Any Amateur Astrophysicists?

#1

/nerd-switch-on

Just curious if there are any folks lurking around who are into astrophysics beyond watching a documentary on the science channel periodically?

Personally, I have been involved since 2015. These days I now help curate a Facebook group and article blogging site dedicated to amateur astrophysics development.

Amateur astronomy is a very well known and developed field, however amateur astrophysics trails shamefully behind by comparison. I’ve even read articles by astrophysicists in the field which outright ask the question: “Where (the hell) are all the amateur astrophysicists?”.

It’s hard going, honestly. Because the field is one that covers a range of fields within it, and that it’s quite heavily more math involved and mostly lacks physical equipment to collect and tinker with, and further because many professionals in the field currently still approach amateurs with a very, very cautious approach to what few amateur astrophysics communities there are.

This is understandable, because amateur astrophysics definitely has a bad history of producing a LOT of quacks that claim to have “solve everything”, or proven that Einstein was wrong, or . Such individuals also tend to be very aggressively defensive and often have an incomplete comprehension of what they are claiming to have accomplished. In other words, the “woowoo” is pretty strong in this neck of the woods…unfortunately.

That said, some push on, regardless (though it is, indeed, a challenge to find valid and non-quack amateur astrophysicists).

My current project over the past few years involves cataloging and analyzing exoplanetary system orbital propagation trends, as well as astrosphere propagation trends, and then deriving a mathematical description of the trends from a data analytics point of view (rather than a mechanical description of the constituent physics). The main purpose of this approach is in cataloging and collation of data sets and theoretical models - as, for example, no two research groups are currently using the same theoretical model for calculating astrosphere distances, nor are they often cross referencing each other’s models or research. Being able to define a means of trend analysis and a model’s deviation from a given baseline, then, could be beneficial in determining trend differences between differing theoretical model sets.

/nerd-switch-off

Cheers,
Jayson

#2

You know astronomy is one of my biggest interests, I’ve always worked in the science field but never pulled the trigger on a lot of the knowledge for the actual “physics” part of astrophysics. In fact, I would probably have rolled down that path academically had it not been for my shit skills in mathematics. haha.

I do have a couple nice telescopes I take up in the mountains during camping season frequently, but I’m more of a stargazer than a researcher by any stretch.

I spent years farming astronomy documentaries which I watched nightly and slept to often, and actually “nostromer” is a hybrid of “nostromo (the ship from Alien” and “Astronomer”.

Astronomy is king, I’ve dove heavy into it from a exposure standpoint. It’s incredible, the universe, the unknowns and things like dark matter / tachyon particles… the entire quantum world… I’m all about it.

I give you mad respect for actually being a component of such a humble and incredible hemisphere of science, that’s rad as hell dude.

#3

Sweet!
I’ll link my project later when I get a chance, as well as post a pic of our telescope (poor neglected thing!).

If you would be interested in getting involved in amateur projects periodically, I can share the FB group I help curate and you can request to join.
It’s only half-a-dozen big and pretty slow-going atm because of many reasons. I hope to one day get things going more with it. :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Jayson

#4

sometimes i think that a multiverse is possible because of the existence of black holes i mean if you think about it beyond the event horizon there is a singularity so what if at the singularity there exists another bing bang event that is responsible for the existence of another universe, i mean all that matter and energy has to go somewhere

shit for all we know we could be living inside a black hole

but hey i could be wrong

#5

Shit I totally believe a multiverse theory is possible. It’s a very sensical standpoint imo.

#6

I wonder where the hell the white holes are myself…

#7

So I got busy, and I’m hoping to get time to respond to you guys tomorrow (or the next day)! :slight_smile:

In the meantime, here’s two papers that show what kind of stuff I do.

Cheers,
Jayson

#8

Gravity waves, sound waves, tidal waves in the ocean…

#9

Working in inspection using gamma radiography for many years got me highly interested in the radioactive component of space, and the potential isotopes that exist out there atomically. It’s interesting to me that they say black holes emit so much cosmic radiation… why is that @Jayson ?

#10

Hawking radiation. I think it ultimately comes down to the laws of thermodynamics (the second one? IDK off the top of my head). If you have a hot, dense point in a system (a black hole in the wider universe), the system wants to tend towards entropy. So over time energy and mass have to leave that point. Black holes do that as hawking radiation, but everything emits radiation of some sort (even people or a lump of rocks emit electromagnetic radiation to some degree). I forget the more specific mechanics to hawking radiation, but I think it has to do with matter/anti-matter pairs spontaneously quantizing into existence right on the event horizon of a black hole so that one part of the pair flies off into the universe and the other is flattened into the black hole, but I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting some intermediary steps there.

#11

I think it becomes so dense that the matter in the singularity itself breaks like a potato becoming a mashed potato with the mashed potatoes slowly being excreted from the black hole like pus oozing out of a pimple

#12

Basically what @White_Noise said.
Hawking proved himself wrong by figuring out that there’s a horizon line where material is pulled into the BH and the material just on the other side that doesn’t go into the BH is emitted back out.

One way to conceptually think of it is like a ship that’s sinking. If you have a longboat trying to get away from the sucking force of the sinking ship, and it was at the right spot, you wouldn’t be surprised to see it smash apart and watch one half go down and the other half bob up to the top and away from the sinking ship.

It’s not exactly like this, but it’s analogous to this kind of concept.

Cheers,
Jayson

#13

Actually, no.

Once something crosses the line of a BH, it never comes back out. Complete loss.

Emissions from BH’s are from the area around it, but not from wthin it.
Strange as a BH already is, there’s actually a bit more strange in that it actually has fields and materials around it.
For instance, a gamma ray burst from a BH doesn’t come from within it, but just “above” it.

(All of the above is current thinking based on observations and theoretical models, anyway - I don’t hold it impossible to find out that we’re wrong and that there’s something that can come out of a BH…but we haven’t seen or verified that yet.)

Cheers,
Jayson

#14

I remember that I either saw a bullshit on YouTube or read something explaining that a bh takes somewhere between a few billion/million years to decay depending on size

Just one theory though not sure how accurate the science behind it is

#15

The largest BH is calculated to take 10^100 years.
That’s (hops to excel)…714,285,714,285,714,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times longer than the approximate age of the universe.

If you have a BH the size of, say, our Sun, then you’re looking at 714,285,714,285,714,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times longer than the approximate age of the universe.

So…a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

  • breathes *

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong

time.

Cheers,
Jayson

#16

damn. That’s mind boggling!

#17

During the heat death of the universe when everything is sucked into black holes and we’re just waiting for them to irridiate all that mass away to bring complete equilibrium (or for everything to re-condense into one master black hole, though that scenario is unlikely because gravity is too weak), it will take so long for that to happen that I don’t know a physicist who has a problem with just calling it “forever”.

#18

What I find mind boggling is that the self-symmetry proportions of a black hole, a star, and an atom are, on average, approximately the same.

What I mean is if you take the nucleus, the star, and the black hole and consider these all as the “core” of the system they each create, and then consider the covalent bond radius, astrosphere radius, and host galaxy radius as the rough outer boundary of each, then the amount of space that each of the “cores” takes up of the “systems” that they cause to exist is approximately the same in percent.

If you grab a bunch of data (which I spent about 5 years doing, not for this reason, but I stumbled into seeing the pattern along the way of having a pile of data), then the core of any of these will likely be in a range of around 0.0037% to 0.0041% of the total system radius.

system%20radii

Which…to me, is pretty wild, because that also means that all of these are basically capable of being approximately described by an exponent of Phi (~ 1.618…etc…).
Basically, to get the size of the system for any of these things, you can approximately be accurate and in the ballpark by taking the radius of the “core” and multiplying it by Phi to the power of 21 … r * (Phi^21).

It’s just mind boggling to me that you can approximate the proportions of a galaxy and an atom using the same simple function that also governs the Fibonacci sequence and where branches on a tree occur.

Cheers,
Jayson

#19

Not an astrophysicist, but physics is a definite interest. By profession I’m a developer.

It’s cool that you’re contributing to science! Much respect!

It is quite fascinating how fractal-like universe is.

It also fascinates me just how fundamental waves are at each level. And the number of different ways that waves manifest, and the abstract levels from which waves emerge when you think about it in terms of waves.

I was recently leaning how Fourier transformations work. And I also find it interesting how it is used in deconstructing the wave function of a quantum state.

It got me thinking of ways that I can use it to make sounds, manipulate the different frequencies and sum them together again to create interesting effects.

A while ago I wrote a simple program that reads the pixels of an image left to right, top to bottom and plays the pixel data as audio, taking the average of the RGB and modulating that with the alpha channel.

I wanted to write the inverse of the program so that I can generate sound from an image, play the sound in a room and record it, and then apply the inverse transformation to obtain an image. I wonder what the effect of the reverberation would have. It’d probably be some kind of blur, but only in the direction the image was parsed in, due to sound only being able to travel forward over time. A real blur would require the sound play before it is actually playing. Hard to imagine that paradox. Funny the blur would wrap to the next line - verb-wrap haha

#20

New instagram filter?