Recent content by Bill McKeeman

Physics: distorting a solid object produces heat. Our moon distorts our planet, at least at the surface. I am wondering how much of the internal heat in our planet is generated by distortion. I have read that radioactive decay is another source of deep heat. Primordial heat will eventually...

Mars apparently does not have a molten core, therefore no magnetic field. If Mars had a substantial moon, say Ceres, would the tidal action melt the core in Mars? And, perhaps, allow Mars to retain an atmosphere.

My question is this: is the CMB constant or might it be changing with time?

I find this discussion very helpful. But, still, in the neighborhood of L2, there must be a net potential well to hold an object. Is there a similar illustration of just L2 and its force field? It seems to me that it must be similar to the force field that would surround a real satellite at...

Galactic longitude, 360 degree measure of position about center. http://www.thinkastronomy.com/M13/Manual/common/galactic_coords.html

My question is whether the (too fast) speed of peripheral galactic stars is observed to vary by galactic longitude as well as distance from the galactic center? Is there any data on this?

I do not think we have any evidence of what an observer somewhere else in the Universe would see. You must be applying the Cosmological Principal, which is an assumption, not a fact.

Sci Am August 2016 discusses a supervoid detected in the direction of the CMB cold spot. The analysis assumes the gravitational potential is less in the center of the void than near its edges (thus near its surrounding galaxies). On the other hand the gravitational field inside a spherical...

What is known about how long it took to transition from an opaque universe to the release of the cosmic microwave background?

Please ignore what I said about counting photons. Not well thought out.

Regarding Dale's comment: I agree that we cannot afford to clutter our intellectual life with repetitious versions of previously presented results. I too was once embarrassed to find my great idea for navigation in a book on the shelf of the Chief of Naval Navigation. It worked out well. I got...

Sir Isaac Newton famously and graciously wrote: If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. I would add: If you stand on the shoulders of giants, it is hard to see what is right in front of you. My serious point is this: we require our youngsters to invest years of...

Phyzguy, thanks for the detailed reply. Perhaps my query was/seemed overambitious, but I was never expecting anything more than a sample of entries distributed over a galaxy. 100 points? Maybe 1000 points? That does not seem out of the question to me. What I am sure is that it takes a lot...

Perhaps this point is obvious to all, but at the time the CMB was released, I suppose every point in space sent photons in every direction. What we observe now are just the photons that happened to be headed in our direction from every point (on a sphere) that has a (current) radius of 41 B LY...

Does anyone know of galactic rotation data (any galaxy) of the following form: For simplicity assume an [x y z] coordinate system with the origin in the center of the galaxy and [x y] representing the plane of rotation. At any point [x y z] there is a corresponding velocity vector [vx vy vz]...