Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear

[Aardwolf]

Not with its narrow angle camera. It's also likely that the exposure time for that shot was for many minutes.

The narrow angle camera was designed to take exposures up to 15 seconds in length to get clear images from the dimly lit outer planets. However, this exposure time could be, and at times was, increased to much larger times in increments of 48 seconds. I suspect that an Earth at 40 AU and only 12% the size of a single pixel of resolution for the camera would require substantial exposure time. So the question is, why no stars?

[Lloyd]

* Can we get back to the main event here?
* Did anyone pay any attention to my last post at: http://thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpBB3/v ... 036#p48987?
* I'll repeat the main points from there.
- Because objects in a star cluster are very faint and do not shine like stars, conventional astronomers call them very old, burnt out stars.
- But they are more likely young planets, not worn out or burnt out stars.
* Isn't that reasonable, that faint objects are likely to be planets or very small brown dwarfs, instead of stars, and that stars should be bright, like an electric arc?

- The photographs of many globular clusters reveal that some objects therein do not appear as small points of light, but rather as significant discs, even through small telescopes.
- This indicates they are just light hours away and some could be even closer than Pluto (but at a high celestial latitude).
* Isn't it reasonable that stars in Milky Way star clusters that show significant faint discs, instead of points, are likely planets, some closer than Pluto?

- In figure 8 the shadows of cluster objects can be seen on the objects that are located farther back behind them (and shadows can't be seen on stars).
* Isn't it reasonable that shadows on star cluster objects indicates that those objects are not stars?

[GaryN]

I thought I would try a different tack, Lloyd. Tell me if it is logical.
The nearest Star, Proxima Centuri surely should be the test case for
Sun Vs. planet determination. Chandra has had a good long look at PC,
8 hours in X-Ray.

Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri have shown that its surface is in a state of turmoil. Flares, or explosive outbursts, occur almost continually. This behavior can be traced to Proxima Centauri's low mass, about a tenth that of the Sun.

Its surface is in a state of turmoil. Must be a Sun. Mustn't it?

The extended X-ray glow is an instrumental effect.

Hmm...
Then I wondered about X-Rays from the Solar system planets.

“This indicates that Saturn’s X-ray emission is due to the scattering of solar X-rays by Saturn’s atmosphere,” said Jan-Uwe Ness, of the University of Hamburg in Germany and lead author of a paper discussing the Saturn results in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics. “It’s a puzzle, since the intensity of Saturn’s X-rays requires that Saturn reflects X-rays fifty times more efficiently than the Moon.”

http://www.universetoday.com/9374/satur ... y-mystery/
More confused scientists. Back to the drawing board I guess. I'll look at some other
planets and see if their X-rays emissions make any sense.
Surely the Square Kilometer Array will be able to tell us for sure,
but at the rate they are going, it will be another 20 years before
it is completed.

[GaryN]

More looking into the resolution of Hubble, thought this was interesting.

* NASA elaborates: "The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure."
Investigator Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said:"This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish."

[kiwi]

stars or just "marks" on the neg due to crude early tech? http://www.airspacemag.com/multimedia/p ... D=16045732

[Nitai]

stars or just "marks" on the neg due to crude early tech? http://www.airspacemag.com/multimedia/p ... D=16045732

nice photo, good question!

[kiwi]

Hi Nitai ... here is the video shot from the V2 launched in 1946 from White Sands.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sykfqa3MKAg

[Lloyd]

Kiwi said: stars or just "marks" on the neg [photographic negatives?] due to crude early tech?

* I didn't find anything about that at the link you provided. Do you have another link that explains what you mean?

Gary said: Tell me if it is logical. The nearest Star, Proxima Centauri surely should be the test case for Sun Vs. planet determination. Chandra has had a good long look at PC, 8 hours in X-Ray. ... "Chandra and XMM-Newton observations of the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri have shown that its surface is in a state of turmoil. Flares, or explosive outbursts, occur almost continually. This behavior can be traced to Proxima Centauri's low mass, about a tenth that of the Sun." Its surface is in a state of turmoil. Must be a Sun. Mustn't it? The extended X-ray glow is an instrumental effect. Hmm... Then I wondered about X-Rays from the Solar system planets. ... "It’s a puzzle, since the intensity of Saturn’s X-rays requires that Saturn reflects X-rays fifty times more efficiently than the Moon."

* Sounds pretty inconclusive, doesn't it? First, it's an assumption that Proxima Centauri is the nearest "star". We need to find out how its distance was "measured" before we can be confident that it's the nearest "star". Re Saturn, Thornhill seems to contend that Saturn produces its own x-rays, rather than reflecting them from the Sun. Here's what this TPOD said: http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2004/ ... rigins.htm.

Like the Sun, Saturn radiates X-rays strongly from near its equator, though X-rays of such intensity were not expected from Saturn. Saturn’s X-ray spectrum is like the Sun’s, and this fact led scientists to suggest, improbably, that the X-rays from the Sun were being reflected by Saturn’s atmosphere. (Why, then, doesn’t Jupiter reflect X-rays equatorially? Its X-rays come from polar auroral discharges, not from a “reflection”). The hasty “explanation” requires that Saturn reflect X-rays 50-times more efficiently than the Moon!
- By comparing historical evidence with data on recently discovered unusually-low-luminosity stars, Wallace Thornhill (http://www.holoscience.com) has suggested that Saturn was formerly an independent brown dwarf star. He predicts that Saturn will continue to perplex astronomers with stellar characteristics. Saturn’s X-rays are concentrated, like the Sun’s, at low latitudes. Voyager 2 also found an immense, hot doughnut of plasma encircling Saturn that is believed to be the hottest place in the solar system, 300 times hotter than the solar corona! Saturn’s atmosphere appears to rotate faster at the equator than at high latitudes – just like the Sun’s. More similarities will emerge, Thornhill predicts.

* So it looks to me like Proxima Centauri could be as small as Saturn or smaller. Saturn may have behaved like PC before Saturn entered the Solar System. PC seems to be quite a distance from alpha Centauri, so it may be entering the AC system, like Saturn entered the Solar System 10,000 years ago.
* Here's more from Bahram's book [paraphrased].

Heat from Stars
- If we examine the light of all celestial objects having a blue color, we see that they are always dull, meaning they do not shine like stars.
- If one looks at the objects in a star cluster, one sees that blue objects in comparison to orange objects of the same size are very faint.
- This clearly shows that blue objects could not have higher temperatures than orange objects, because if they did they would be many times brighter.
- The warmer the object, the more infrared radiation it emits.
- The fact that the sun is a star with a high temperature and a strong source of infrared radiation suggests that any hot stars must be strong sources of infrared radiation.
- Stars in the neighborhood of the sun were found to be not hot at all.
- Many nearby stars are blue objects that cannot be seen in infrared light because they reflect much less heat from the Sun.
- Instead of considering that these blue and cold objects could be planets, astronomers assumed they emit most of their energy in ultraviolet light.
- See http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosm ... idfar.html
Spectra
- A method to distinguish a star from a planet is spectrum analysis.
- In the mid 1800s Harvard Professor and leading astronomer, Edward Pickering, lettered the stars according to the strength of their hydrogen spectral lines.
- He found that all objects in the Milky Way had spectra very different from the sun.
- The whitish or bluish objects such as Sirius that have much hydrogen in their spectra are more numerous in the Milky Way.
- It appears that no spectrum analyses were ever carried out for the sole purpose of differentiating stars from planets.

[kiwi]

* I didn't find anything about that at the link you provided. Do you have another link that explains what you mean?

its a still shot showing the first pic from space Lloyd,... I just checked the link and it still works for me

[GaryN]

Hi Lloyd,

* Sounds pretty inconclusive, doesn't it? First, it's an assumption that Proxima Centauri is the nearest "star". We need to find out how its distance was "measured" before we can be confident that it's the nearest "star".

I'm still having trouble getting above the first rung of the Cosmic Ladder.
For a start, they are assuming a negligible angle of refraction of the atmosphere
at the equator, but when there are lots of layers with temperature and humidity
variations, and uncertain boundary layer effects, this seems highly unscientific.
I think in a court of scientific inquisition, they would be hard pressed to present
a solid case.
The idea of a much smaller Universe has been brought up before, and mentioned in
this PDF that was provided to me by a BAUT member.
http://www.geocentricperspective.com/St ... tances.pdf

allynh, thanks for the Harlow Shapley and Great Debate links in the Distance
Calculations thread, haven't had a chance to go through those thoroughly yet.

[Lloyd]

* Gary, your link http://www.geocentricperspective.com/St ... tances.pdf is interesting, but a geocentric perspective seems totally absurd. Do you think it's actually plausible?
* Here are some quotes from the webpage. The first two are interesting, but the 3rd one is the one that seems absurd. The method described for obtaining stellar distances seems plausible and these quotes show only the conclusions.

4. DISTANCE TO SIXTH-MAGNITUDE STARS
We now consider the question, "How far away is the faintest star of comparable size and effective temperature to the Sun, that can be seen with our naked eye?" ...
Light will take [a minimum of] 1.092 x 10^5 seconds, or 1.26 days, to travel ... the maximum distance to a sixth-magnitude star (of similar characteristics to the Sun). Sixth-magnitude stars of a size and effective temperature equivalent to our Sun are therefore no more than 1.26 +/- 0.01 light-days distant from us. This is an upper limit; they can be closer than this.

6. CONSIDERATIONS PERTAINING TO CERTAIN OTHER CELESTIAL OBJECTS
... But we know from Eq. 5 that I[26] = 1/m^2 x I[6], where the 26th magnitude star is m times further from the observer than is the 6th magnitude star. And so here, m = 10^4. This means that the distance to a 26th magnitude star cannot be greater than ~ 34.5 +/- 0.3 light-years. ...

9.1 Stellar Parallax
In attempting to preserve the integrity of the paper, we are therefore drawn to the inescapable conclusion that the World does not orbit the Sun. A geocentric cosmology ... accounts for stellar parallax by assigning all movements of the stars to the stars themselves, rather than to the World. Observations will, in this case, document real displacements, rather than apparent ones, but consequently will supply no information as to the distances involved. Our results are thus only feasible within a geocentric framework.

* I think a 6th magnitude star is about the faintest stars visible to the naked eye. A 26th magnitude star is the faintest visible through Earth-based telescopes.
* And the author showed that the visible stars are no more than 1.26 light-days away, while 26th magnitude stars are no more than 34.5 light-days away.
* On page 3 of this thread I paraphrased Bahram as saying that the diameter of the Milky Way is less than 30 light-days [480 billion miles], which is about the same as what the above webpage says.

[GaryN]

Hi Lloyd, I was jut looking into this Geocentrism idea, must admit I am
not familiar with the proponents, and this Dr Jones looks like the main
player. However, if it can account for all the negative parallax results
that even Hipparcos records, I think it worth a look. I would have put
those errors down to plasma lensing perhaps, but thats just a guess. I still
have not seen any convincing proof though that Katirai's ideas are impossible.
http://www.geocentricperspective.com/Ne ... rallax.htm

[Lloyd]

* This webpage http://www.catholicforum.com/forums/sho ... eocentrism says geosynchronous satellites are good evidence against a non-rotating Earth theory, which is part of at least some geocentrist theories.
* This one http://biblelight.net/kepler.htm says Kepler proved heliocentrism and links to a video clip about it and offers some details at the bottom of the webpage.
* This site http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v15/ ... ntrism.asp has a section on parallax vis-a-vis geocentrism as follows.

Parallax
- For instance, while he correctly notes that the failure to detect stellar parallax was an argument against the heliocentric model, he quickly concludes that this was circumstantial evidence for geocentrism (or as he prefers, the Tychonian model).39 Of course the heliocentric model can explain the lack of trigonometric parallax if the stars are at incredible distances. This turned out to be the case, and there is compelling evidence that even the nearest stars are more than 200,000 times farther from us than the Sun is. If lack of parallax was evidence against heliocentrism and for geocentrism, then one would expect that when parallax was finally detected in the 1830s, trigonometric parallax would be taken as evidence against geocentrism and for heliocentrism. However, this is not Bouw’s conclusion. Instead, Bouw modifies the Tychonian model so that the Sun in its annual motion drags along the distant stars. In other words, Bouw cries foul whenever physicists change models (as with modern relativity theory) to correctly describe new data, but he feels free to tinker with his model at will to meet the challenge of new results. It is impossible to refute any theory with these kinds of rules.
- Bouw uses the same skewed rules in discussing star streaming.40 The Sun is moving through space, as can be deduced by proper motions (the gradual motion of stars across the sky) of many stars. The first measurement of this was done more than two centuries ago by the great German-born English astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822), though the measurement has been refined many times since then. When the proper motions of many stars are considered, we find that stars seem to stream out of a region called the solar apex, presumably in the direction in which the Sun is moving. Conversely, stars appear to stream toward a convergent point, called the solar antepex, diametrically opposed from the solar apex and presumed to be the direction from which the Sun is moving. This would appear to be strong evidence that neither the Sun nor the Earth is the centre of the universe, but Bouw baldly asserts that stars could be moving past the Sun rather than the other way around.

* I don't have time to comment further now.

[Nitai]

In the Bhagavat Purana, the cosmology is geocentric, and also lists the heights of the planets above and below the plane of the ecliptic.

[GaryN]

by Nitai

In the Bhagavat Purana, the cosmology is geocentric, and also lists the heights of the planets above and below the plane of the ecliptic.

Thanks for that info Nitai, I'll have a look into that. The ancients seem to have known much more than
we give them credit for.