Recent content by Spourk

This is good stuff, we've watched this and the couple of interactive flash videos going from strings to the farthest known size of the universe. He's just asking questions specific to 3d shapes nested in 4d hyperspace. We have gone through the whole expansion analogies and he gets that we...

Thanks for the replies. He's pretty good at origami and folding paper and understanding some of the basics of planes and how math relates to them. I'm looking for something specific to Cosmology though and the shape of the universe, (a little deeper than origami - he's asking ALOT of good...

There is always a fine line between giving too much info and not enough needed to have your questions answered but to make a long story short, my 8 year old loves math and all that it applies to. For an 8 year old he's pretty good at math so I've been inserting sort of high level implications...

By definition Brown Dwarves are too low in mass to sustain hydrogen fusion. They (as stars) might be more massive than other brown dwarves, but not more massive than a low mass "star" that is main sequence and has happily burned off it's lithium and is in full hydrogen fusion.

Ha, much better. If it involves the life of our sun I know I have plenty of time, and any excuse to party down seems a good one to me, as long as it doesn't end you up in jail or the middle of the antarctic. :-p

I am too laymen to really criticize this at all, but I can say is phenominal work; your contribution to learning and science really helps someone like me dig a little deeper, and even better, answers a lot of questions that might take a lot more time to answer without a go between. Much...

You kind of just answered all of your own questions.

That is a pretty chilling thought. What would happen if everything we see now as red-shifted, was suddenly blue-shifted and moving at us exponentially... How long would it take for us to see the effects, galactic collisions? What would the implications be?

"...any attempt to destroy the black hole seems to be doomed to fail" XD Who woulda thunk it?

Speaking of tidal forces, has anyone read the shortstory, "Neutron Star" by Larry Niven? It describes what it might be like if a pilot of an indestructable ship gets close enough to a Neutron star to experience tidal effects. Poor Larry Niven though, he has been chastized into the floor by...

Hi Mike, Going to quote an explanation from Marcus from This Thread Marcus started, post #5 that answers this question pretty well: "Notice that today our particle horizon is 46.28 which is the farthest matter is NOW which could have sent us light we'd be receiving today. It is the...

No. If your friend Fred "fell" (past tense) into a black hole and is perpetually red shifted at the EH, he still fell into the black hole for both of you. The photons bouncing off his poor spagettified self right before falling in are just stuck there, so all your seeing is an illusion. An...

Absolutely true, and thank you for clarifying. What is funny is that is one of the first comments to that guys article after he did all this math to calculate how fast he thinks the solar system is moving was asking him to use GR based exactly on what you said. I guess I was trying to...

Just adding some more layman's terms here to add to Mordred and Dave: Well, According to this dude we are moving through space around 2.7 mph. This is probably wrong and just a "licked thumb in the wind" kind of thing, better people at math will have to either confirm or deny this guy's...

You're thinking of Hawking radiation, which theoretically yes, over a great amount of time, a black hole will radiate off a small portion of it's mass. (Google heat death). But in the case of our sun, if it were big enough to form into a black hole at collapse, would still have about the...