Celestia Forums

Thats a very good point, and I'm thinking in the same general direction. I've already started what I hope will be a more fruitful discussion (for my personal purposes) at the Bad Astronomy forum as Selden originally suggested (I go by TheNick there, if anyone is interested).

This is now really for another forum ("alternative" physics or whatever these are called) Selden? Bye Fridger I'm afraid I don't understand you. Or rather, I'm afraid you don't understand me. My purpose here is not to argue for alternative theories as much as it is to argue against the current popu...

While I'm at it, here's another fun theory. Would anyone be able to explain to me why this couldn't POSSIBLY be the case: Suppose there is a class of particles in the universe that has a similar sort of interaction to electromagnetic particles. (I believe what I'm thinking of is called "guage symmet...

I would like to clarify a few things concerning my own views: First of all, I do believe, in principle, in both quantum mechanics and relativity, which I understand encompass more or less the entirety of the "complicated math" we are referring to. I am not so naive as to think it could possibly be a...

1- the second interpretation you're describing (about the redshift dependant on distance, which may be caused by a kind of "photon fatigue" in its course through a space filled with dust and gas) was already discussed a long time ago in the physics community, and it was rejected. It is conficting w...

As the registration-confirmation e-mail for the Bad Astronomy forum seems to have been dispatched from one of the more distant galaxies, and as I am sure the members of this forum are more than qualified to have this discussion, I think I'll keep it here. Thanks, though, Selden; that's clearly a ver...

I have no formal education in cosmology or astronomy, with the exception of a single Intro to Astronomy course I took a couple years ago and which caused me to start asking a lot of questions. Although I'm familiar with almost none of the mathematics behind modern cosmology, I am acquainted with man...

What would happen to a planet about the size of Earth, with no natural satellites, if it were to (for no particular reason) start gaining a large amount of angular momentum? At what point would it begin to fly apart? What other effects would happen to it? And what about bigger planets? Say, a planet...

I think if you can't appreciate the sense in this new definition, you're not a very good scientist, cause it's pretty unquestionably reasonable.

Allz I know is you'd need a hell of a lot of CO2, cause most of it would dissolve in the ocean.

Awesome.

Are there any landforms on any of the spherical terrestrial bodies we know of that might have been created by the deformation of the body's surface when it took on a spherical shape? If not, is something like that possible?

Dude, that totally makes perfect sense. I thought I might be missing something...

I guess that's the end of this thread.

Do scientists know of any sort of threshhold of mass at a which a rocky body will begin to take on a spherical shape under the influence of its own gravity?

It just occured to me that stars near the plane of the ecliptic, even very near stars, wouldn't have a very pronounced parallax as the Earth orbits the Sun. Were astronmers only able to get accurate distance measurements of stars closer to the celestial poles before the Hipparcos sattelite?

Is there any sort of solid "ground" in a gas giant like Jupiter? I've wondered this all my life and I don't know why it's taken me so long to ask someone. If, hypothetically, a humongous lead ball (or some other durable object) were dropped on Jupiter, what would happen to it?

Well, what I'm trying to do is basically make a very rudimentary roadmap of the places humans might go if and when we start moving to other stars using Celestia. I'm making a lot of assumptions about things I don't really understand (which is fine with me for my purposes), such as how easy it would ...

Thanks a lot guys. This is all really helpful.

Also, since I'm using Celestia to compile this list, should I worry about any innacuracies in the star data Celestia displays?

I'm trying to make a list of stars that might reasonably be considered habitable by humans, and I'm not sure of the best criteria to use to make this list. I'd kind of arbitrarily adopted the criteria of 0.5 Rsun or larger, and of those stars, 4,000 K or hotter. Before I get too far into the list (I...

Can anyone direct me to any serious attempts at outlining hypothetic galactic navigation systems. That is, assuming interstellar travel becomes commonplace however many hundreds of years in the future, what systems for describing locations in the galaxy might be in use for navigation. For instance, ...