Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
* I'm pretty sure your theory is wrong. The moon is rather gray and white both to the naked eye from Earth and from spacecraft photos.
I'm not saying there is NO reflected visible light from the nearer objects, Lloyd, but it isn't very strong. When the Apollo crews photographed the moon from orbit, they used an ASA 6000 film, and it still doesn't look very bright. Why use such a high speed film if you are looking at a bright object? There are no exposure settings listed with the Apollo photos, but even the over- exposed images haven't totally washed out the surface features. There are some solar corona images too. http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/apoll ... azine/?124 So why does the Moon look so bright from Earth?? The Sun looks kind of weird though, but even then, the lunar surface is not bright, and I would have thought everything else would have been either washed out, or in total shadow. These are images from MESSENGER, taken with the Wide Angle Camera. I think this is how the Moon would look if it were not from something happening to the light in our atmosphere. The Moon has a very low albedo, 0.12 max, and as low as 0.07.I presume this is taken with the panchromatic filter, but most of the mission web sites do not give a lot of information on how the images were taken, and they don't seem to want to give out much info on the technical details of the imaging systems. Strange stuff, this thing we call light. I'm having fun though. BTW, here is a site with lots of starry sky images. "This is something that the average person could do, absolutely" he says. http://www.astropics.com/index.html
Lloyd
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
* Nick, or anyone, can you help determine the maximum and minimum distances of stars, based on angular visual diameters? * Here are the visual diameters from Earth of the Sun, Moon and some stars per Wikipedia. Sun----------- 1929" Moon--------- (same) R Doradus-- 0.057" Betelgeuse-- 0.0545" Alphard------ 0.00909″ a-Centauri-A 0.007″ Canopus----- 0.006″ Sirius-------- 0.005936″ Altair-------- 0.003″ Deneb------- 0.002″ Pr-Centauri- 0.001″ * The sky is divided into 360°; each degree is divided into 60 arcminutes and each arcminute into 60 arcseconds. The star with the largest visual diameter after the Sun is R Doradus at 0.057 arcseconds. The Sun's and Moon's visual diameter is about 1929 arcseconds viewed from Earth. - R Doradus's visual diameter is 33,842 times smaller than the Sun's and Moon's visual diameter. - If the real diameter of R Doradus is the same as the Moon's real diameter, 2160 miles, its distance would be 8 x 10^9 or 8 billion miles. - If its real diameter is the same as Neptune's real diameter, 31,000 miles, its distance would be 1.15 x 10^11 or 115 billion miles. - If it's the same as the Sun's real diameter, it's 3 x 10^12 miles away. 1 lightyear is 5.9 x 10^12 miles, so 3 x 10^12 divided by 5.9 x 10^12 = .508 or about half a lightyear. - If it's 1,000 times the Sun's real diameter, it's 3 x 10^15 miles away. 3 x 10^15 divided by 5.9 x 10^12 = 508 lightyears. - The conventional claim is that it's 370 times the Sun's diameter and 204 lightyears away. * If R Doradus diameter =: ---------------- then its distance =: Moon-size: — 2160 mi. ------------------ 8 billion mi. === 0.0014 ly Neptune-size: 31,000 mi. --------------- 115 billion mi. == 0.019 ly Sun-size: ----- 864,000 mi. ------------- 3 trillion mi. ==== 0.508 ly 1000 Sun-size: 864 million mi. -------- 3,000 trillion mi. = 508 ly - So, ignoring other constraints, that star could be at any of those distances. * And Sirius, having about one tenth the visual diameter of R Doradus, would be at a distance ten times as great as the range for R Doradus. Right? * Brightness, or luminosity, is conventionally used to help determine distance, but it's based on uniformitarian Nebular theory assumptions. There is surely a maximum possible brightness per surface area and that could probably be determined from arc-mode plasma measurements. That's probably been done somewhere, but who knows where to find the info? * This says something about luminosity, but I don't know what the numerical quantity per square cm per second means. Does anyone? http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1108184/files/p177.pdf
Abstract: The project of a dedicated 510 MeV electron-positron storage ring with the luminosity above 10^33/cm^2/sec is proposed. Its energy corresponds to a maximum of the phi-meson resonance production (Phi-factory). An essential feature of the project is the solenoidal focusing used to obtain round beams at the interaction point.
GaryN
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
In trying to determine the distances to the stars, I'm not satisfied that any of the methods are correct. Parallax has huge margins of error, standard candles now seem to not be standard, redshift is not properly understood, and luminosity, magnitude, apparent size, all this stuff seems to be referencing itself and making assumptions. I don't see anything I can trust. So here is a suggestion, mad maybe, but a suggestion. It has been mentioned to me that some of the nearest stars have been shown to flare, and that must mean they are stars.
X-ray craft sees Venus in whole new light Venus doesn't have its own source of X rays. Rather, X rays from the sun induce the Venusian emissions when they bombard the planet's upper atmosphere and are absorbed by ionized atoms. The atoms reemit the incoming radiation at a lower X-ray energy, a process known as fluorescence. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m ... _81790561/
Saturn's X-Ray Mystery Chandra observed Saturn for about 20 hours in April of 2003. The spectrum, or distribution with energy of the X-rays, was found to be very similar to that of X-rays from the Sun. http://www.universetoday.com/9374/satur ... y-mystery/
So, if Prox Cen. was a planet, could the flaring be due to the reaction to an X-ray event on our Sun, which we detect some time later and call a flare of a star? If Prox Cen. is really 4 LY away, and is a planet, then we would see an 8 year offset correlation of Solar flares to Prox Cen. flares (if the Solar flare was at the correct location to 'hit' Prox Cen.) and if Prox Cen is a star there should be no correlation. Make any sense? If we found a correlation, but at a much shorter time offset, then we could determine distance very accurately, no?
nick c
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
GaryN wrote: Parallax has huge margins of error
Parallax is a technique for measuring the distance to stars in our galactic neighborhood. The measurements are made at opposite points of the Earth's orbit. It is simple geometry....
175px-Stellarparallax2_svg.png (10.64 KiB) Viewed 1770 times
The difficulty lies in the fact that the measurable movement of the star's position (relative to more distant background stars that do not move) is very small. It is small because the stars are so far away! (Their distance is also why they do not show as disks when magnified by the largest telescopes.) The stars are no where near our solar system. Many stars show no movement at all, in other words they are at tremendous distances, measured in light years. Mainstream's measurement of distances arrived at by the parallax method are probably reasonably accurate. While the Electric Universe has challenged the precision of many of the measuring sticks of astronomy it does not deny that we are dealing with great distances. Or that galaxies are composed of millions of stars, and that we are a part of one those galaxies, etc, etc, etc.
Nick
GaryN
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
Or that galaxies are composed of millions of stars, and that we are a part of one those galaxies, etc, etc, etc.
Dang. Back to the drawing board I guess. I thought stars were fed by flux tubes into and out of the poles, but I guess they can't be, or those flux tubes would all soon get pretty twisted around themselves in those multiple star systems.
nick c
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
GaryN wrote:
nickc wrote: Or that galaxies are composed of millions of stars, and that we are a part of one those galaxies, etc, etc, etc.
Dang. Back to the drawing board I guess. I thought stars were fed by flux tubes into and out of the poles, but I guess they can't be, or those flux tubes would all soon get pretty twisted around themselves in those multiple star systems.
Gary, no need to be sad. Though there are situations where two or more stars are in close proximity, the average spacing between stars in a galaxy involves large distances, here is a discussion of the Burnham model which illustrates the magnitude of the distances involved: http://www.electric-cosmos.org/localspace.htm
The nearest star to us is over four light-years away. In our model, a light year is scaled down to one mile. So the nearest star to us is four and a half MILES away in our model. So when we model our Sun and the nearest star to us, we have two specks of dust, each 1/100 inch in diameter, four and a half miles apart from one another. And this is in a moderately densely packed arm of our galaxy!
Well, that's for anyone to accept or not, it seems good to me
Nick
Lloyd
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
- Nick: The difficulty lies in the fact that the measurable movement of the star's position (relative to more distant background stars that do not move) is very small.
* It's an Assumption that "background stars ... do not move", which Bahram's book challenges.
- Nick: It is small because the stars are so far away! (Their distance is also why they do not show as disks when magnified by the largest telescopes.)
* It's an Assumption that "they do not show as disks" because of distance; it's possible that it's not because of great distance, but because of small size.
- Nick: The stars are no where near our solar system. Many stars show no movement at all, in other words they are at tremendous distances, measured in light years. Mainstream's measurement of distances arrived at by the parallax method are probably reasonably accurate.
* It's an Assumption that "stars are no where near our solar system". * It's an Assumption that "stars show no movement at all". They show little or no movement relative to so-called background stars, but Bahram surmises that the background stars are simply moving at the same rate. He says almost 25% of stars have negative parallax values, which is evidence that they're all moving, but conventional scientists simply throw out the negative values as assumed errors. Have you ever heard of THAT before - throwing out data? Sounds reminiscent of ignoring electrical and plasma effects in space. THEY SUPPRESS DATA. Doesn't that bother you? As Bahram stated, absolute parallax should be very reliable, but astronomers don't use absolute parallax; they use relative parallax, meaning relative to background stars, which ASSUMES that those stars are relatively fixed.
- Nick: While the Electric Universe has challenged the precision of many of the measuring sticks of astronomy it does not deny that we are dealing with great distances. Or that galaxies are composed of millions of stars, and that we are a part of one those galaxies, etc, etc, etc.
* I think we're well aware of what EU and conventional science claim on this issue. We may agree that "galaxies" are composed of thousands or millions of objects, but we question the sizes of those objects and the sizes of those galaxies. If the sizes are smaller than assumed, then the distances are less than assumed. If those stars are 100 times smaller than assumed, then they're 100 times closer than assumed. If they're 1000 times smaller, they're 1000 times closer. Etc. * I think the only thing likely to settle this matter soon is to determine what is the maximum possible brightness of an object, as in an arc-mode discharge.Then we can determine the possible distance based on brightness. I see a lightbulb about a mile away in the daytime. It's on a pole that's probably 8 inches or so in diameter. The pole visually looks about as wide as Venus at night. The lightbulb, which is turned on, is probably 200 watts and looks visually about half the diameter of the pole, although it's probably smaller than that. People standing at that distance are very hard to see, but the lightbulb is plain to see. Brightness seems to make things appear a bit larger. Lightning is said to be about an inch in diameter generally, but it usually looks about 5 or 10 times that thick. * So can you help us find out what maximum brightness is possible for stars and how to determine distance based on brightness and visual diameter?
GaryN
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
Well, that's for anyone to accept or not, it seems good to me
It does seem like they have lots of room Nick, but in an IR image like this, it is hard for me to imagine where they all get their power from. It is much easier for me to imagine these as planets, planetoids or rocky bodies. Larger: http://oldblog.orbitingfrog.com/wp-cont ... dr1_gc.png
* So can you help us find out what maximum brightness is possible for stars and how to determine distance based on brightness and visual diameter?
I haven't spent much time on that Lloyd, as again, there seem to be a lot of assumptions involved. I'll try and make time to study how they derive their figures though, and maybe ask the guys at BAUT. I believe there are too many unknowns for them to be so confident of their figures, but they do seem willing to explain their processes and procedures.
Lloyd
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
* Gary, good luck with BAUT. * I heard that EU Theory now considers 500 lightyears the maximum that can be measured somewhat accurately presently, so any measurement beyond that is unreliable for stars. That means the diameter of the Milky Way might be as little as 500 LY. * We'll have to wait a bit for more details.
nick c
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
Lloyd,
It's an Assumption that "background stars ... do not move", which Bahram's book challenges.
Of course they move, but very slowly as seen from Earth. Look at a star chart from a hundred years ago, take it out to the night sky, the stars look to be in the same positions.
It's an Assumption that "stars are no where near our solar system".
It's a logical conclusion from the information available.
It's an Assumption that "stars show no movement at all".
The full and correct quote is "many stars show no movement at all." These are the background stars that the movement of the foreground stars are measured against. The point is that there are many stars, some visible to the naked eye, whose distance cannot be determined by the parallax technique, the implication is that they are not in our galactic neighborhood and are at great distance, at least a few hundred light years.
It's an Assumption that "they do not show as disks" because of distance; it's possible that it's not because of great distance, but because of small size.
It's not an assumption, it is a fact. If you moved close enough to Sirius it would show itself as disk. Is that debatable? If you propose that Sirius is a small object close to us, than you have to explain why it is so bright. At a magnitude of - 1, and yet it does not show as a disk in any telescope. Solar system objects such as Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are not visible to the naked eye yet have been telescopically resolved as disks. Sirius is a point light source as opposed to the above which are revealed to be disks in telescopes. The bottom line, why is it so bright yet does not show itself as an object? The theory that it is a Sun like object at a far distance, approximately 8 light years, fits these observations. A few questions: In your scheme of things, what is the source of the light we see from stars, reflected or generated by the star? where do you propose that a star, Sirius for example, is located? how large is it?
Nick
Lloyd
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
* Nick, I said:
It's an Assumption that "[stars] do not show as disks" because of distance; it's possible that it's not because of great distance, but because of small size.
* And you replied:
It's not an assumption, it is a fact. If you moved close enough to Sirius it would show itself as disk. Is that debatable?
* Actually, this Hubble image of Sirius shows it as a disk, not a point. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Sirius_A~ * Something you haven't yet acknowledged here is that there are TWO reasons that other stars can be seen as points, instead of disks, when viewed through a telescope. The first reason is that a star may be at a great distance. The second reason is as Bahram said, that the star or object may be of small size. The reason can also be a combination of great distance and small size. You don't actually disagree, do you? * You said:
If you propose that Sirius is a small object close to us,
* I propose that its size isn't yet determined, but it MAY be much smaller and closer than assumed.
th[e]n you have to explain why it is so bright. At a magnitude of - 1, and yet it does not show as a disk in any telescope. Solar system objects such as Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are not visible to the naked eye yet have been telescopically resolved as disks. Sirius is a point light source as opposed to the above which are revealed to be disks in telescopes. The bottom line, why is it so bright yet does not show itself as an object? The theory that it is a Sun like object at a far distance, approximately 8 light years, fits these observations.
A few questions: In your scheme of things, what is the source of the light we see from stars, reflected or generated by the star?
* It depends on the electrical environment. Saturn, before it entered the Solar System, seems to have been very bright periodically, when it encountered stronger electrical current sheets, although it usually was not much brighter than the present full Moon. Brown dwarf stars would generate their own light, but planets would reflect light. The difference between those two can be very fuzzy.
where do you propose that a star, Sirius for example, is located? how large is it?
* It's probably beyond the Kuiper belt and, as I calculated in my earlier post, it could be as small as Venus or one of the gas giants or up to the size of the Sun or larger. * I understand that EU Theory now considers parallax measurements of stars to be highly unreliable beyond a few hundred lightyears. And that still seems to be based on relative parallax, which may also be inaccurate even for closer measurements. * So, as I said in the prior post, I think luminosity needs to be studied in greater depth to determine stellar distances more accurately. Conventional assumptions about luminosity are based on the stellar fusion theory, but we need to study it from the perspective of arc mode and glow mode electric discharge. According to http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1997/33, Hubble found a star ten million times more luminous than the Sun, but only 100 times larger in diameter. Of course, the actual diameter wasn't observed, just guessed at. But I don't think science knows yet how small an object can be and still be highly luminous.
GaryN
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
...and Pluto are not visible to the naked eye yet have been telescopically resolved as disks
I don't see Pluto as having been resolved as a disk, do you have an image source? Hubble does not see very far in the visible, and at the distance of Pluto, you get about 5 pixels resolution. Then they use their imaginations and lots of computing to arrive at a pretty image. I couldn't begin to imagine the math involved, maybe it does work as they say, but the general rule seems to be that the more complex a system, the less certain, or reliable, its behaviour. This is a Hubble image of the tenth planet, they don't know its distance yet, but farther out than Pluto. This is what they start with before their math. NASA page. http://www.nasaimages.org/luna/servlet/ ... t--is-Slig They have not figured the exact size, as they have not determined its surface brightness yet. I still can't figure out how that works.
* Actually, this Hubble image of Sirius shows it as a disk, not a point.
Looks like an over-processed mess to me Lloyd. The Hubble can't even 'see' one pixel at that distance, so it is all done by instruments, amplified, diffracted, filtered, then computer processed.
what is the source of the light we see from stars, reflected or generated by the star?
Because these stars are detected, and not seen in the conventional sense, the instruments they use will also pick up the objects, and more strongly, the atmospheres above the objects, that are fluorescing, surprising (again) many astronomers with the strength of the emissions. The deeper I look into all this, the murkier it all gets. I believe less of what the astronomers tell me than before I started looking, but there is as yet no simple, conclusive evidence either way, IMO.
nick c
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
hi Lloyd, That image of Sirius is not the actual "disk" of the star, but is the result of overexposure. The disklike appearance in the image is not real, and is caused by Sirius' brightness. Overexposure of Sirius is necessary in order to reveal the presence of the much dimmer white dwarf companion, Sirius B, which is seen as a faint star in the lower left quadrant of the image. If Sirius were not overexposed than Sirius B would be too faint to be seen in the image.
Nick
nick c
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
hi GaryN, It is my understanding that the Hubble has resolved Pluto as a disk: Disk-Resolved Images of Pluto and Ceres from the Hubble Space Telescope Whatever the techniques, it is resolvable as a disk to the point that details can be detected on its' surface. This cannot be done with Sirius. But there is a bigger difference, in that Sirius has a magnitude of -1.4 and Pluto of +13.6 to 16. Sirius is many thousands of times brighter than Pluto. It cannot be a small object far away, what kind of small object could emit that bright of a light?
I am not defending mainstreams' techniques for measuring distance, especially cosmological redshift. Also, the assumption that cepheid variables are a standard candle is certainly debatable. However, the parallax method should be reasonably accurate, after that the margin of error increases with distance. My understanding is that it's pretty good to around 500 ly. I do not think there is any reason to doubt that we are in a spiral galaxy of immense size, accompanied by several small satellite galaxies and dozens of globular clusters all of which are resolvable into stars. And we can see other nearby spiral galaxies with their attending satellite galaxies and globular clusters, and can resolve them into stars. We can get a rough estimate of the distance by just asking how far away would the Milky Way have to be to have that apparent size and brightness?
Nick
Lloyd
Re: Stars Are Thousands Of Times Closer Than They Appear
Nick said: Sirius is many thousands of times brighter than Pluto. It cannot be a small object far away, what kind of small object could emit that bright of a light?
* Did you misspeak there? We're suggesting that Sirius may be a smaller object that's closer than assumed, not farther.
- ... the parallax method should be reasonably accurate, after that the margin of error increases with distance. My understanding is that it's pretty good to around 500 ly.
* Does the parallax method involve observing an object and its background at 6 month intervals when the angle from the object to the 2 different positions of Earth is at a maximum angle? How would an astronomer know that the background stars haven't moved significantly in that 6 month interval? I just calculated that an object orbiting the Sun at 1,000 AUs would move about 20 arcseconds in 6 months. Stellar parallaxes are less than one arcsecond, so it seems that objects could be within a few thousand AUs and the closer ones would show such a parallax motion of under one arcsecond. One lightyear is over 63,000 AUs.
I do not think there is any reason to doubt that we are in a spiral galaxy of immense size, accompanied by several small satellite galaxies and dozens of globular clusters all of which are resolvable into stars. And we can see other nearby spiral galaxies with their attending satellite galaxies and globular clusters, and can resolve them into stars. We can get a rough estimate of the distance by just asking how far away would the Milky Way have to be to have that apparent size and brightness?
* Your statement of faith doesn't seem to help much to explain how we can be certain that stars and galaxies etc are as distant as is normally assumed. I hope to hear soon of a reliable means to determine distances, whether by parallax or anything else. Here are Parallaxes in arcseconds of some stars. Sirius 0.379 Procyon 0.288 Ross-780 0.213 Altair 0.194 Arcturus 0.090 Regulus 0.045 Antares 0.024 Betelgeuse 0.009 Hadar 0.006 Rigel 0.004
The Hubble can't even 'see' one pixel
