- 1716 - Astronomical Disappointments. 2014 had some explorations that did not pan out so well. Not much reporting on the flip side of discoveries. Here are a few disappointments.
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----------------- 1716 - Astronomical Disappointments
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- Exploring the Universe. Sometimes experiments go wrong. Stuff happens. Missions are unsuccessful, or, sometimes we just don’t get the exciting results we were expecting. Here are a few 2014 examples to start of the new year, 2015:
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- The Orion spacecraft: The Orion had it first test flight and it was flawless.. But, there is no funding to continue the development of the spacecraft, and there is no destination in which to use it. Maybe, something might come up as a plan to explore or relocate an asteroid. Mars is still a pipe dream funding wise. In 2014 the NASA space program went no where. Fortunately several other missions were launched years, even decades, earlier.
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- BiCep2 South Pole telescope: BiCep2 announces it has found gravitational ripples in space-time that originated in the birth of the Universe. But, data from the European Planck satellite produced contrary evidence. More data needs to substantiate these bold announcements of discovery.
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- BiCep2 scans the microwave sky from the South Pole. Cosmologists claimed they found a swirl pattern in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB). This background is a snapshot of what the Universe looked like 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That is the moment charged particles first combined to form neutral atoms. When that happened photons of light were finally free to expand in to the space of the expanding Universe.
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- Microwaves are a form of light. It too has a characteristic called polarization. E-mode and M-mode polarization of electromagnetic radiation. Electric and Magnetic waves travel perpendicular to each other at the speed of light.
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- Gravity waves are ripples in the fabric of space -time. These ripples create temperature variations, density variations. These ripples might also create polarization variations in light.
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- 10^-37 seconds after the Big Bang extreme acceleration in the expansion of the Universe called “ inflation”, created the gravity waves. Could these gravity waves be detected as ripples in polarization of the CMB?
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- The BiCep2 telescope was observing at 150 gigahertz. Planck telescope was observing from 30 gigahertz to 857 gigahertz. Plank did not find the same polarization results. so, the debate continues. More experiments, more data is needed to confirm do “gravity waes” exist? Stay tuned. and don’t jump to conclusions.
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- Life on Mars: The spacecraft on Mars names “ Curiosity” has re-confirmed the existence of water. But, we already knew that. But, another finding was traces of methane gas. That could be associated with life forms. But, Curiosity can not get much further in its analysis. It is stymied in its efforts to find the “golden fleece“, some form of life on Mars.
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- Virgin’s Galactic spaceship: A test flight crashed in the Mojave dessert. Prior to this accident that killed a test pilot Galactic had completed 54 successful test flights. That record of 2 out of 100, 98%, returning safely is going to limit the number of tourism space travelers.
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- Titan and Enceladus: Return visits to the Saturn moon Titan and Enceladus were de-funded. Titan is a moon the size of the planet Mercury. It has a methane rainfall, organic chemistry, and possible subsurface oceans. Enceladus has geysers and a large subsurface ocean. They deserve more exploration, but, the money is not forthcoming. ( See Review # 1714 on Enceladus)
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- Milky Way’s Blackhole: Astronomers had predicted a large gas cloud would be swallowed up by the Blackhole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers expected fireworks and a ream of data to learn more about blackholes. Somehow that did not happen. Astronomers now need to figure out what did happen that was a dud.
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- Dark Matter: 83% of the matter in the Universe is Dark Matter. We don’t know what it is. We measure its existence through gravity and nothing else. We have not been able to crack this mystery even a little.
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- Warp Drive Spaceship. Replace chemical rockets with another form of propulsion? Reports galore of a warp-drive spaceship on the horizon. But, so far they are only found in the movies.
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