Now it seems, if not confirmed, thought by today's astronomers to be very likely that the beautiful construct in the Eagle nebula, called the Pillars of Creation, may in fact have been destroyed thousands of years ago by the shock wave from a nearby supernova. This fact will be extremely hard to to confirm however. Because of the distance ( in overall stellar terms the pillars are pretty close, relatively speaking, some 7000 light years distant) it will be at least another millennium before the light from their destruction starts to reach us.
"The Pillars of Creation" was taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995. The Pillars are of great interest by astronomers because these columns of dust and gas are likely places where stars form. which makes the next time they were re-imaged turned out to be a bit melancholy. In 2007 researchers again focused on this region of space using the Spitzer Space Telescope. These new images showed the Pillars and next to them, a giant cloud of hot dust thought to have been heated by the blast of a star that possibly went supernova.
What's more this shock wave could have already reached the Pillars, causing them to disintegrate about 6,000 years ago. (hence the 1000 year estimate before we start to see evidence of the destruction)
Read more at the Daily Galaxy here
And an excellent break down of this information in the Wikipedia here
9 comments:
I've always wondered about a lot of this stuff. Here's why.
Most people go by their own perception and forget these thing are 100's to 1,000's or farther light years away. I don't even see time like most physicists, let alone the basic perceptional time of normal people. To me, a billion years is barely even a blink, so yeah, I do see time way different than others, and have no concept at all, of an end of time, for anything.
Energy can not be destroyed, only altered. That's a law that has nothing to do with physics, (though basically prove by physics) at least in my training.
But here is my real point here. We are seeing something from long ago, not how it is now. We see the universe at it's supposed end, at 13.5 billion years ago. Even our closest and most famous friend, (from things like Lost In Space) we see at an average of 4.5 years later. A lot can happen in one day, so lets think about 1,000years ago. We see it as it was, not how it is. This is why I push so hard to drop the nonsense, and build a ship.
We have the tech to build a centrifugal force gravity station, that could be used as a generation ship.
WHY AREN'T WE DOING THIS.
Once again, I make my plea. Lets all get rich, somehow, and build our own freaking station ship, and get the frack out of here.
Really isn't that hard. It really isn't.
Once again, we see the thing that people miss, time.
Time = the greatest non existent power in the universe.
At least by my theory, and others for a very long time.
Yeah, I don't think my time view came across here. I may not have the long view as you do, but I do understand that everything we see (starting with our moon)is how it was, based on it's time/distance factor. It is one of the main reasons that I have never been able to accept the reality of visitors of an other worlds. And of course the same old hoary arguments come up...ummm ftl...umm warp and on and on. Like we can't detect the gravitational abnormalities such engines would produce. And so on.
Generation ships are certainly an interesting idea but I can only envision failure. It is so difficult to engender your vision in the next generation. If this were an intermediate generation, with no clear reward then failure becomes inevitably certain. Romanticized ships like oh...the one in Wal-E say have large populations that would help, but not nearly large enough in reality. Gene Wolf's Long Sun ships start to give you an idea of scale and populations. The enormity of the ships alone works against them. My mind is that hyper-sleep would be the most economical and the most likely to succeed. A ship that starts and ends with the same crew would see a clear economic reward for the mission to succeed, whatever that might be. Ahhh...yess, less romantic but a whole lot more pragmatic as well.
hey, why did you take that down kall?
Lets try this comment again. (something went haywire bad in case anyone saw this when first posted 1 minute ago.)
Give me a couple days to transfer my base ship over to something I can put up here. By the way, it's only a base sketch, so we'll take that, and start a concept on this exact thing. First I need to make my copier work, or try and do the base in paint brush. (Yeah, I know, fun.)
But this is on, and this should be fun.
You stay with the doubting, and I'll promote the ship. Lets see what happens. It'll be up by tomorrow hopefully, or Wednesday at the latest. Depending on my printer, copier, scanner, what the feck ever it is called with all that.
See you at the debate brother. And I am sure I can prove it, and I'm also sure you can prove your point. So once again, we get to that article I'm afraid to touch.
But this should be cool. Get ready, I'm coming to prove it. Your job is to prove me wrong at every turn. This means all of you.
Lets be honest though, if I had the money I'd go for it anyway, and so would all of you.
So lets see what we can figure out here. See you soon folks, get ready.
After all, this is what this place is for after all. Let's play, all the way.
be prepared to be humbled puny earthling
It's back, But something went haywire bad, at least here it was. That is why I took it down and re-posted it.
And we shall see. Oh yes, we shall see. LOL. Yep, this is going to get interesting.
Oh, ok, well I got the email update and it looked ok, but who knows....I make sure that if I write offline I used the notepad because it does not add any formatting. But in general...I just write it here, unless it is like couple hundred words...
Post a Comment