Recent content by Rob Haskell

When you say "flat", are we to imagine that space is longer and wider than it is high? Flat but with height extension? Like a pancake (to use a wildly incorrect image, no doubt! But just for the point of height). Then this feeds into the question of whether space is flat, positively or...

I noticed a mention in the article about the "raisin bread analogy". I guess that is the correct 3D version of the analogy. There is no center in that: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_exp.html

Thanks for the answers and the article on the balloon analogy is great. I guess one of the things that is so compelling about the balloon analogy is that the popular mind wants a way to visualize what the universe is, but apparently physics cannot provide the requisite image. And so the balloon...

I've been thinking about the balloon surface analogy and I want to ask some questions. Perhaps I am pushing it too far. But in that case it seems important to find its limits. My understanding is that the this analogy is used to illustrate the expansion of the universe and in particular how it...

Yikes... total brain fart there. Thanks SteamKing

A couple of you mentioned the question of how far v1 is right now from earth. I got my info from the Voyager odometer: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/ It lists light round trip time at 37 minutes. That would be 18.5 light minutes distance? Or am I misreading this?

So basically the article is a bit misleading by mentioning the the current distance to Gliese 445 by not mentioning that it is moving towards the solar system. Understandable, of course, as it a pop level article.

Ok. That's cool. Thanks!

Greetings! I read this article on line, where it states that Voyager 1 has an appointment with a star, AC +79 3888, which is 17.6 light years away, in 40,000 years. However, if voyager is traveling at 35,000 mph, that number seems off. Shouldn't it be 319,000 years to travel that distance? I'm...

Red shift would not account for lateral speed, right? I mean, relative to us

Greetings - We speak of astronomical objects as being x number of light years away, which is also a statement about the age of the data. So our knowledge of M83, for example, is about 15 million years old, etc, etc. I'm just wondering why there never seems to be any attempt to move this...