Hawking reverses 'Black Hole' theory

Written by Fox News on . Posted in Science

Publisher's note:  I find it very interesting that Stephen Hawking has reversed his position on this issue; I also see it as a sign that perhaps some of the rebuttals of his claims by Ravi Zacharias are starting to take hold.  Time will tell.

Fox News:  Stephen Hawking now says there are no black holes, doing an about-face on the objects that helped cement his reputation as the world’s preeminent scientist, New Scientist reports.

In 1974, Hawking took a black hole theory and added quantum mechanics, sparking a debate that rages to this day.

But now, after a bet with another physicist, Hawking says things may be able to escape from black holes.

According to New Scientist, Hawking originally said that when a black hole dies, it takes everything inside with it.  Now, 40 years later, he is arguing that it might be possible for light and information to escape. 

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Stars escaping the Milky Way?!

Written by Science Daily on . Posted in Science

Publisher's note:  I am always fascinated by the cosmos, and this story of stars actually escaping the gravitational pull of our galaxy is amazing.

Science Daily:  Jan. 9, 2014 — An international team of astronomers has discovered a surprising new class of "hypervelocity stars" -- solitary stars moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy.

The discovery of this new set of "hypervelocity" stars was described at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week in Washington, D.C., and is published in the Jan. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

"These new hypervelocity stars are very different from the ones that have been discovered previously," said Vanderbilt University graduate student Lauren Palladino, lead author on the study. "The original hypervelocity stars are large blue stars and appear to have originated from the galactic center. Our new stars are relatively small -- about the size of the sun -- and the surprising part is that none of them appear to come from the galactic core."

The discovery came as Palladino, working under the supervision of Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, assistant professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt was mapping the Milky Way by calculating the orbits of Sun-like stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a massive census of the stars and galaxies in a region covering nearly one quarter of the sky.

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Yellowstone Pressure Cooker

Written by Fox News on . Posted in Science

Publisher's note:  Who needs nukes?  If this thing decides to blow its top, the rest won't matter.  Very scary.

Fox News: HELENA, MONT –  The hot molten rock beneath Yellowstone National Park is 2 1/2 times larger than previously estimated, meaning the park's supervolcano has the potential to erupt with a force about 2,000 times the size of Mount St. Helens, according to a new study.

By measuring seismic waves from earthquakes, scientists were able to map the magma chamber underneath the Yellowstone caldera as 55 miles long, lead author Jamie Farrell of the University of Utah said Monday.

The chamber is 18 miles wide and runs at depths from 3 to 9 miles below the earth, he added.

That means there is enough volcanic material below the surface to match the largest of the supervolcano's three eruptions over the last 2.1 million years, Farrell said.

The largest blast -- the volcano's first -- was 2,000 times the size of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state. A similar one would spew large amounts of volcanic material in the atmosphere, where it would circle the earth, he said.

"It would be a global event," Farrell said. "There would be a lot of destruction and a lot of impacts around the globe."

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Giant planet found far from its star

Written by Fox News on . Posted in Science

Publisher's note:  I'm always fascinated by the cosmos, and this is an amazing find.  According to the story, a massive planet that is 11 times the size of Jupiter is orbiting it's sun from a mind boggling distance...60.5 Billion miles.  To put that in perspective, Jupiter is roughly 11 times larger than Earth, and the distance between us and our star, the sun is around 93 million miles. Additionally, Pluto is 'only' about 3.6 Billilon miles from the sun.  

Another way to look at the distance might be in dollars; this planet is about 8 days of wasteful government spending/borrowing away in miles.  

Fox News:  An enormous alien planet — one that is 11 times more massive than Jupiter — was discovered in the most distant orbit yet found around a single parent star.

The newfound exoplanet, dubbed HD 106906 b, dwarfs any planetary body in the solar system, and circles its star at a distance that is 650 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. The existence of such a massive and distantly orbiting planet raises new questions about how these bizarre worlds are formed, the researchers said.

"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," study lead researcher Vanessa Bailey, a fifth-year graduate student in the University of Arizona's department of astronomy, said in a statement. 

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Earth view...Astronaut style!

Written by Fox News on . Posted in Science

Publisher's note:  If Christopher Columbus were alive, he might say something like "che cosa; davvero; esci fuori della città."

Or maybe in English, "are you nuts?!" The bottom line is he believed the world was round and he proved it; however to watch the earth spin on its Axis in real time from one's living room?! I'm guessing he would have joined the naysayers of his day and helped locked you up in a 1492 straight jacket. However, that was then and this is now. As this Fox piece shows, we will soon be able to do just that.

Fox News: You might not have hundreds of thousands of dollars for a seat on Richard Branson’s private shuttle, but one enterprising outfit is about to offer the next best thing: the chance to see the Earth from space, from the comfort of your couch. With the aid of Russian space authorities, Vancouver-based UrtheCast (pronounced “earthcast”) will launch two cameras into orbit Monday with the immediate goal of streaming images of the Earth back home in near-real time. For free, Internet users will log on to UrtheCast.com anytime to see the beauty of the big blue ball we live on, as the cameras make the 90-minute revolution around Earth, 16 times a day. It's a sight few have ever seen before. “Ten years ago it would have been incredibly difficult to do this,” Scott Larson, CEO of UrtheCast, told FoxNews.com. But after three years of raising money and working with Russian and Canadian engineers and developers, the project is about to lift-off -- literally. The cameras will ride a Russian Soyuz rocket on Monday at 3:53 p.m. EST from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. You can watch it live on FoxNews.com.

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