A minor accident had forced me down in the Rio de Oro region, in Spanish Africa. Landing on one of those table-lands of the Sahara which fall away steeply at the sides, I found myself on the flat top of the frustum of a cone, an isolated vestige of a plateau that had crumbled round the edges. In this part of the Sahara such truncated cones are visible from the air every hundred miles or so, their smooth surfaces always at about the same altitude above the desert and their geologic substance always identical. The surface sand is composed of minute and distinct shells; but progressively as you dig along a vertical section, the shells become more fragmentary, tend to cohere, and at the base of the cone form a pure calcareous deposit.
Without question, I was the first human being ever to wander over this . . . this iceberg: its sides were remarkably steep, no Arab could have climbed them, and no European had as yet ventured into this wild region.
I was thrilled by the virginity of a soil which no step of man or beast had sullied. I lingered there, startled by this silence that never had been broken. The first star began to shine, and I said to myself that this pure surface had lain here thousands of years in sight only of the stars.
But suddenly my musings on this white sheet and these shining stars were endowed with a singular significance. I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man's fist, a sort of moulded rock of lava incredibly present on the surface of a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origin so unmistakably.
And very naturally, raising my eyes, I said to myself that from the height of this celestial apple-tree there must have dropped other fruits, and that I should find them exactly where they fell, since never from the beginning of time had anything been present to displace them.
Excited by my adventure, I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. The marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected.
Well that is some spectacular prose, I am truly transported to a place where spirituality and science meet at a single point of grand mystery and realization that I have felt a few times in real life, alone in nature at surprising places and odd hours, but Saint-Exupéry has taken this all one further level up the rung.
To a level that my father actually lived, as an airplane pilot in Baja California back when the peninsula didn’t have a paved road, an isolated, remote place as yet mostly untouched by man.
One minor caveat, however:
a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust
While I understand such a thoughtful writer was going for a feeling, surely with his talent he could have found a way to include windstorms, all the dust and sands they can sweep horizontally across the lands and over hills. The Rio De Oro region is in northern Morocco, surely it often gets blasted by powerful Saharan winds.
A sheet spread beneath the Moroccan sky most often receives desert-dust.
“Contrary to standard cosmological theories where the accelerated expansion of the universe is attributed to dark energy, our findings indicate that this expansion is due to the weakening forces of nature, not dark energy,” he continued.
Or maybe we actually are the first interstellar civilisation. With features like Jupiter and especially our giant ass moon seeming to be pretty rare we still don’t know what it really takes to make a planet habitable. Let alone habitable in such a way that it creates intelligent life.
The force of gravity is weak. And not just a little bit weak. It’s so much weaker than the other three fundamental forces—electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—that it’s almost impossible to provide analogies.
Gravity isn’t a force. It’s the curvature of spacetime, the bending itself. You can’t compare it to the three other forces.
We can’t see the bulk, touch the bulk, experience the bulk, or otherwise interact with the bulk because our entire universe—all the particles and forces of nature—are restricted to life on the brane.
That means it isn’t falsifiable. It’s same as believing in god - it’s faith and not a scientific theory. Also the article says:
Physicists just need some way to pierce the veil of the brane and peer into the realm of the bulk.
How should physicists do that when by definition a bulk can’t be detected? In the later parts it is claimed that the bulk-brane-interactions somehow influences gravity and that this influence could be detected. I call bullshit.
If our running knowledge of gravity is mistaken
We know that our understanding of gravity is flawed because we can’t unify it with the theory of quantum mechanics. But there must be a link between them.
In 2019, the LIGO detector (…) measured gravitational waves emanating from the merger of a black hole with … something else. The black hole had a mass of around 23 solar masses. Its companion had a mass of only 2.6 solar masses. That’s far too small to be a black hole … but also a little too big to be a neutron star.
Objects with a mass above 2.5 solar masses are likely light weight black holes. Source
The whole article consists only of a lot of ‘could be’, nothing tangible and bullshit.
Gravity isn’t a force. It’s the curvature of spacetime, the bending itself. You can’t compare it to the three other forces.
I do agree but, it is very common in academia to disagree with this, to believe that the geometric representation of gravity is merely a clever trick to approximate gravitational effects, but that in reality it is caused by a force-carrying particle just like any other force, a graviton, and spacetime is flat. That was the basis of String Theory and some other views. I don’t know why this view is so popular but it is.
Just 6 light-years away, Barnard’s Star is a well-studied 10-billion-year-old M dwarf with a mass of 0.16 solar mass. Finding exoplanets around Barnard’s Star has been something of a white whale for astronomers for more than half a century; starting in the 1960s, researchers have claimed to have spotted various planets around Barnard’s Star, from distant Jupiter-mass companions to close-in super-Earths. Each of these claims has been refuted.
Now, the white whale appears to have been caught at last. Just last November, researchers reported the discovery of a planet orbiting Barnard’s Star with a period of 3.154 days. The data hinted at the presence of three other planets, but these candidates could not be confirmed. In a new research article published today, Ritvik Basant (University of Chicago) and collaborators leveraged years of data to confirm that Barnard’s Star hosts not just one, but four planets.
Good summary, but to everyone else reading this, it’s really worth it to read the article. It’s short and yet, frankly, fascinating. It discusses the methods used to identify the exoplanets and their orbital periods.
astronomy
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