Moons of Saturn

This post I wrote over a year ago, I had just moved to Oulu. I never posted this though. So here you go.

First of all, I am sorry for the slow rate of new updates on my blog. It has been quite hectic, moving to Oulu and searching for new job an stuff. That being said, I am really glad I moved, no doubt about that...

So, I wanted to tell you something cool that NASA's space probes have photographed, Saturn's moons, not all of them, but still this is the most coolest photo I have seen for a while...

Just in the middle you can see the brightest and the most interesting of them all, Enceladus. Why it is the brightest? Well, its surface is mostly covered in ice and astronomers predict that it has a water oceans below the surface. Enceladus is quite active little moon, it has "geysers" that erupt all the time, spewing water ice hundreds of kilometers in to space. Enceladus also leaves a trail of ice behind as it orbits around Saturn. It creates another weak ring of ice around Saturn.

Cool photo, cool little moon.

Relativity of Life

Hi! It has been a looong time since I have posted something here, primaly because for a lack of time. I have had a lot of work and stuff so my focus has been on work and wife, for the last year and so.

But, now that I have again been inspired to write something on my blog here, It shall be the thing that has been twirling in my mind for a time now, Is there "life" out there? Why I say "Life" is that I believe that the definition for life is wague, for the most parts anyway. That is because, if we really think about what is "life" in the univere, we can only use our own perception of what life is, as we have come to know life in our planet in it complexity, I think we are by that, limited to imagine what might really be out there. Never the less, our imagination goes a long way of making all kinds of posibilities for alien life;)

But, what I mean is that "there is no spoon" like they said in the movie Matrix... the meaning in this case is that the Infinity of space can hold unimaginable possibilities for life. The life that could exist could be made out of pure energy, or made out of pure anti-matter for that matter. The point is, that to know such thing now in this time and space, would give one a "god" like understanding... getting of topic here. Though, why should that be a bad thing since imagination is what we have to expand the mind and conceive the things that push technology and understanding further.

To really get to my point now, is that, we as a species are limited beings, we are bound by the laws of physics, limited by our brain and as a general limited by our own content and limited by our desire to advance as a species. There should be no limit to human evolvement, but there are, we create them ourself.

As I have seen, anything is possible, but the human condition is to doubt and fear to break the boundaries of reality and imagination. It is so that, if you can imagine it, it should be real. I think that there are people who hawe broken this reality-imagination barrier. Two of them being Stephen Hawking and Micho Kaku.

But is there life out here? I have to say yes. What kind of life? Dont know, I would IMAGINE that the closest life to us would be microbes or some sort of bacteria, but who knows. I HOPE that the life out there is not limited by same restrictions as us, they could be some inter dimensional beings, able to move trough time in a way we do not undestand. But, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote: 

"Two possibilities exists: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

So, we can not really know, we can only speculate, we can only imagine and hope. We reach for the stars, we have taken huge steps in recent years in the field of Astronomy, but compared to the age and infinities of space, they are but baby steps. Still, I believe that there will come a "breakthroug" in human understanding, of what real is and then we will take a true giant leap... Or Quantum leap maybe;D

May this be some sort of warm up for restarting my blog. This is just to get my brain juices flowing the right way again:P

About making sense...

Kinda funny topic, but as I have come to realize, the universe makes sense. I do not mean this in the way that there has to be some underlying grand design and that everything happens for a reason. In fact, I believe that everything happens becaus they just do, everything is random and chaotic in nature. There might be some, underlying, grand design but it's there because in this bubble of universe, dices just rolled that way. It might be that, in some other universe/dimension, the very nature of the universe that we take for granted here, is different in lot of ways.

Like, not too long ago, we tought that the speed of light was the absolute speed limit in the universe. Well, it turns out that at CERN they just resently measured a neutrinos that traveled a certain distance faster than light! (This measurement and result, has still a long way to go before it can be found accurate and stuff...). But none the less, it is extremely intersting that, the thing we take for granted in physics, like the theory of relativity, might all of a sudden...change!

Now, it might be that the speed of light limit still is the speed constant that Einstein figured out it to be and the illusive particle called neurino just might be able to go places no one could ever imagine, like other dimension. I don't know... but universe has still a lot to show us:P But our universe makes sense in that it does not... one word, entropy... even that does not make sense! :D

Diamond planet

This thing is pretty cool, a planet that is slightly bigger than Jupiter, but has the density of over twenty times that of Jupiters. The planet composes of carbon and due to its mass and desity, the carbon is in crystalline form, essentially diamond. 

Now, the planet itself, was once propably a massive star that lost its outer layers to its companion star, now know as a pulsar. But, this pulsar once was a huge star that started to devour its binary star and went supernova. This supernova caused the other star to lose its outer layers and the remnant then became a diamond planet. Now the diamond planet orbits its parent neutron star in little over two hours and so close that the orbit could fit inside our Sun.

The star is little over 20 km across and spins hundred times per second sending radiowaves and x-rays from its poles, like a lighthouse. The pulsar is a super dense star and one tea spoon of its material would weigh as much as the whole Mount Everest. 

How cool would it be to actually "see" this weird system! A diamond planet orbiting a neutron star, 4000 light years from Earth, towards the galactic core of Milky Way. Incredible! :P

Artists Rendering of the neutron star (in the middle) and the diamond planet orbiting it. 

The yellow sphere is the size of our Sun.

Neutron degenerate

Regarding photon emission of neutron stars, when a neutron star is created, the photons are actually captured in the collapsing matter which is so dense, it takes millions (maybe billions) of years for all the photons to escape (it can take photons up to about 10^6 years to escape the suns core, reaching the surface then taking only about 8.3 minutes to reach the Earth). When it comes to capturing light, this is down to the escape velocity which is relative to mass and radius and not specifically to density. In theory a preon star with a radius of ~1.2 metres, 50 Earth mass's and a central density of 10^25 kg/m^3* is far more dense than a 2.5 sol mass neutron star with a central density of ~2x10^18 kg/m^3 yet if the neutron star was to attain a 3 sol mass by accretion it would collapse into a black hole with the central density reaching no more than 5x10^18 kg/m^3, the preon star having an escape velocity of 0.61c while the neutron star with a much lower density attaining an escape velocity of c. Actually stopping light I think is a different thing all together. Apparently it can be slowed down by passing it through a Bose-Einstein condensate but actually stopping it would violate the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and create all sorts of issues regarding energy due to momentum and rest mass. So, this is why neutron stars are glowing, even when all the electrons are blown away in the supernova explosion. Photons are trapped inside the super dense (and super massive) star and sloooooowly ooze out.

How complicated this might be, it's still incredible how dense these compact stars are... how much they bend the very fabric of space and time is mind blowing. Magnetic fields are so strong that they would wipe your credit cards clean from hundred thousands of kilometers away, draw the iron from you body and fry your brain.