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Nothing happened Tuesday in space science, is the conclusion reached by this researcher. As a hard scientist here at ScientificBlogging, I find interesting topics to write about twice weekly. However, today, there was nothing. Nothing at all happened in science, at least involving space, or astronomy, or Mayans (who, according to /., apparently predicted the apocalypse in 2220, not 2012 as commonly misreported).More The Daytime Astronomer articles
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The NASA Ares-X launch was postponed due to bad weather and risk of triboelectrification. This NASA lead set the trend for 'nothingness' that continued up until I wrote this piece.
Physics Today reported that Hot dust evinces a violent planetary collision around a nearby star but really, that's too little, too late.
The latest issue of Astrophysical Journals notes a 500 parsec halo around a globular, some dwarf binary spectrography, and two models. Ho hum. Astronomy&Astrophysics notes transneptunian objects, planetary companions, exoplanets, and disks around other stars, but really, isn't that stuck in an 2008 mindset? We're so over the Pluto/transneptunian thing, at the very least. And Astrophysical Journal ('ApJ', the 800-pound gorilla of astronomy research mags) notes, among other things, a novel theory saying the universe's first stars were powered by dark matter, not our ordinary nuclear fusion, and also almost a dozen dozen other results.
But I could not find one witty quip among those. Fortunately, though, a quick glance at "People" online leads that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are planning an African honeymoon. So at least the real magazines are tackling hard-hitting news, even while science flounders. For today, at least.
Alex, The Daytime Astronomer, Tues&Fri here, via RSS feed, and twitter @skyday
Read about my own private space venture in The Satellite Diaries
I'm not a scientist, but I've been thinking about black holes and their relationship to the origin of the universe and would like to offer the following comments. I call it "Harold's Theory of Everything".
While we can observe an expanding universe that is still increasing the rate of it's expansion, what if all matter in the universe was gradually and inexorably destined to fall into a black hole of one size or another. Imagine a condition where there is nothing left in space except an unknown number of black holes with nothing to devour besides themselves. It would seem logical that one day only two unimaginably massive black holes are left standing, with a showdown at high noon pending. What if the Big Bang were the result of such an encounter, critical mass having been reached? Is it possible we live in a universe (whatever that is) whose matter undergoes an endless cycle of expansion into seemingly limitless space followed by condensation and contraction back to that point of singularity?