Desi In Toronto

So all those questions about arming space have been answered now……

The stunning image of a Navy missile streaking into outer space at 6,000 mph to obliterate an orbiting spy satellite boosts the credibility of missile-defense advocates. Yet questions remain whether that success could be duplicated against a surprise, real-world attack.

The idea, whether the target is an unarmed satellite or an enemy missile, is basically the same: fire a guided missile into the path of the moving target and smash it to bits by the force of impact. In theory, the collision could render harmless even a nuclear- or chemical-armed missile, an idea that evolved from President Reagan’s “star wars” program of the 1980s.

Wow….what a documentary!!! Everyone, everyone needs to watch this.

<Link>

Neutrinos, they are very small.
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The earth is just a silly ball
To them, through which they simply pass,
Like dustmaids through a drafty hall
Or photons through a sheet of glass.
They snub the most exquisite gas,
Ignore the most substantial wall,
Cold-shoulder steel and sounding brass,
Insult the stallion in his stall,
And scorning barriers of class,
Infiltrate you and me! Like tall
And painless guillotines, they fall
Down through our heads into the grass.
At night, they enter at Nepal
And pierce the lover and his lass
From underneath the bed-you call
It wonderful; I call it crass.

Talk about blowing away to pieces……

In a cascade of superlatives that belies the traditional cerebral reserve of their profession, astronomers reported yesterday that they had seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.

The cataclysm — a monster more than a hundred times as energetic as the typical supernova in which the more massive stars end their lives — may be an example, they said, of a completely new type of explosion. Such a blast, proposed but never seen, would explain how the earliest and most massive stars in the universe ended their lives and strewed new elements across space to fertilize future stars and planets.

Such supermassive stars are extremely rare in the modern universe but are believed to have been common among the first stars that formed when the universe was less than a billion years old.

Now here is an interesting tit-bit. It has been proposed that we humans (and life on Earth) is made out of star stuff. Star material (Carbon and other slightly complex molecules) landed on Earth and because of unique circumstances (an accident, really) life came into being. Isn’t this huge exploding star support this theory? Anyway, back to the explosion.

The astronomers first suspected that the supernova’s dramatic output was caused by the shock wave of a white dwarf exploding into a dense cloud of hydrogen. When observations with the Chandra X-ray Observatory failed to find enough X-rays to support that idea, the group was forced to consider an alternative: that the luminosity was produced by the decay of radioactive nickel. But to match the observations, the star would have had to produce 22 solar masses of radioactive nickel — way off scale for the core collapse model.

In desperation, the astronomers turned to a theory proposed nearly 40 years ago by Zalman Barkat of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his colleagues. The intensity of radiation in the cores of supermassive stars could be so great, they said, that pairs of electrons and their antimatter opposites, positrons, would be created.

Am a big fan of Stephen Hawking as he is one of the few (John Gribbon, Kip Thorne and John Wheeler among others) who have tried to explain to us lay people the worlds of the universe in a clear language.

Here is something interesting that he said :

Hawking spoke to a packed audience in Zellerbach Hall about how Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum theory explained the creation of the universe.

His lecture, which touched upon subjects such as black holes and spacetime, was peppered with quips that drew laughs from the audience.

“If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning,” Hawking said. “What was God doing before He made the world? Was He preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”

A few “bubbles,” Hawking said, will grow to a certain size until they are safe from collapse, and will begin to develop galaxies, stars and eventually human life.

“The universe began with accelerating expansion which we call inflation, because the universe grows in the way prices go up in some countries,” Hawking said. “It expanded in a million trillion trillionths of a second.”

I wonder why he is moving in this direction. The theory of the first few seconds of the creation of the universe is still in works so why choose to go where the theories don’t exist at all!! But then again, that’s what scientists do!!