Beyond Nature

NASA has launched a probe into orbit high above the earth to study the distant edge of the solar system where hot solar winds crash into the cold outer space.

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) was launched at 17-45 GMT on Sunday, according to images broadcast live by the U.S. space agency.

The small probe was deployed on a Pegasus rocket which dropped from the bay doors of a Lockheed L-1011 jet flying at 12,000 metres over the southern Pacific Ocean near the Marshall Islands.

“The count went really smooth… and everything appears to be going well,” NASA assistant launch manager Omar Baez said shortly after the launch.
The IBEX is on a two-year mission to take pictures and chart the mysterious confines of the solar system — including areas billions of kilometres from earth.


Remote region

The small, stop-sign-shaped probe is equipped with instruments that will allow it to take images and chart, for the first time, a remote region known as the interstellar boundary, where the solar system meets interstellar space. The area is a vast expanse of turbulent gas and twisting magnetic fields.


“The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into earth’s orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous,” David McComas, IBEX principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas, said.

The only information that scientists have of this distant region is from the twin Voyager 1 and 2 probes, launched in 1977 and still in service today.

The two probes have travelled past the inner solar system, where the planets are, and on their way to its farthest edge.

In December 2004 Voyager 1 reached an area that scientists describe as the “termination shock” zone, where solar winds crash into the gas of interstellar space, marking the boundary of the solar system.


Fascinating

“The Voyager spacecraft are making fascinating observations of the local conditions at two points beyond the termination shock that show totally unexpected results and challenge many of our notions about this important region,” said Mr. McComas.


In 2007 Voyager 2 reached the heliosheath — the area where the termination shock begins — and on its current path and speed, should reach the heliopause in 2010. The heliopause constitutes the boundary between solar winds and interstellar winds.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) remains in regular contact with the two probes, which return data recorded by their particle detectors.

By 2020, however, contact with Voyager probes will be lost because of the weakening of their plutonium generators.


Revealing images

IBEX, armed with two very large aperture single pixel “cameras” that measure energetic neutral atoms, is to produce images of the region that will allow scientists for the first time to better understand what happens where the solar system meets the galaxy.



The mission will also study cosmic radiation, which has a negative impact on human health and space exploration. The IBEX probe weighs about 462 kg and is shaped like an octagon. It measures a mere 52 cm high and 97 cm across.

The Pegasus put the IBEX in a low orbit some 96 km above the earth. The IBEX spacecraft’s own solid rocket motor will then carry the probe into a much higher altitude orbit of around 200,000 miles, NASA said in a statement.

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In 1996 the controversial discovery of what appeared to be Martian fossils in a meteorite from Antarctica ignited a furor in the scientific community.

The idea that a rock billions of years old was flung into space with traces of life aboard was intoxicating, fueling thoughts of panspermia -- the idea that all life on Earth could have originated on Mars or some other alien planet.


Twelve years on, scientists still debate whether the tiny structures are Martian or not, or even fossils. But now a new study has shown it's possible for traces of life to survive a punishing interplanetary journey.

Frances Westall of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and a group of researchers attached a 2-centimeter-thick rock to the heat shield of a Foton M3 space capsule.

Nestled between the shield and rock was a layer of the hearty bacteria Chroococcidiopsis, commonly found in the harshest deserts on Earth.

When the capsule hit Earth's atmosphere, the rock was heated to at least 3,056 degrees Fahrenheit (1,680 degrees Centigrade). Most of it burned away, leaving only 8 millimeters of material behind. What was left was a gooey, melted white crust of quartz.

The rock's original structure -- along with visible microfossils -- was preserved at the core.


"This is a great positive result in searching for traces of extra-terrestrial life on meteorites," Westall said. "If ever Martians fossils land on Earth, we should be able to see them."

The desert-dwelling organisms were not so lucky, however.

Westall said the screws that held the rock to the heat shield loosened during re-entry, allowing temperatures between the shield and the rock to climb to between 570 and 930 degrees Fahrenheit (300 and 500 degrees Centigrade).

"[The bacteria] were carbonized," she said, "so it's a negative result for the idea of panspermia, but we'll have to run the experiment again."

"This certainly does not disprove the idea of panspermia," David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute said.


For life on Mars to make it to Earth, it would have to survive a perilous interplanetary crossing. Scientists have calculated that the first stage -- launching off the surface with debris created by a meteorite impact -- is survivable.

Little is known about the long journey through the vacuum of space, but microbes living inside rock could be protected enough to make the trip.

Then comes re-entry. If life were to survive the heat of rocketing through Earth's atmosphere at 12-15 kilometers per second (33,000 mph), it would still have to live through the impact. At this point, no one knows if it can.

"This is a piece in the puzzle of the origin of life, and the distribution of life in the solar system," Kring said of the team's research. "If life did originate on Earth and was transferred elsewhere in the solar system, it would be interesting to everyone to know that, and vice versa -- if life began on Mars and simply propagated better on Earth, that would be interesting, too."

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Whether it took the Earth 4.5 billion years to get to where it is today (or a mere seven days), destroying it might take a lot less time. Take a look at these spell-bounding new ways of destroying our Earth and how far man can reach from today's perspective.

10. Total existence failure

You will need: nothing

Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist. Note: the odds against this actually ever occurring are considerably greater than a googolplex to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.

Utter, utter rubbish.


9. Gobbled up by strangelets

You will need: a stable strangelet

Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks. Keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilizing machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.

A while back, there was some media hoo-hah about the possibility of this actually happening at the RHIC, but in actuality the chances of a stable strangelet forming are pretty much zero.

Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.


8. Sucked into a microscopic black hole

You will need: a microscopic black hole. Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.

Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.

Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.

Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.

Source: "The Dark Side Of The Sun," by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time.


7. Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction

You will need: 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter

Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this will take some considerable time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible - and much easier - simply to "flip" 2.5 trillion tons of matter through a fourth dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.

Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.

How hard is that?

The gravitational binding energy of a planet of mass M and radius R is - if you do the lengthy calculations - given by the formula E=(3/5)GM^2/R. For Earth, that works out to roughly 224,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules. The Sun takes nearly a WEEK to output that much energy. Think about THAT.

To liberate that much energy requires the complete annihilation of around 2,500,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. That's assuming zero energy loss to heat and radiation, which is unlikely to be the case in reality: You'll probably need to up the dose by at least a factor of ten. Once you've generated your antimatter, probably in space, just launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's famous mass-energy equation, E=mc^2) should be sufficient to split the Earth into a thousand pieces.

Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.

Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500. Of course, if it does prove possible to manufacture antimatter in the sufficiently large quantities you require - which is not necessarily the case - then smaller antimatter bombs will be around long before then.


6. Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation

You will need: a light bulb

Method: This is a fun one. Contemporary scientific theories tell us that what we may see as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and actually thriving with vast amounts of particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. It also suggests that the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum energy to boil every ocean in the world. Therefore, vacuum energy could prove to be the most abundant energy source of any kind. Which is where you come in. All you need to do is figure out how to extract this energy and harness it in some kind of power plant - this can easily be done without arousing too much suspicion - then surreptitiously allow the reaction to run out of control. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too.

Slightly possible.

Earth's final resting place: a rapidly expanding cloud of particles of varying size.

Earliest feasible completion date: 2060 or so.

Source: "3001: The Final Odyssey," by Arthur C. Clarke


5. Sucked into a giant black hole

You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole to our planet is 1600 light years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius, orbiting V4641.
Method: after locating your black hole, you need get it and the Earth together. This is likely to be the most time-consuming part of this plan. There are two methods, moving Earth or moving the black hole, though for best results you'd most likely move both at once.

Very difficult, but definitely possible.

Earth's final resting place: part of the mass of the black hole.

Earliest feasible completion date: I do not expect the necessary technology to be available until AD 3000, and add at least 800 years for travel time. (That's in an external observer's frame of reference and assuming you move both the Earth and the black hole at the same time.)

Sources: "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy," by Douglas Adams; SPACE.com


4. Meticulously and systematically deconstructed

You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly 2*10^32J

Method: Basically, what we're going to do here is dig up the Earth, a big chunk at a time, and boost the whole lot of it into orbit. Yes. All six sextillion tons of it. A mass driver is a sort of oversized electromagnetic railgun, which was once proposed as a way of getting mined materials back from the Moon to Earth - basically, you just load it into the driver and fire it upwards in roughly the right direction. We'd use a particularly powerful model - big enough to hit escape velocity of 11 kilometers per second even after atmospheric considerations - and launch it all into the Sun or randomly into space.

Alternate methods for boosting the material into space include loading the extracted material into space shuttles or taking it up via space elevator. All these methods, however, require a - let me emphasize this - titanic quantity of energy to carry out. Building a Dyson sphere ain't gonna cut it here. (Note: Actually, it would. But if you have the technology to build a Dyson sphere, why are you reading this?) See No. 6 for a possible solution.

If we wanted to and were willing to devote resources to it, we could start this process RIGHT NOW. Indeed, what with all the gunk left in orbit, on the Moon and heading out into space, we already have done.

Earth's final resting place: Many tiny pieces, some dropped into the Sun, the remainder scattered across the rest of the Solar System.

Earliest feasible completion date: Ah. Yes. At a billion tons of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.


3. Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument

You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it... perhaps Mars

Method: Essentially, anything can be destroyed if you hit it hard enough. ANYTHING. The concept is simple: find a really, really big asteroid or planet, accelerate it up to some dazzling speed, and smash it into Earth, preferably head-on but whatever you can manage. The result: an absolutely spectacular collision, resulting hopefully in Earth (and, most likely, our "cue ball" too) being pulverized out of existence - smashed into any number of large pieces which if the collision is hard enough should have enough energy to overcome their mutual gravity and drift away forever, never to coagulate back into a planet again.

A brief analysis of the size of the object required can be found here. Falling at the minimal impact velocity of 11 kilometers per second and assuming zero energy loss to heat and other energy forms, the cue ball would have to have roughly 60% of the mass of the Earth. Mars, the next planet out, "weighs" in at about 11% of Earth's mass, while Venus, the next planet in and also the nearest to Earth, has about 81%. Assuming that we would fire our cue ball into Earth at much greater than 11km/s (I'm thinking more like 50km/s), either of these would make great possibilities.

Obviously a smaller rock would do the job, you just need to fire it faster. A 10,000,000,000,000-tonne asteroid at 90% of light speed would do just as well. See the Guide to moving Earth for useful information on maneuvering big hunks of rock across interplanetary distances.

Pretty plausible.

Earth's final resting place: a variety of roughly Moon-sized chunks of rock, scattered haphazardly across the greater Solar System.

Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500, maybe?


2. Eaten by von Neumann machines
You will need: a single von Neumann machine

Method: A von Neumann machine is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. Create one of these that subsists almost entirely on iron, magnesium, aluminum and silicon, the major elements found in Earth's mantle and core. It doesn't matter how big it is as long as it can reproduce itself exactly in any period of time. Release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow it to fend for itself. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then they create two more, then they create four more. As the population of machines doubles repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of potentially sextillions of machines. Technically your objective would now be complete - no more Earth - but if you want to be thorough then you can command your VNMs to hurl themselves, along with any remaining trace elements, into the Sun. This hurling would have to be achieved using rocket propulsion of some sort, so be sure to include this in your design.

So crazy it might just work.

Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of iron sinking into the Sun.

Earliest feasible completion date: Potentially 2045-2050, or even earlier.

Source: "2010: Odyssey Two," by Arthur C. Clarke


1. Hurled into the Sun

You will need: Earthmoving equipment

Method: Hurl the Earth into the Sun. Sending Earth on a collision course with the Sun is not as easy as one might think; even though you don't actually have to literally hit the Sun (send the Earth near enough to the Sun (within the Roche limit), and tidal forces will tear it apart), it's surprisingly easy to end up with Earth in a loopy elliptical orbit which merely roasts it for four months in every eight. But careful planning can avoid this.

This is impossible at our current technological level, but will be possible one day, I'm certain. In the meantime, may happen by freak accident if something comes out of nowhere and randomly knocks Earth in precisely the right direction. Earth's final resting place: a small globule of vaporized iron sinking slowly into the heart of the Sun.

Earliest feasible completion date: Via act of God: 25 years' time. Any earlier and we'd have already spotted the asteroid in question. Via human intervention: given the current level of expansion of space technology, 2250 at best.

Source: "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers," by Grant Naylor.

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I have written about the Extraterrestrial and the Alien Mania stuff here in my previous posts. Now this post is all about life beyond Planet Earth! Man has always been in a constant search for a hospitable place in our solar system and studies reveal that his long cherished dream of living off the earth may come true one day! Europa and Titan--The two moons may be the next destinations of mankind! This post should have come up right after the science explorations but its just that I recently ran into a documentary on History Channel called "Histories Classroom" and that is how my curiosity grew regarding this topic! And hence here I am trying to bring about yet another interesting aspect of Beyond-Nature! Lets digg deeper...

It is the sixth of Jupiter's known satellites and the fourth largest; it is the second of the Galilean moons. Europa is slightly smaller than the Earth's Moon. It has fascinated the humans for hundreds of years now ever since it was discovered by Galileo in 17th century.

It has been suggested that life may exist in Europa's under-ice ocean, perhaps subsisting in an environment similar to Earth's deep-ocean hydrothermal vents or the Antarctic Lake Vostok. Life in such an ocean could possibly be similar to microbial life on Earth in the deep ocean. So far, there is no evidence that life exists on Europa, but the likely presence of liquid water has spurred calls to send a probe there.

Until the 1970s, life, at least as the concept is generally understood, was believed to be entirely dependent on energy from the Sun. Plants on Earth's surface capture energy from sunlight to photosynthesize sugars from carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen in the process, and are then eaten by oxygen-respiring animals, passing their energy up the food chain. Even life in the ocean depths, where sunlight cannot reach, was believed to obtain its nourishment either from consuming organic detritus rained down from the surface waters or from eating animals that did. A world's ability to support life was thought to depend on its access to sunlight. However, in 1977, during an exploratory dive to the Galapagos Rift in the deep-sea exploration submersible Alvin, scientists discovered colonies of giant tube worms, clams, crustaceans, mussels, and other assorted creatures clustered around undersea volcanic features known as black smokers. These creatures thrive despite having no access to sunlight, and it was soon discovered that they comprise an entirely independent food chain. Instead of plants, the basis for this food chain was a form of bacterium that derived its energy from oxidization of reactive chemicals, such as hydrogen or hydrogen sulfide, that bubbled up from the Earth's interior. This chemosynthesis revolutionized the study of biology by revealing that life need not be sun-dependent; it only requires water and an energy gradient in order to exist. It opened up a new avenue in astrobiology by massively expanding the number of possible extraterrestrial habitats. Europa's unlit interior is now considered to be the most likely location for extant extraterrestrial life in the Solar System.

While the tube worms and other multicellular eukaryotic organisms around these hydrothermal vents respire oxygen and thus are indirectly dependent on photosynthesis, anaerobic chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea that inhabit these ecosystems provide a possible model for life in Europa's ocean. The energy provided by tidal flexing drives active geological processes within Europa's interior, just as they do to a far more obvious degree on its sister moon Io. While Europa, like the Earth, may possess an internal energy source from radioactive decay, the energy generated by tidal flexing would be several orders of magnitude greater than any radiological source. However, such an energy source could never support an ecosystem as large and diverse as the photosynthesis-based ecosystem on Earth's surface. Life on Europa could exist clustered around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, or below the ocean floor, where endoliths are known to habitate on Earth. Alternatively, it could exist clinging to the lower surface of the moon's ice layer, much like algae and bacteria in Earth's polar regions, or float freely in Europa's ocean. However, if Europa's ocean were too cold, biological processes similar to those known on Earth could not take place. Similarly, if it were too salty, only extreme halophiles could survive in its environment.

In 2006, Robert Pappalardo, an assistant professor within the University of Colorado's space department, said, "We’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort trying to understand if Mars was once a habitable environment. Europa today, probably, is a habitable environment. We need to confirm this … but Europa, potentially, has all the ingredients for life … and not just four billion years ago … but today."

Regarding the info. about Ice-Surface, The Explorations and the History of this Moon we recommend you to visit the following sites..

Nine Planets

Solar Views

Europa-The Wiki Link



This brownish-yellow satellite might have appealed more to the TitanWorld-The Watch Manufacturers that they named their company after this moon . Known for its earth like atmosphere , rugged mountains and climatic features this satellite has been cited as a possible host for microbial extraterrestrial life or, at least, as a prebiotic environment rich in complex organic chemistry.

Scientists believe that the atmosphere of early Earth was similar in composition to the current atmosphere on Titan. Many hypotheses have developed that attempt to bridge the step from chemical to biological evolution. The Miller-Urey experiment and several following experiments have shown that with an atmosphere similar to that of Titan and the addition of UV radiation, complex molecules and polymer substances like tholins can be generated. The reaction starts with dissociation of nitrogen and methane, forming hydrocyan and ethyne. Further reactions have been studied extensively.
All of these experiments have led to the suggestion that enough organic material exists on Titan to start a chemical evolution analogous to what is thought to have started life on Earth. While the analogy assumes the presence of liquid water for longer periods than is currently observable, several theories suggest that liquid water from an impact could be preserved under a frozen isolation layer. It has also been observed that liquid ammonia oceans could exist deep below the surface; one model suggests an ammonia–water solution as much as 200 km deep beneath a water ice crust, conditions that, "while extreme by terrestrial standards, are such that life could indeed survive". Heat transfer between the interior and upper layers would be critical in sustaining any sub-surface oceanic life.

Detection of microbial life on Titan would depend on its biogenic effects. That the atmospheric methane and nitrogen are of biological origin has been examined, for example. Hydrogen has been cited as one molecule suitable to test for life on Titan: if methanogenic life is consuming atmospheric hydrogen in sufficient volume, it will have a measurable effect on the mixing ratio in the troposphere.

Despite these biological possibilities, there are formidable obstacles to life on Titan, and any analogy to Earth is inexact. At a vast distance from the Sun, Titan is frigid (a fact exacerbated by the anti-greenhouse effect of its cloud cover), and its atmosphere lacks CO₂. Given these difficulties, the topic of life on Titan may be best described as an experiment for examining theories on conditions necessary prior to flourishing life on Earth. While life itself may not exist, the prebiotic conditions of the Titanian environment, and the possible presence of organic chemistry, remain of great interest in understanding the early history of the terrestrial biosphere. Using Titan as a prebiotic experiment involves not only observation through spacecraft, but laboratory experiment, and chemical and photochemical modelling on Earth.

An alternate explanation for life's hypothetical existence on Titan has been proposed: if life were to be found on Titan, it would be statistically more likely to have originated from Earth than to have appeared independently, a process known as panspermia. It is theorized that large asteroid and cometary impacts on Earth's surface have caused hundreds of millions of fragments of microbe-laden rock to escape Earth's gravity. Calculations indicate that a number of these would encounter many of the bodies in the solar system, including Titan.

Conditions on Titan could become far more habitable in future. Six billion years from now, as the Sun becomes a red giant, surface temperatures could rise to ~200K, high enough for stable oceans of water/ammonia mixture to exist on the surface. As the Sun's ultraviolet output decreases, the haze in Titan's upper atmosphere will deplete, lessening the anti-greenhouse effect on the surface and enabling the greenhouse created by atmospheric methane to play a far greater role. These conditions together could create an environment agreeable to exotic forms of life, and will subsist for several hundred million years, long enough for at least primitive life to form.

Landing on the Moon Titan

While the Cassini–Huygens mission was not equipped to provide evidence for biology or complex organics, it did support the theory of an environment on Titan that is similar, in some ways, to that of the primordial Earth.

There are a wide range of options for future missions to Titan that might address these and other questions, including orbiters, landers, balloons etc.

Additional Info.

Solar Views

planetary.org - Explore the Cosmos

Titan-A world of Rivers and lakes on Space.com

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About seven billion years ago, the universe went into a sort of pubescent growth spurt that as far we know hasn't slowed down. Scientists call the growth stimulus dark energy, for lack of a better term or an understanding of the mechanics.

Now they've invented a tool called a laser comb that can measure expansion rates over time periods as short as 10 to 20 years.

Ronald Walsworth, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, offers this as an example: Say you want to figure out if something big, like your house, has moved a millimeter. If you counted on a measuring stick that chalked off miles, you'd never know. But if you had a ruler nicely hashed out by the millimeter, it'd be a cinch.

Laser combs refine the technique of spectroscopy, a process that picks apart a photon's journey from its source to our telescopes by identifying what chemicals it has passed through.

The fingerprints emerge by splitting the light into component wavelengths and comparing absorption lines in its spectrum with the wavelengths of laboratory sources.

The laser combs take a target's light signature one step further. If you've ever sat at a railroad stop and heard the train whistle, you know how it changes pitch as it comes closer or as it recedes down the tracks. The same shift takes place not only in sound waves, but in all wavelengths, including visible and ultraviolet light.

Click on the image n see a enlarged one to have a broader perspective

As the universe expands, distant galaxies, which are used to chart the universe's motion, move further away from Earth, with a corresponding shift in their spectra. Current tools to measure the shift would be like using the mile-marker to tag your house's re-location

Scientists know the universe has expanded over billions of years. The laser comb can refine that measurement to well within a human lifetime.

"We have to measure the movement of these distant galaxies to a few centimeters per second and follow this over decades. These speeds are barely faster than a snail's pace," said Antonio Manescau, with the European Southern Observatory.

The ESO says that feat would be like measuring the circumference of Earth to a millimeter (.062 inches).

"Never before have we had the chance to see the shape of the universe change before our eyes. We have inferred it from the cosmic background radiation, but it takes billions of years to see," said Walsworth. "With sensitive tools, in a human time scale we can see change."

To make the measurements, scientists use ultra-short pulses of laser light at many frequencies, each separated by a precise and constant interval. By comparing shifts in the spectra -- which may be a small as a molecule -- researchers expect to be able to determine, for example, how much a distant galaxy has moved over a 10- or 20-year period. The measurements, however, will have to wait until new, extremely large telescopes, currently under development, begin operations.

The technique also can be used to look for Earth-sized planets in other star systems.

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Mayans - The Mayan Calendar is something profoundly different than just a system to mark off the passage of time. The Mayan Calendar is above all a prophetic calendar that may help us understand the past and foresee the future. It is a calendar of the Ages that describes how the progression of Heavens and Underworlds condition the human consciousness and thus the frames for our thoughts and actions within a given Age.

The Mayan Calendar is not predicting the end of the world 2012, but the start of a new era; the golden age.

The Mayan civilization predicted that on December 21, 2012 something will happen to the world we know. Something will happen that will change our civilization, value systems and the way we know human civilization forever.

What does that means? What did the Mayan see through their spiritual wisdom?

According to scientists and technologists something strange is happening behind the scene. The terrestrial and solar polar reversal peaks are coming within three weeks of that day, December 21, 2012. Innumerable UFOs are scouting our skies regularly and increasing as we approach that day. The tectonic plate shifts, underwater volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and Tsunamis are increasing at rates never seen before. The solar flares are increasing. The earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere are experiencing strange disturbances. The numbers of typhoons and cyclones have increased many folds. The number of floods and droughts has increased beyond imaginations in the last ten years.

Scientists who look beyond conventional science point out that that the Hyperspace that contain our Universe is also showing signs that something strange is happening in our universe. The multidimensional time research is showing that a parallel universe may be predicting strange effects.

According to some scientists it is possible that another Universe is slowly starting to claim a spatial dimension in our physical Universe. It is also possible that we will face major calamities because of the polar reversal in the Sun and in Earth. If that happens, it is possible that the hyperspace has to adjust the suction force known as gravity and Electromagnetic force fields to keep the earth and the solar system intact.

The biggest clue to what will happen comes from astrophysicists. There is a big possibility that the simultaneous polar reversal in earth and sun will throw the solar system out of whack. That will cause massive upheaval in the earth. At that point of time, the extraterrestrials will officially show up and put “cosmic seat belts” around us as they apply the superpower of the Hyperspace to bring the solar system back to what it is today.

According to think tanks, this has happened before. The extraterrestrials take care of the earth and the solar system whenever the solar system faces challenges like that.

December 21st, 2012 - Modern astronomy can tell us a lot about the facts of where we will be in space at that time, where our planets will be, etc. The thing is that the ancient Mayans, Sumerians and the Egyptians knew about this long ago, and left their art recordings behind for us.

What do we know about this date? Well, we know that on that date, our the bodies in our solar system will all be in alignment. The Transit of Venus will occur once again due to Venus passing in front of the Sun. Our Sun will also be in the peak of its solar cycle, causing some groups to speculate that the magnetic poles of our Earth and possibly other planets could be shifted or reversed altogether.

Besides all this activity occurring in our Solar System, the solar system itself will be in perfect alignment with the elliptical plane of our Milky Way galaxy. It will be the first time this has occurred in gazillions of years.

Also, the area of space that our solar system will occupy at that time will be in the middle of a strange nebulous cloud that scientists have been studying and tracking for a few years now. We do not have a clear understanding of what the clouds effects could be on our Solar System and the Earth itself.

1) Our sun will be at the peak of a Solar hissy fit.
2) Our planets will be in alignment.
3) Our entire Solar System will be aligned with the elliptical plane of the galaxy.
4) We will be in the middle of a strange nebula.

Take this modern astronomical knowledge, and apply it to the ancient legends of our ancestors. The Mayans refereed to this period as the "Cycle of Civilization." They even accurately predicted these alignments to the date, thousands of years ago. And they chose to end their calender on this date. Not to restart it, but to END it.

No one can know for sure what will happen during the strange times of late 2012, but as the date draws nearer, we are certain to learn more.

Video:

This is a short film I found on Youtube made about the mayan calendar . They tried to explain who the mayans are and what the calendar is all about along with the mystery behind 2012.

Author of the Film: notarecordplayer

For more detailed clues and description visit:

• http://www.civilization.ca/civil/Maya/mmc06eng.html

• http://www.lost-civilizations.net/mayan-calendar-prophecies.html

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Check out this video for the Large Hadron Rap, by far the greatest physics rap of all time. The flow is halfway decent, and it accurately covers a lot of knowledge related to particle physics and the LHC. Its by Katherine McAlpine, alter-ego of a science writer currently working at the LHC.

The video, posted on YouTube, begins with a narration, a beat, and images of the scientists in lab coats leaning out the windows of a compact CERN lab car approaching the facility as they move their hands to the beat.

Rapper Alpinekat, a CERN trainee whose real name is Kate MacAlpine, explains the theory that the Higgs Field is an invisible force through which particles move. Some, like the proton, move quickly. "It has no mass, but something heavy, like the top quark is dragging its --- (!)," MacAlpine explains as her words appear on the bottom of the screen.

The "Large Hadron Rap" explains, in rhyming terms that could be understood by elementary school students, how scientists plan to send protons speeding through an underground tunnel at near-light speed to make them collide. It also provides clear and simple explanations about dark matter, antimatter, undiscovered dimensions, and ions.

The video shows clips of the equipment and scientists dancing in the environment where they hope to test the big bang theory, learn about dark matter, or refute the validity of theories about matter, mass, and how the universe formed.

"The LHCb accelerates the protons and the lead and the things that it discovers will rock you in the head," MacAlpine raps in the song's refrain.

More than 13,200 people have rated the video, which scores five stars for quality according to YouTube users' ratings. About 9000 comments and more than 150 video responses were listed with the video as of Friday. One user reported, "I just got my geek on." The video was "favorited" more than 17,000 times. It was originally posted in late July.

The video ends with the narrator slowly saying, "Ah yeah, our understanding of the universe is about to change thanks to the Large Hadron Collider. This is C-to-the-E-to-the-R-to-the-N, coming straight out of Geneva," before MacAlpine signs off with, "Alpinekat, over and out."

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Mankind's Biggest scientific experiment to be conducted on Wednesday this week....
With this experiment we are going to know the answers for the questions which have been a mystery for us since ages......
It is the BIG BANG EXPERIMENT..
the experiment is being conducted by scientists from more than 112 countries only with an aim to unravel the mysteries of universe..
The experiment is done with the help of a huge machine named Large Hadron Collider (LHC)...

The most powerful physics experiment ever built, the Large Hadron Collider will re-create the conditions just after the Big Bang in an attempt to answer fundamental questions of science and the universe itself.

The Large Hadron Collider – a £4bn, 18-mile-long atom-smasher buried 300ft underground on the Swiss-French border...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will smash two beams of particles head-on at super-fast speeds, recreating the conditions in the Universe moments after the Big Bang.

The Alice detector will investigate the moments after the Big Bang

Scientists hope to see new particles in the debris of these collisions, revealing fundamental new insights into the nature of the cosmos.

They will be looking for new physics beyond the Standard Model – the framework devised in the 1970s to explain how sub-atomic particles interact.

The Standard Model comprises 16 particles – 12 matter particles and four force-carrier particles. The Standard Model has worked remarkably well so far.

But it cannot explain the best known of the so-called four fundamental forces: gravity; and it describes only ordinary matter, which makes up but a small part of the total Universe.

Also, one of the most important particles in the Standard Model – the Higgs boson – has yet to be found in an experiment.

Today, the Standard Model is regarded as incomplete, a mere stepping stone to something else. So the LHC should help reinvigorate physics' biggest endeavour: a grand theory to explain all physical phenomena in Nature.

However, some physicists point out that Nature has a habit of throwing curve balls. And some of the most exciting discoveries at the LHC could be those that no-one expects.

There is an essential ingredient missing from the Standard Model. Without it, none of the 16 particles in the scheme would have any mass.

An extra particle is required to provide all the others with mass – the Higgs boson. This idea was proposed in 1964 by physicists Peter Higgs, Francois Englert and Robert Brout.

According to their theory, particles acquire mass through their interactions with an all-pervading field, called the Higgs field, which is carried by the Higgs boson. It is the only Standard Model particle that has yet to be observed experimentally.

As such, the search for the Higgs has become something of a cause celebre in particle physics. Finding the Higgs is one of the main science objectives for the LHC.

The Atlas and CMS experiments are both designed to see it, if it is there. This means that scientists working on these respective experiments will be competing to see it first, once the LHC begins its "science run" sometime in 2009.

The US Tevatron particle accelerator, though less powerful than the LHC, is also engaged in the hunt for the Higgs.

All the matter that we can see in the Universe – planets, stars and galaxies – makes up a minuscule 4% of what is actually out there. The rest is dark energy (which accounts for 70% of the cosmos) and dark matter (26%).

Dark energy cannot be observed directly, but it is responsible for speeding up the expansion of the Universe – a phenomenon that can be detected in astronomical observations.

Like dark energy, dark matter can only be detected indirectly, as it does not emit or reflect enough light to be seen. But its presence can be inferred through its effects on galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Physicists know virtually nothing about the nature of either dark energy or dark matter. But they can speculate.

According to one idea, dark matter could be made up of "supersymmetric particles" - massive particles that are partners to those already known in the Standard Model.

A leading dark matter candidate is the neutralino, the lightest of these "super-partners". And some theoretical physicists have proposed a link between the Higgs mechanism and dark energy.

Each basic particle of "ordinary" matter has its own anti-particle. Matter and antimatter have the same mass, but opposite electric charge.

For example, a proton has an anti-particle called an anti-proton (a proton with a negative charge). An electron has an anti-particle called a positron (an electron with a positive charge).

What happened to the anti-matter that emerged from the Big Bang?

In the same way that an ordinary proton and electron can come together to form a hydrogen atom, an anti-proton and a positron can form an atom of anti-hydrogen.

When a particle of ordinary matter meets its anti-particle, the two disappear in a flash, as their mass is transformed into energy.

They are said to "annihilate" one another. But equal amounts of matter and anti-matter must have been produced in the Big Bang.

So why did matter and anti-matter not completely annihilate each another after the birth of the Universe?

Today, we live in a Universe almost entirely composed of ordinary matter. Scientists will use the LHC to investigate why this is, and what happened to all the anti-matter.

Attempts to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces have come to a startling prediction: that every known particle has a massive "shadow" partner particle.

Atlas is one of the experiments that could find evidence for supersymmetry

All particles are classified as either fermions or bosons. A particle in one class has superpartner in the other class, "balancing the books" and doubling the number of particles in the Standard Model.

For example, the superpartner of an electron (a fermion) is called a selectron (a boson). Evidence for supersymmetry would enable the "unification" of three fundamental forces - the strong, weak, and electromagnetic – helping to explain why particles have the masses they have.

It would also give a boost to string theory – one stab at a grand "theory of everything". But string theory is not dependent on discovering evidence for supersymmetry.

In addition to the four dimensions we already know about, string theory predicts the existence of six more.

Some physicists even think the existence of these extra dimensions could explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces. Perhaps, they argue, we are not feeling its full effects.

This might be explained if its force was being shared with other dimensions. If these extra dimensions do exist, the LHC could be the first accelerator to detect them experimentally.

At high energies, physicists could see evidence of particles moving between our world and these unseen realms. For example, they could see particles suddenly disappear into one of these dimensions.

Alternatively, particles originating from an extra dimension could suddenly appear in our world.

According to some physicists, the LHC can operate at high enough energies to generate mini-black holes.

However, the vast majority of particle physicists say there is no need for alarm. If any should be created, they should evaporate quickly.

How a black hole might look if it is generated in the collider

A recent report dealing with the collider's safety acknowledged the possibility that the LHC could create these primordial black holes.

The report says: "If microscopic black holes were to be singly produced by colliding the quarks and gluons inside protons, they would also be able to decay into the same types of particles that produced them.”

The suggestion that black holes could be made in the LHC has stoked fears in the online world that one of these micro-black holes could swell in size, swallowing up the Earth.

In March, plaintiffs requested an injunction in a US court stopping the LHC from switching on.

However, physicists stress that any such phenomena would be short-lived and thus would pose no threat to our planet.

Building the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider is not just an extraordinary science experiment, it is also a remarkable engineering undertaking. Just getting it built is an astonishing story in itself.

The LHC took 10,000 scientists a total of 14 years to assemble

How do you build a "Big Bang Machine"? That was the challenge which scientists at Cern began to ponder in the early 1980s, when the idea for the Large Hadron Collider was born.

Cern's governing council wanted to build a kind of time machine that could open a window to how the Universe appeared in the first microseconds of its existence.

If it could recreate the fleeting moments 13.73 billion years ago, when the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos took shape, then the world we live in today would be brought into much sharper focus.

It could discover how matter prevailed over antimatter, learn how dark matter was formed, and catch our first glimpse of the elusive Higgs boson - a "missing jigsaw piece" in our model of the universe.

We might even find evidence of the existence of other dimensions. But to conjure up these conditions, the Cern council new it needed to perform an engineering miracle.

The 12-storey ATLAS detector weighs in at 7,000 tonnes

To generate the necessary high energies, the designers required a particle accelerator more magnificently complex than any machine ever built.

Beams of protons would be hurled together at 99.9999999% of the speed of light, in conditions colder than the space between the stars and each travelling with as much energy as a car at the speed of 1,600km/h.

And yet the fruits of these explosions - high-energy particles - would decay and disappear from view in less than a trillionth of a second.

To "photograph" these valuable prizes would require a detector as large as a five storey building, yet so precise, it could pinpoint a particle with an accuracy of 15 microns - 20 times thinner than a human hair.

How on earth do you build a machine like that? The journey took 14 years, more than 10,000 scientists, from 40 countries, and a financial injection anticipated at up to 6.2bn euros - four times the original budget. But it was achieved, on time. Well, almost.

The last of the LHC's 1,700 dipole magnets is lowered into place

The plans for the Large Hadron Collider began to gather momentum in the early 1980s, inspired by the success of its predecessor at Cern, a collider known as the Large Electron Positron (LEP).

But it was not until 1994 that the formal proposal for the LHC was ratified by Cern's member states, and the engineering work began.

The accelerator would be housed in a near-circular 27km-long tunnel, buried 50m-175m underneath the Jura mountains, criss-crossing the Swiss-French border. The tunnel was already in place - being the once occupied by LEP, which was eventually disassembled in 2000.

Inside the LHC vacuum pipe, two parallel beams of subatomic particles (protons or lead ions) would hurtle in opposite directions at record energies.

Crashing together at specially designated junctions, they would release unstable, high-energy particles - including, perhaps, the elusive Higgs Boson.

To generate a magnetic field powerful enough to steer the high-energy particles around the pipe requires 1,740 superconducting magnets, which together required some 40,000 leak-tight welds and 65,000 "splices" of superconducting cables.

If you added all the filaments of these strands together, they would stretch to the Sun and back five times, with enough left over for a few trips to the Moon.

In order to conduct, the magnets must be cooled to within a couple of degrees of "absolute zero", the theoretical limit for how cold anything can get. This requires a constant supply of liquid helium pumped down from eight over-ground refrigeration plants - about 400,000 litres per year in total. Enough to fill 1000 swimming pools.

Engineers excavating the cavern for CMS encountered serious difficulty

At the junctions where particles collide, four enormous detectors have been designed to observe the microscopic wreckage.

Between 1996 and 1998, approval was granted for four giant "experiments" - Alice, Atlas, CMS and LHCb - to be housed in four enormous underground caverns, dug strategically around the collider loop.

Excavating these caverns out of sand, gravel and rock was a considerable feat. In the case of the 7,000 tonne ATLAS detector, it took two years to burrow a cavern large enough to hold a 12-storey building.

But while Atlas may be the largest cavern, it was CMS - 10km up the ring below the village of Dessy - which proved the most problematic at the excavation stage.

The cavern shaft had to be bored through a 50m layer of glacial deposits, including fast flowing water, which threatened to flood the shaft. Engineers repelled these underground rivers by piping super-chilled brine down the shaft, allowing a wall of ice 3m thick to form around the circumference.

It took six months to freeze the walls of the two CMS shafts. But while the barrier worked initially, the water eventually broke through, forcing engineers to first pump down liquid nitrogen to turn the area into "Siberian permafrost", in the words of Austin Ball, CMS Technical Coordinator.

LHC components were transported to Cern from all over the world

Building the components of both the accelerator and the detectors was a truly international effort.

In the case of the 12,500-tonne CMS detector, the coiled strands of its central solenoid magnet - all 50km of them - began their life in Finland, before travelling to factories in Grenoble, Neuchatel and Genoa, to be braided, coated, and welded.

After being shipped to Marseille, they went up the river to Macon, where they were unpacked and driven by lorry under the mountains to Cern.

In fact, the diameter of the magnet was restricted to ensure it was just narrow enough that components could squeeze through the tunnels. The clearance was a matter of centimetres.

The CMS magnet is the most powerful solenoid ever built - conducting a current of 12,000 amperes - to create a magnetic field 100,000 times stronger than the Earth's.

The detector units of CMS were squeezed in with centimetres to spare

The next problem, of course, was how to get a 45m-long, 25m-high, 7,000-tonne detector, through a shaft hole 20m wide.

The answer of course is to do it in bits. ATLAS was lowered piece by piece over several years, and assembled almost entirely in the subterranean cavern.

The largest piece - the barrel toroid magnet - fitted down the cavern shaft with only 10cm of clearance on either side.

But the building of the detectors is not all heavy engineering. Layer upon layer of electronic sensors had to be wired and connected by hand, which meant up to 300 people a day working in the cavern cramped against each other.

Squeezing each piece into place was "like solving a wooden puzzle" - there is only one possible way of doing it, according to Professor Andy Parker of Cambridge University, one of the founders of Atlas.

"Everything fits together like Russian dolls. I saw one design for Atlas which fitted together, but you couldn't assemble it, because there was no room to move the pieces past each other. Every single millimetre of space was fought over," he said.

The CMS detector, on the other hand, was largely assembled above ground, in several enormous units.

The largest, at 2,000 tonnes (the weight of five jumbo jets, or one-third of the weight of the Eiffel tower) took 10 hours to lower down a 100m shaft, with a clearance of 20cm either side. The world's largest electromagnet had to be handled with extreme care.

Its cylindrically arranged silicon wafer detectors contain a vast network of micro-circuitry - including 73,000 radiation-hard, low-noise microelectronic chips, almost 40,000 analogue optical links and 1,000 power supply units.

To manufacture these required an entirely new method of auto-assembly.

Failure of a magnet in testing delayed the LHC start-up by almost a year

Though the LHC was originally slated to begin operations in late 2007, the entire project was set back after a failure in one of the quadrapole magnets used to focus the beam, which buckled during testing.

This meant all similar magnets would have to be redesigned and replaced.

Other, less serious problems arose due to with leaky plumbing of liquid helium, and also when some copper "fingers" used to ensure electrical continuity between magnets buckled when the magnets were warmed up.

The final tab for the LHC is expected to come in at a colossal 6.4bn euros, four times the original budget set by the Cern Council in 1995.

But that sum still represents good value for money, according to Dr Chris Parkes, of Glasgow University, UK, who works on the LHCb detector.

He said: "Tom Hanks is to appear in the movie of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, which involves scientists at Cern making anti-matter. But the new experiment at the LHC to understand anti-matter cost less than Tom Hanks will earn from the movie."

For knowing more visit

http://news.bbc.co.uk

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India offers software support to unravel Big Bang secrets...
India also has its part to do for the worlds biggest experiment.. If all goes well, the experiment will unravel the mysteries of the universe, particularly the very moment that led to the creation of time and space, a la the Big Bang.

Despite not being a member of CERN, the European nuclear research organisation, India made a significant contribution as an observer state to the build-up of the $9 billion experiment. Scores of Indian scientists and other professionals in nuclear and other material sciences took part in select areas of setting up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) machine over the last 20 years.

The LHC is at the heart of the experiment that will contribute to the knowing of the unknown in the formation of the universe. “The privilege to participate in the 21st century’s biggest scientific experiment and the modest role played in setting up the LHC and experiments are indeed major achievements for India,” said Archana Sharma, staff scientist at CERN.

Built under 100 metres of rock and sandstone, the LHC is a giant machine that will work at full tilt by driving two beams of particles in clockwise and anti-clockwise directions around a specially constructed underground 27 km ring at almost the speed of light, i.e., 299,792,458 metres/second. Each beam will complete 11,245 laps of the machine per second.

When each particle — proton — collides with another proton coming in the opposite direction, it would result in a collision creating mass from energy via the famous Einstein equation in E = Mc2 — the mother of all creations of space.

“Within a second (after the Big Bang), the super-hot universe expanded and cooled dramatically, its temperatures falling from a few trillion to a few billion degrees,” observed Simon Singh, the author of the book Big Bang.

Scientists at CERN are now recreating that very second after all matter and energy, which were hitherto condensed, exploded at that very moment of the Big Bang. There are four major experiments that will be conducted at four points around the ring where the beams will be directed into head-on collisions and India is participating in the CMS experiment and the Alice experiment.

The CMS explores into the next developments in the world of physics, and more importantly, into the elusive Higgs boson particle — popularised as the God particle — that explains the origin of mass. The Alice experiment will study what happened when the super-hot universe expanded within a second after its creation 13 billion years ago, especially the protons, equivalent to hydrogen nuclei, reacted with other particles in a next few minutes to form light nuclei such as helium.

“The ratio of hydrogen to helium in the universe was largely fixed within these first few minutes, and is consistent with what we see today,” said Singh.

The LHC will search for all those extra dimensions through giant detectors that will examine the shower particle debris. Besides, the experiment might also create “dark matter” which is currently present in the universe. Scientists had calculated that about 23 per cent of the universe is dark matter, 73 per cent dark energy and 4 per cent ordinary matter.

“It is once in a generation experiment, and for 20 years, all the fine details have gone into conceiving this gigantic experiment,” Archana Sharma told Business Standard. “For years to come, we will see several results emanating from this experiment at CERN that will advance the understanding of several unknown factors in universe,” she said.

Indian research establishments including the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bhaba Atomic Research Centre, Saha Institute, and Punjab University were involved in providing software and quality-testing services of detectors.

“To study and view the experiments from 70 million channels, you need awesome computing infrastructure and TIFR is involved in addressing some of the software requirements,” Sharma said, suggesting that India contributed about $25 million towards the LHC project.

The LHC project also generated some legal challenges and led to fears about the possible creation of a black hole that would wreck the planet. But the attempts to stop the machine from experimenting were dismissed in courts.

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As a human being (only animal with good intelligence on this planet) we really face a lot of questions... one of them which everyone likes to know the answer is...
"How the universe has originated???"
lets see the story below to know about origin of

Universe

Basically the are two groups of people with their own beliefs .....

Theism vs. Atheism
In general, theists attribute the origin of the universe to some sort of transcendent, intelligent Designer. Atheists envision a natural, undirected process by which universes spring into existence spontaneously. Prior to the 20th century most atheists believed the universe was eternal. This changed however as discoveries throughout the 20th Century rendered that view untenable. Einstein’s theory of gravity (which has been thoroughly validated by extensive experimental confirmation) and Hubble’s astronomical observations preclude an eternal universe. We now know beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe began at some point in the finite past.

Now we understand that there are only two legitimate options for the origin of the universe:

(1) Someone made the universe (Intelligent Design), or
(2) The universe made itself (Random Chance).

The third option, the universe has always been here, is no longer a feasible alternative -- it contradicts empirical science. No other scientifically plausible theories for the origin of the universe have ever been proposed.

The implications of various 20th century discoveries have put atheists in an awkward position. Logic now requires that they identify an uncontrolled mechanism by which the universe could have initiated, designed, created and developed itself without an Intelligent Director. Otherwise, intellectual honesty requires the necessity of a Creator God.

The Big Bang Theory
So began the effort to propose an atheistic mechanism for the origin of the universe. Enter the Big Bang Theory and Darwinian Evolution. The original Big Bang Theory seeks to explain the sudden appearance of everything from nothing, while Darwinian Evolution seeks to explain the origin of complex life forms from their supposed simpler ancestors. The premise of the Big Bang is that the entire universe was compacted into a teeny tiny little ball, which, after randomly coming into existence for no apparent reason in the first place, exploded into all space, time, matter and energy in an instant. Yes, that's the theory. No Ph.D. required.

in detail:
The Big Bang theory is an effort to explain what happened at the very beginning of our universe. Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was nothing; during and after that moment there was something: our universe. The big bang theory is an effort to explain what happened during and after that moment.

According to the standard theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. What is a "singularity" and where does it come from? Well, to be honest, we don't know for sure. Singularities are zones which defy our current understanding of physics. They are thought to exist at the core of "black holes." Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure. The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density (a mathematical concept which truly boggles the mind). These zones of infinite density are called "singularities." Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, something - a singularity. Where did it come from? We don't know. Why did it appear? We don't know.

After its initial appearance, it apparently inflated (the "Big Bang"), expanded and cooled, going from very, very small and very, very hot, to the size and temperature of our current universe. It continues to expand and cool to this day and we are inside of it: incredible creatures living on a unique planet, circling a beautiful star clustered together with several hundred billion other stars in a galaxy soaring through the cosmos, all of which is inside of an expanding universe that began as an infinitesimal singularity which appeared out of nowhere for reasons unknown. This is the Big Bang theory.

Big Bang Theory - Common Misconceptions
There are many misconceptions surrounding the Big Bang theory. For example, we tend to imagine a giant explosion. Experts however say that there was no explosion; there was (and continues to be) an expansion. Rather than imagining a balloon popping and releasing its contents, imagine a balloon expanding: an infinitesimally small balloon expanding to the size of our current universe.

Another misconception is that we tend to image the singularity as a little fireball appearing somewhere in space. According to the many experts however, space didn't exist prior to the Big Bang. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, when men first walked upon the moon, "three British astrophysicists, Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.^{1, 2} According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy."³ The singularity didn't appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy - nothing. So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space? We don't know. We don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we.

Big Bang Theory - Evidence for the Theory
What are the major evidences which support the Big Bang theory?

• First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning.
• Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This is called "Hubble's Law," named after Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered this phenomenon in 1929. This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that the universe was once compacted.
• Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to find some remnant of this heat. In 1965, Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a 2.725 degree Kelvin (-454.765 degree Fahrenheit, -270.425 degree Celsius) Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which pervades the observable universe. This is thought to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery.
• Finally, the abundance of the "light elements" Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins.

Big Bang Theory - The Only Plausible Theory?
Is the standard Big Bang theory the only model consistent with these evidences? No, it's just the most popular one. Internationally renown Astrophysicist George F. R. Ellis explains: "People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations….For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations….You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."⁴

In 2003, Physicist Robert Gentry proposed an attractive alternative to the standard theory, an alternative which also accounts for the evidences listed above.⁵ Dr. Gentry claims that the standard Big Bang model is founded upon a faulty paradigm (the Friedmann-lemaitre expanding-spacetime paradigm) which he claims is inconsistent with the empirical data. He chooses instead to base his model on Einstein's static-spacetime paradigm which he claims is the "genuine cosmic Rosetta." Gentry has published several papers outlining what he considers to be serious flaws in the standard Big Bang model.⁶ Other high-profile dissenters include Nobel laureate Dr. Hannes Alfvén, Professor Geoffrey Burbidge, Dr. Halton Arp, and the renowned British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who is accredited with first coining the term "the Big Bang" during a BBC radio broadcast in 1950.

Origin of the Universe - The Inflation Universe Theories
The Big Bang Theory provided an atheistic explanation for the origin of the universe, but its obvious simplicity was subject to multiple attacks. As a result, the original theory is no longer the dominant scientific explanation for the atheistic origin of the universe. While the original Big Bang Theory is now "dead," from its ashes have emerged the various Inflationary Universe Theories (IUTs). Starting with Alan Guth in the late 1990's (The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins), the scientific community has now proposed roughly 50 different IUT variants. Scientists hope that one of the current IUTs will sire an accurate reconstruction of the birth of our universe, though it is universally acknowledged that all of the current IUTs have their problems. It seems the only way to get realistic calculations to match an IUT model is to make assumptions that are poorly justified.

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