Friday, June 22, 2012

Amazingly Close Planets Found orbiting Kepler-36

Amazingly Close Planets Found orbiting Kepler-36

Two planets recently discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope orbiting the star Kepler-36 come as close as 1.2 million miles every 97 days. One is a so called "super-Earth" and the other is a gaseous planet about the size of Neptune orbit this a 1,200 light-years from Earth. They are closer than any other known planets making make them visible to each other as disks instead of stars with Kepler-36c appearing Kepler-36b’s sky in 2.5 times the size as our moon as seen from Earth.

The two planets are about 30 times closer than any planets our solar system yet one has a density similar to Earth and the other has a density similar to that of Saturn. This is yet another failure of naturalistic planet formation theories and will likely force a reworking of both planet formation and migration theories.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Shenzhou 9  Docks to Tiangong-1 Spacelab

Shenzhou 9  Docks to Tiangong-1 Spacelab
China's  Shenzhou 9 spacecraft docked with the Tiangong-1 today in their docking of a manned spacecraft. The three Chinese astronauts launched onboard the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft  entered Tiangong-1 this afternoon.

Mitochondrial Eve

It is commonly claimed that Mitochondrial Eve lived 100,000 - 200,000 years ago but hat claim is based on a mutation rate that assumes we had a common ancetor with chimps 5 million years ago but direct mesurments of the mutation rate produces a date fo around 10,000 years,

Sunday, June 17, 2012

On Classical Mechanics



Mechanics is the branch of physics that deals with the behavior of physical objects that are subjected to forces or displacements. Classical Mechanics is the field of mechanics dealing with the physical laws that describe the motion of bodies under the action of a system of forces at every day sizes and velocities. Together thiso types of mechanics form the bases of physics.
Classical mechanics is limited in terms of the sizes and speeds at which it is applicable. The is because when the size of the objects gets extremely small quantum mechanics comes into play but on the macroscopic level quantum mechanics produces essentially the same results as classical mechanics. Further more when the speed of the objects gets extremely fast; that is approaching the speed of light relativistic mechanics comes into play while at the speed experienced in every day life relativistic mechanics produces essentially the same results as classical mechanics. Furthermore at larger scales of size and distance celestial mechanics come into play however this is actually just an expansion of the principles of classical mechanics to larger scales.
Classical Mechanics has an ancient history since the science goes back at least as far as ancient Greece with Greek philosophers like Aristotle. In practice the principles of classical mechanics go back much further even though they were not yet formulated. Classical Mechanics became a full fledged empirical science starting with Galileo and then grew into the beginnings of physics as it is known today with men like Isaac Newton.
Classical mechanics has virtually unlimited applications particularly useful at the scales of size and speed of everyday life since those were the scales it was developed on. Every aspect of human life is affected by the application of force in one manner or another. Classical Mechanics is the foundation of physics because it is where physics had it start and where its main participles were laid down. Classical Mechanics works fine within our every day experience but reaches its limits when dealing with the very fast the very small.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

China's Shenzhou 9 launches crew to Space Lab

The Chinese the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft was successfully launched today ontop of a Long March 2F rocket, 6:37AM EDT. The space craft carries a crew of three. Two men and one woman. She is Liu Yang and she is China's first female astronaut. On mo Monday tthey will manually dock to China's Spacelab Tiangong-1 launched late last year. The mission is planed to last 2 weeks. Shenzhou 9 will be China's first manned vehicle to dock in orbit.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Transit of Venus 2012


Here is a picture of the beginning of the 2012 transit of Venus from Greenville, South Carolina. This image was taken about 6:20 pm near the beginning of the event. Venus is a small dent in the disk of the sun near the bottom of the solar image. It was a cloudy day but by the grace of God there was a break in the clouds that allowed this image to be taken. This is the last time in the life time of any one alive today that this will occur since the next time will be in over 100 years. Unfortunately clouds prevented a longer observation and pictures from later in the event.