Original Post September 21, 2020 Kuhn’s 1962 essay (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) exploring the nature of changes in scientific theories, and a plethora of commentaries since, have made it out to be a Big Deal and to be also somewhat mysterious: “revolution”, “incommensurability of paradigms”, “new world”, etc. It…
Original Post February 6, 2019 There is supposed to be a supermassive black hole in the core of the Milky Way that is tearing stars apart. Black holes cannot be directly seen, but astrophysicists continue to maintain that they exist because of their putative effects. They assume that matter can…
Original Post January 2, 2014 Galactic tails, bright comas, and central nuclei are reminiscent of comets. What is a comet? Most astronomers think comets are small, fragile, irregularly shaped objects composed mostly of water ice and dust, along with carbon and silicon-based compounds. “Dirty snowballs,” as Fred Whipple described…
Original Post May 5, 2015 INTEGRAL has observed intense gamma-ray emissions from the Cygnus X-1 star system. Cygnus X-1 is thought to be a stellar binary with one companion object a black hole and the other a blue supergiant known as HDE 226868: one of the strongest X-ray sources ever…
How hot is the Sun’s surface really? by Mathias Hüfner As Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute emphasizes, he sees the search for natural constants as one of the five basic tasks of physics. The theory of relativity is based on the assumption of the constancy of the speed of…
Original Post August 13, 2015 Rather than clouds of frigid dust and gas, twisted filaments suggest electric currents in space. The Eagle nebula is an active “star nursery” located in the constellation Serpens, approximately 7000 light-years away. It is a multi-spectral cloud of gas mixed with microscopic particles of dust. The…
Original Post August 5, 2015 Shockwave: a compressional wave of high amplitude caused by a shock (as from an earthquake or explosion) to the medium through which the wave travels. The plasmasphere of Saturn is highly energetic, enough so that, when the Cassini orbiter sent images to Earth, lightning up to a million…
Original Post June 19, 2015 “Plasma phenomena are complicated and can be understood only with the help of a very sophisticated diagnostics.” — Hannes Alfvén According to consensus opinions, the Sun accelerates charged particles into space in the same way that sound waves are amplified. The interior solar energy…
Original Post June 5, 2015 What force creates energetic beams that span distances measured in light-years? What confines them into narrow jets? Explaining the jets of ionized particles and X-rays often seen erupting from various galaxies and quasars ranks as one of the most difficult tasks facing modern astronomers….
Original Post May 28, 2015 The definition of “life” can be ambiguous. The Galileo spacecraft was launched on October 18, 1989 from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, and subsequently entered orbit around Jupiter on December 7, 1995. After eight years in orbit, Galileo was deliberately incinerated by sending into the…
