Incredible Euro space agency data leak... just as planned: 1.7bn stars in our galaxy mapped The European Space Agency (ESA) has emitted a huge dump of data from its Gaia mission to 3D map the Milky Way. Wednesday's mega-release, containing high precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars, dwarfs the first release of data in 2016, which pinned down the position of 1.14 billion stars and the distances and motion …
This is going to be a boon in the hunt for this mythical "Dark Matter". It doesn't exist of course.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171122113013.htm
Let's not jump to conclusions already.
Space is big. The Universe is complicated.
Yes, there is a new theory about how to explain the matter discrepancy and yes, I have myself a lot of misgivings about a form of matter that does not interact with anything yet still exerts a gravitational effect - not to mention that I would dearly prefer our Universe to not expand endlessly because I like seeing other galaxies.
But let's let the scientists hash it out before taking sides, shall we ?
The trouble with a theory that there's no such thing as dark matter (and I will admit that dark matter sounds like a bit of a fudge), is that it doesn't explain the existence of a galaxy which behaves as if it contains no dark matter.
Of course, no one knows why this galaxy doesn't have any dark matter, but it certainly seems to behave as if all the mass in it is accounted for by the objects we can see. That is, the outermost clusters of stars orbit the core much slower than in other galaxies.
Yes, many types of proofs in maths, many of which well apply to a lot of branches of physics. But until you make an actual experiment, they are just abstract ideas. Sooner or later they have to be tied to some actual observation. If we go by what the scientific method is, math is hardly a science.
P.S. I think mathematics are amazing. Hard to come up with a subject with more elegance in a higher level of abstraction. Something really rewarding about understanding some proofs.
You need to read up on your history of quantum physics, and relativity, and quite a lot else.
Because those whole areas only exist because the (quite ordinary, but difficult-to-solve) maths gave only one logical result - that "these things follow" (meaning things like relativity and quantum phenomena) was the result of the maths. Literally the equation that someone said "Well, that can't be right" but knew they'd done their maths properly... that turned out to have interpretations in physics hitherto unheard or dreamt of.
It was only years later that anyone put a physics name to them, and the larger portion of a century before they were observed to be true.
Sorry, but you can't poo-poo maths without destroying all of modern physics. And maths told you how the world worked, it just took 100 years for geniuses to actual understand what that meant and observe it.
I was listening to a very excited science podcast last night where they were marvelling at the fact that all this data was made public to everyone and straight away. Usually the team that harvests this data first mines it to get the most juicy bits out and write a bunch of papers on it. Only then is it made wider available.
With the Gaia data everyone from school class to astronomy research institute gets access to all the data straight away.
More like 1035 miles an hour at the equator and some 6000 around the sun.
As for maths I think some on this thread think about it more like arithmetic.
Doing some copy past:
Is there a difference between math and arithmetic?
(1) the study of the relationships among numbers, shapes, and quantities, (2) it uses signs, symbols, and proofs and includes arithmetic, algebra, calculus, geometry, and trigonometry. The most obvious difference is that arithmetic is all about numbers and mathematics is all about theory.
I have been looking forward to Gaia's data. With this huge amount of data, astronomers will be able to test many different theories and gain a large amount of knowledge on galaxy formation and dynamics, dark matter, better measurements for hubble's constant and so much more.
I wonder how many 100's or 1000's of papers Gaia will spawn?
The science podcast I mentioned earlier speculated that there would be a whole bunch of skeleton papers that were already written that just needed this data to be slotted in to prove or disprove the hypothesis. That means we could expect the first papers based on this data to be out in weeks.
the GDPR doesn't cover Vogons, Poghrils, Haggunenons, Dentrassis, etc, so no privacy rules are broken.
More seriously, very good work indeed, which I am proud to say our university was involved in (professor Amina Helmi of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, to be precise). I contributed absolutely nothing I should hasten to add. I will be having a go at algorithm development for analysis of these data.
Prompted by the remark re. quasars (discovered 1963), I pulled from my bookshelf a volume which I read a great deal when I was young, although it was published some twenty years before I was born. "The Wonder Encyclopaedia for Children" has an initial chapter on The Universe, which conveys the impression that the "spiral nebulae" that are observed with "the best telescopes" are clouds of gas from which a new star (singular) may be born. The caption to a photograph of Mars, with all the resolution of a charcoal pencil drawing, says 'Some astronomers think that Mars has inhabitants, and the lines which you can see are canals for irrigation'. Progress involves un-learning a lot of things!
I had a much read children's encyclopedia when I was young which described the luminiferous aether theory of light propogation replaced by Einstein's theory of special relativity in 1905 (but not in children's science books) and had many other anachronistic entries which even I as a child noticed. One entry I remebered in paticular was for aeroplanes which stated something like 'two types of aeroplanes exist biplanes and mono planes for most practical purposes biplanes have been found to be far superior'. I think it was published in the 30s.
I guess I am old too.
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