Celestia Forums

You are right, but for the wrong reasons. The ring doesn't create a gravitational field, rather a gravitomagnetic field. Unless you were wearing another such ring, you wouldn't be pulled towards it. However, a toroidal ring of such rings could be used to generated an gravity field within the hole of...

What a bizarre topic. OK my two cents is that even if there were some force of appropriate magnitude. The planet wouldn't remain axially locked. Rather, the axis would necessarily precess. This whole problem could be solved precisely: for a given tidal force, what is the maximum rate of rotation for...

Fridger, If I've understood your proposal correctly then the following scenario would happen. If you are centered 2 ly form the brightest star, and then pull back to 4ly. The star itself would maintain a constant profile (assuming no other star became the new brightest star) despite loosing 75% of i...

Fridger that's an interesting approach. For the same lens system shouldn't all background stars have the same half width, saturation notwithstanding? So one might let the halfwidth be fixed relative to the FOV; under the assumption that higher FOV is equivalent to higher resolution, and thus smaller...

Paolo, I agree with most of your post, the exception being the two or more tails bit. Given the low density of solar wind, where the streams merge, there should be a region with low mixing such that the particles streams are separate. The mean free path length of solar wind particles is about 1 AU (...

Gradius, I think you'll find that people here are overall very nice. Probably the neg's you are getting are a result of the fact that what you want is just a little too grand. And whether you realizing it or not, you are in effect reflecting celestia in the negative light of what it can never be. Pe...

So presumably, if more than one star can create enough light pressure at the comet's current location to create a visible tail, you can get two comet tails pointing away from each star? Certainly not! A gradient is a gradient, is a gradient. You could, however, have the tail pointing in a direction...

Fridger, In general I would agree with your conclusion. However, for this particular case, assuming that there aren't any resonances, the cascaded distances between the bodies is sufficient to minimize the multibody interactions. Although the system is undeniably chaotic and thus nature will not fol...

Has it escaped your attention that I only criticize others who, themselves criticize others ? Bravo! I admire someone who, as a matter or principle, always criticizes themselves when criticizing others. I was going to criticize only those forum members who do not criticize themselves, but I gave up...

Three cheers to Melenfant for his tireless efforts to seperate science from ignorance. It is a neverending and thankless task. I'm glad someone is doing it.

Malenfant, I believe the 'soccor ball' theory was ruled out: http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0307282 As far as I know, it hasn't been show that the universe isn't infinite. All evidence seems to point to the universe being very big; many many Hubble volumes and possibly infinite. Maybe someone lik...

Actually the distortion to the normal vector would be greatest at the mid lattitudes and have no distortion at the equator or the poles. The charts you showed are purely gravitatonal. The strong variations in the gravitational field will naturally lead to significant corrections in the geoid. I've n...

Wcomer said : "volcanos do not point to the center of mass...Volcanos point to the surface normal". Where did you get that idea? It is not credible. GlobeMaker, By surface normal, I am of course referring to the normal to the spheroid or more specifically to the local surface of the geoid. I'm not ...

Mars is a spheroid. So volcanos do not point to the center of mass. And there is nothing mysterious about this. Volcanos point to the surface normal. The sample of volcanos happens to be conveniently situated within the same hemisphere so they appear to focus in the same region. Additionally I supec...

My analysis may seem callous, but it isn't. Quite the opposite actually. I suspect that it would also truly be in Chris's best interest to fork the project and take it off his hands. His lack of communications doesn't indicate to me a lack of interest what it indicates is that he is stuck with too m...

If you fork the project then there are two outcomes: 1) Chris is a grown adult and handles it with grace and maturity. 2) Chris isn't and takes it poorly. In the first case, the fork is the right decision and you've lost nothing. In the second case, the fork is still the right decision because that ...

If this paper stands, why do you suppose it has taken so long for anyone to discover this? I assume all the theory and techniques involved have been well understood for many decades - is this not the case?

-Walton

Fridger+Cham, Thanks for the insight. I read some pretty nasty comments on the Cooperstock and Tieu in another physics forum, so I thought I throw the 'rebuttal' at you two and see what you thought. I'm certainly not qualified to judge it myself. But I have high regard for your opinions. cheers, Wal...

Fridger+Cham, Here is a rebuttal paper: "Recently a new model of galactic gravitational field, based on ordinary General Relativity, has been proposed by Cooperstock and Tieu in which no exotic dark matter is needed to fit the observed rotation curve to a reasonable ordinary matter distribution. We ...

I survived Active State... perl that is. Don't get me started on its garbage collection problems