them in TRAPPIST-1’s habitable zone
BY
ASHLEY YEAGER
1:00PM, FEBRUARY 22, 2017
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PLANETARY LINEUP Seven Earth-sized planets orbit the star TRAPPIST-1 with short periods, from 1.5 to 20 Earth days. This artist’s illustration shows potential differences in the planets’ surfaces and sizes.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
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A nearby ultracool star harbors seven Earth-sized planets, three with orbits that potentially put them in a habitable zone. That makes the system, around a star called TRAPPIST-1, a prime target in the search for signs of alien life. Its discovery also hints that many more cousins of Earth may be out there than astronomers thought.
“It’s rather stunning that the system has so many Earth-sized planets,” says Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park. It seems like every stable spot where a planet could be, there is an Earth-sized one. “That bodes well for finding habitable planets,” he says.
Michaël Gillon, an astrophysicist at University of Liège in Belgium, and colleagues announced last year that they had found three Earth-sized planets around TRAPPIST-1, an ultracool dwarf star previously called 2MASS J23062928−0502285 (SN: 05/28/16, p. 6). The star, about the size of Jupiter and much cooler than the sun, is 39 light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes and the Spitzer Space Telescope now reveal that the third planet is actually four additional Earth-sized ones, three of which could be habitable. If those planets have Earthlike atmospheres, they may even have liquid water oceans on their surfaces, Gillon and colleagues report online February 22 in Nature. Data also revealed signs of a seventh outer planet in the system.
All seven planets were detected by watching how their star dims as the planets pass in front of it from Earth’s vantage point. Calculations of the amount of starlight blocked by each transit indicates that all seven have roughly the same radius as Earth. These dips in starlight can also reveal how fast the planets orbit the star: The innermost one makes a round trip in 1.5 Earth days, while it takes the outermost one about 20 days.
Story continues below slideshow
You must log in or register to see images
You must log in or register to see images
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
You must log in or register to see images
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
You must log in or register to see images
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
You must log in or register to see images
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
You must log in or register to see images
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
You must log in or register to see images
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
You must log in or register to see images
SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT Planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 are a lot alike in some ways and distinct in others. Click through this slideshow to discover each planet’s specs, including how long it takes to orbit the dwarf star, distance from the star (in astronomical units), and radius and mass relative to Earth.
JPL-CALTECH/NASA
To calculate the planets’ masses, which range from about half to 1.5 times that of Earth, researchers looked at the way the six inner planets tug on each other. The mass and size data together then allowed the team to calculate the planets’ densities, suggesting that the inner six are rocky.
The length of each planet’s day may sync with its stellar orbit, so the innermost planet’s day lasts 1.5 Earth days and the outermost planet’s day lasts about 20 Earth days. That’s like Earth rotating once in 365 days instead of in 24 hours. Such a spin means the same side of a planet faces the star throughout the planet’s orbit, giving it a day side and a night side. Astronomers feared that would make the planets too hot on the day side and too cold on the night side to be habitable. But if they have Earthlike atmospheres, TRAPPIST-1e, TRAPPIST-1f and TRAPPIST-1g would be warm enough all over to have liquid water, making them ripe for life. The seventh planet, TRAPPIST-1h, is probably icy, Gillon says, maybe like Jupiter’s moon Europa.
EARTH’S COUSINS Detecting seven Earth-sized planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star is exotic. This video describes some of the data collected to make the discovery and what the analyses are revealing about these foreign worlds.JPL-CALTECH/NASA
Finding these seven planets suggests that Earth cousins may be more common than expected. “We are on the right angle to see this system and its Earth-sized planets,” says Deming, who was not involved in the study. “For every system we see, there are dozens more that we don’t.” Stars like TRAPPIST-1 with Earth-sized planets are probably not rare, he notes. If they were, it would have taken many more observations to find them. The fact that Gillon and colleagues’ pilot project to study ultracool dwarfs spotted planets so quickly indicates that it may be the norm for these stars to harbor planets similar to Earth.
Studying the atmospheres of such planets could reveal if they have life, especially if gases such as methane and oxygen are detected. It could be possible to study the planets’ atmospheres with the Hubble Space Telescope or its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, slated to launch in 2018. Deming is cautious, however, about how easy these atmospheric studies of the planets will be. Ultracool dwarfs’ starlight can vary, he notes. There are also atmospheric effects from the stars that astronomers don’t yet understand. Both could make it difficult to decipher what gases are in the planets’ atmospheres.
Didier Queloz, a study coauthor and an astronomer at the University of Cambridge, is a bit more optimistic. “We have no idea what these planets look like now. They could be wet or dry. We just don’t know,” he says. “But for the first time since the first exoplanet was discovered 25 years ago, we may be able to answer the question about life beyond our solar system.”
That small is normally assumed to be rocky. I'm not sure if that is from observing planets in our solar system or if there is some underlying physics reason they apply. For example, could a gaseous planet hold together without a certain mass?
Planets that close together if life evolved on one it could spread to the others via rocks spewed from meteor collisions.
There again, dwarf suns are a bad place to look for life like ours. To be warm enough for water the planets have to be close enough that they would be tidally locked. Any water on the warm side would evaporate until it made it to the cold side and be locked as ice on the cold side.
It is unlikely the planets would hold an atmosphere.
Physics greats of the 20th century mixed science and public service
New biographies chronicle the lives of Enrico Fermi and Richard Garwin
BY
TOM SIEGFRIED
6:00AM, FEBRUARY 23, 2017
GREAT MINDS Physicists Enrico Fermi (left, shown in the 1940s) and Richard Garwin (right, in the 1960s) are the subjects of two new books.
FROM LEFT: DEPT. OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS/DEPT. OF ENERGY, NATIONAL ARCHIVES; IBM
Magazine issue: Vol. 191 No. 4, March 4, 2017, p. 28
The 20th century will go down in history — it pretty much already has — as the century of the physicist. Physicists’ revolutionizing of the scientific world view with relativity and quantum mechanics might have been enough to warrant that conclusion. Future historians may emphasize even more, though, the role of physicists in war and government. Two such physicists, one born at the century’s beginning and one still living today, typify that role through their work in developing weapons, advising politicians and shaping policy while still performing outstanding science.
Best known of the two is Enrico Fermi, the Italian intellectual giant who escaped from fascist Italy to America after winning a Nobel Prize for his research in nuclear physics.
When he arrived in the United States in 1939, Fermi almost immediately went to work studying nuclear fission, discovered only weeks earlier in Hitler’s Germany. Eventually Fermi took a major role in the Manhattan Project, leading the team that first demonstrated a controlled nuclear fission chain reaction.
Fermi, a foreigner, assumed a lead role because he was so widely recognized among the world’s physicists as infallible — hence his nickname “the pope.” In The Pope of Physics, Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin chronicle Fermi’s life and science with insight and rich detail.
The Pope of Physics
Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin
Henry Holt, $30
True Genius
Joel N. Shurkin
Prometheus, $25
Fermi is often cited as the last of the great physicists who excelled both at theory and experiment. His theory of the weak nuclear interactions, produced in the early 1930s, remains a key segment of modern physicists’ understanding of matter and forces. His experimental work on neutrons won the Nobel (even though aspects of those experiments turned out to have been incorrectly interpreted).
Segrè (whose uncle was a collaborator of Fermi’s) and Hoerlin explore the personal and political influences on Fermi’s science and relate in detail his experiences in the effort during World War II to develop the atomic bomb. His postwar government service included membership on the General Advisory Committee to the new U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He was also on the University of Chicago faculty until his abrupt death in 1954 from stomach cancer. He was 53.
Briefly mentioned in Segrè and Hoerlin’s account is a visit near the end of Fermi’s life from one of his former graduate students, Richard Garwin. To Garwin, Fermi mentioned regret at not having been even more involved in public policy. Perhaps, Segrè and Hoerlin suggest, that conversation inspired Garwin, “who went on to have an extraordinarily distinguished career as a presidential adviser on science and security issues.”
As Fermi’s postdoc at Chicago, Garwin also spent time at the lab in Los Alamos, N.M., where the atomic bomb had been built. By 1951, the lab’s focus was on the hydrogen bomb, or the Super, powered by fusion in addition to fission. Despite input from Fermi and significant insights from the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and physicist Edward Teller, designing the Super had proven an insuperable problem. Garwin offered to help; Teller assigned him the task of designing an experiment demonstrating how the Super could work. In a couple of weeks, Garwin handed in the blueprint for the actual bomb itself.
In True Genius, veteran science writer Joel Shurkin recounts this story in detail for the first time. For decades, popularizations credited Teller with the development of the hydrogen bomb; Garwin’s role was long classified. Late in life, Teller, who died in 2003, revealed Garwin’s crucial role, which was eventually reported in the New York Times.
As Shurkin emphasizes, Garwin designed the bomb because it was a technical problem that he knew how to solve. But he spent the rest of his career devoted to arms control (both as an adviser inside government and a critic from the outside).
Garwin made significant contributions to physics as well — many modern technological conveniences, such as the GPS satellite system, owe their existence to Garwin’s insights. Last November, in recognition of all these achievements, President Barack Obama awarded Garwin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Shurkin’s account of Garwin’s life is detailed but often hard to follow, sometimes jumping from decade to decade (not always in order) in the space of a few paragraphs. And the book is marred by poor fact-checking (tritium is certainly not an isotope of lithium; Otto Hahn was a chemist, not a physicist; and Niels Bohr’s mother was Jewish, not his father). And peculiarly the title, the book’s publicity material says, refers to Fermi’s description of Garwin as a “true genius,” while the text of the book quotes Fermi as calling Garwin a “real” genius.
Nevertheless, Shurkin’s account is by far the best (virtually only) complete record of the life of a scientist who devoted his career to serving the public good — while also doing extraordinary science. Garwin really, truly, is a genius.
New biographies chronicle the lives of Enrico Fermi and Richard Garwin
BY
TOM SIEGFRIED
6:00AM, FEBRUARY 23, 2017
You must log in or register to see images
GREAT MINDS Physicists Enrico Fermi (left, shown in the 1940s) and Richard Garwin (right, in the 1960s) are the subjects of two new books.
FROM LEFT: DEPT. OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS/DEPT. OF ENERGY, NATIONAL ARCHIVES; IBM
Magazine issue: Vol. 191 No. 4, March 4, 2017, p. 28
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The 20th century will go down in history — it pretty much already has — as the century of the physicist. Physicists’ revolutionizing of the scientific world view with relativity and quantum mechanics might have been enough to warrant that conclusion. Future historians may emphasize even more, though, the role of physicists in war and government. Two such physicists, one born at the century’s beginning and one still living today, typify that role through their work in developing weapons, advising politicians and shaping policy while still performing outstanding science.
Best known of the two is Enrico Fermi, the Italian intellectual giant who escaped from fascist Italy to America after winning a Nobel Prize for his research in nuclear physics.
When he arrived in the United States in 1939, Fermi almost immediately went to work studying nuclear fission, discovered only weeks earlier in Hitler’s Germany. Eventually Fermi took a major role in the Manhattan Project, leading the team that first demonstrated a controlled nuclear fission chain reaction.
Fermi, a foreigner, assumed a lead role because he was so widely recognized among the world’s physicists as infallible — hence his nickname “the pope.” In The Pope of Physics, Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin chronicle Fermi’s life and science with insight and rich detail.
You must log in or register to see images
The Pope of Physics
Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin
Henry Holt, $30
You must log in or register to see images
True Genius
Joel N. Shurkin
Prometheus, $25
Fermi is often cited as the last of the great physicists who excelled both at theory and experiment. His theory of the weak nuclear interactions, produced in the early 1930s, remains a key segment of modern physicists’ understanding of matter and forces. His experimental work on neutrons won the Nobel (even though aspects of those experiments turned out to have been incorrectly interpreted).
Segrè (whose uncle was a collaborator of Fermi’s) and Hoerlin explore the personal and political influences on Fermi’s science and relate in detail his experiences in the effort during World War II to develop the atomic bomb. His postwar government service included membership on the General Advisory Committee to the new U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. He was also on the University of Chicago faculty until his abrupt death in 1954 from stomach cancer. He was 53.
Briefly mentioned in Segrè and Hoerlin’s account is a visit near the end of Fermi’s life from one of his former graduate students, Richard Garwin. To Garwin, Fermi mentioned regret at not having been even more involved in public policy. Perhaps, Segrè and Hoerlin suggest, that conversation inspired Garwin, “who went on to have an extraordinarily distinguished career as a presidential adviser on science and security issues.”
As Fermi’s postdoc at Chicago, Garwin also spent time at the lab in Los Alamos, N.M., where the atomic bomb had been built. By 1951, the lab’s focus was on the hydrogen bomb, or the Super, powered by fusion in addition to fission. Despite input from Fermi and significant insights from the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam and physicist Edward Teller, designing the Super had proven an insuperable problem. Garwin offered to help; Teller assigned him the task of designing an experiment demonstrating how the Super could work. In a couple of weeks, Garwin handed in the blueprint for the actual bomb itself.
In True Genius, veteran science writer Joel Shurkin recounts this story in detail for the first time. For decades, popularizations credited Teller with the development of the hydrogen bomb; Garwin’s role was long classified. Late in life, Teller, who died in 2003, revealed Garwin’s crucial role, which was eventually reported in the New York Times.
As Shurkin emphasizes, Garwin designed the bomb because it was a technical problem that he knew how to solve. But he spent the rest of his career devoted to arms control (both as an adviser inside government and a critic from the outside).
Garwin made significant contributions to physics as well — many modern technological conveniences, such as the GPS satellite system, owe their existence to Garwin’s insights. Last November, in recognition of all these achievements, President Barack Obama awarded Garwin the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Shurkin’s account of Garwin’s life is detailed but often hard to follow, sometimes jumping from decade to decade (not always in order) in the space of a few paragraphs. And the book is marred by poor fact-checking (tritium is certainly not an isotope of lithium; Otto Hahn was a chemist, not a physicist; and Niels Bohr’s mother was Jewish, not his father). And peculiarly the title, the book’s publicity material says, refers to Fermi’s description of Garwin as a “true genius,” while the text of the book quotes Fermi as calling Garwin a “real” genius.
Nevertheless, Shurkin’s account is by far the best (virtually only) complete record of the life of a scientist who devoted his career to serving the public good — while also doing extraordinary science. Garwin really, truly, is a genius.
Ghosts definitely aren't real because the biggest science experiment in the world would have found them by now, according to Brian Cox.
People have wondered for perhaps as long as life itself whether people's spirits can live on in the world once their body dies. But the TV professor says that they definitely don't, since CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would have stumbled across one.
The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. It is includes a huge ring of superconducting magnets and accelerators that fling particles around, sending them into each other at such speed that they can be used to understand some of the most fundamental properties of the universe. In doing so, scientists can find out how elementary particles interact and behave, and understand how they work to compose the world that we see around us.
The project has seen a number of things, identifying how particles decay and picking up hints that there could be new and unknown particles. But it hasn't yet found even a sliver of proof that there is anything that could make up a ghost.
If ghosts existed, then they would need to be made purely of energy, since by their very definition they can't be made of matter. But if they were made only of energy, they would quickly dissipate, because the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is always lost to heat.
Atom smasher could be about to see a new, revolutionary particle
The only way that they would be able to avoid that would be to have an incoming source of their own spooky energy. But there is nothing to account for that in the standard model of physics or anything we've seen in the particle accelerator.
"If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made," he said in a special edition of his podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage that focused on the paranormal. "We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies."
Guest Neil deGrasse Tyson checked whether Professor Cox was really claiming that the particle accelerator had actually disproved the existence of supernatural spirits.
“If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts,” he asked. "Yes," replied Professor Cox
People have wondered for perhaps as long as life itself whether people's spirits can live on in the world once their body dies. But the TV professor says that they definitely don't, since CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) would have stumbled across one.
The LHC is the biggest particle accelerator ever built. It is includes a huge ring of superconducting magnets and accelerators that fling particles around, sending them into each other at such speed that they can be used to understand some of the most fundamental properties of the universe. In doing so, scientists can find out how elementary particles interact and behave, and understand how they work to compose the world that we see around us.
The project has seen a number of things, identifying how particles decay and picking up hints that there could be new and unknown particles. But it hasn't yet found even a sliver of proof that there is anything that could make up a ghost.
If ghosts existed, then they would need to be made purely of energy, since by their very definition they can't be made of matter. But if they were made only of energy, they would quickly dissipate, because the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is always lost to heat.
You must log in or register to see images
Atom smasher could be about to see a new, revolutionary particle
The only way that they would be able to avoid that would be to have an incoming source of their own spooky energy. But there is nothing to account for that in the standard model of physics or anything we've seen in the particle accelerator.
"If we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern and how it interacts with the matter particles out of which our bodies are made," he said in a special edition of his podcast The Infinite Monkey Cage that focused on the paranormal. "We must, in other words, invent an extension to the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider. That’s almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our bodies."
Guest Neil deGrasse Tyson checked whether Professor Cox was really claiming that the particle accelerator had actually disproved the existence of supernatural spirits.
“If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts,” he asked. "Yes," replied Professor Cox
So the planets have years (orbits the sun) between 1.5 to 20 of our earth days? What about actual days of the planets? It only mentions the one that makes a full turn in 20 earth days which is the same time as it's orbit of the star, which gives it a constant day side. Be interesting to find out about the other ones.
I think there's a bit of supposition going on net all direct observation.
If the star is about the size of jupiter it really does sound like they are more like moons than planets but then again.... ganymede is less than half the size of earth but is largest moon around jupiter so.. they are quite big to all be that close in and all temperate etc.
There are no days.
They are believed to all be tidally locked. Meaning: they rotate around their axis at the same speed they rotate around their sun.
As an example of what this means, the moon is tidally locked around the earth. Thus, if you look at the moon from Earth you will always see the same side of the moon.
The closer a body is to that which it orbits the more likely it is to be tidally locked. Any planet in the goldilocks zone around a dwarf star system is almost certainly tidally locked.
One side will always face the sun and be hot, the other side will always be cold. Even if water and an atmosphere exists, any water on the hot side will eventually move to the dark side and freeze. (Water evaporates... When eventually it reaches dark side it would freeze and get locked there).
Any life that evolves there would be vastly different to ours.
The only chance that they have of not being tidally locked is if they have very eccentric (oval) orbits, and then you have the problem of inconsistent temperatures during the year.
I really don't know if they can really say that or not. the moon is tidally locked here and so are most others in the solar system but can they really say from looking in the manner they do from this distance?
Also the interesting this is if a planet was largely spherical and what you've said about water was true they would get very lop sided and it would be interesting to note how that would affect their orbits.
Well all bodies in orbit tend to move towards being tidally locked or in resonance over time and the closer they are and the larger one is compared to the other the quicker that occurs.
Trappist 1 is very old and the planets all orbit closer to the star than Mercury does to our own (it's an ultra-cool star, doesn't put out much heat).
They don't know for sure the planets are tidally locked but they strongly suspect they are.
It's like being back at school. Please don't make me eat chalk and piss in my pencil case again...
