Because Proxima is so relatively small and dim, any Earth-like planet circling it would likely be orbiting very closely, even closer than Mercury's orbit of our sun. This makes it likely that such a planet would also become tidally locked with the same side always facing Proxima, similar to the way the same side of the moon is always facing Earth.
What's on your mind?
TEXT
POLL
- All405 posts
- General32 posts
- General Discussion9 posts
- Admin noticeboard3 posts
- War Room2 posts
- 'A' Topics17 posts
- 'B' Topics14 posts
- 'C' Topics24 posts
- 'D' Topics11 posts
- 'E' Topics21 posts
- 'F' Topics16 posts
- 'G' Topics20 posts
- 'H' Topics15 posts
- 'I' Topics6 posts
- 'J' Topics3 posts
- 'K' Topics4 posts
- 'L' Topics9 posts
- 'M' Topics25 posts
- 'N' Topics14 posts
- 'O' Topics5 posts
- 'P' Topics32 posts
- 'Q' Topics16 posts
- 'R' Topics7 posts
- 'S' Topics49 posts
- 'T' Topics24 posts
- 'U' Topics6 posts
- 'V' Topics7 posts
- 'W' Topics8 posts
- 'Y' Topics1 post
- 'Z' Topics1 post
- New on Open Science Wiki3 posts
- News and Announcements1 post
Sort by
Card Layout
'P' Topics
(Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) satellite is planned to launch in 2026 from Guiana Space Centre with a Soyuz rocket to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point. It is a planned European Space Agency space observatory that will use a group of photometers to discover and characterize rocky extrasolar planets of all sizes around red dwarf stars, yellow dwarf stars like our Sun, and subgiant stars where water can exist in liquid state. Plato will search for planets around up to one million stars.
Atoms and the elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts(qr26)
Heisenberg's world of potentia is not only empty of actualities, even its possibilities are not as well defined, in the absence of a measurement situation, as, say, classical dice possibilities(qr195)
These grand unified theories predict that the proton decays ultimately into a positron. In so doing the laws of baryon and lepton number conservation are both violated. The way is therefore open for the creation of matter without an equal quantity of antimatter(au104)
In the laboratory protons are routinely produced in high energy collisions between subnuclear particles, but in every case the appearance of a proton is accompanied by an anti-proton (or a particle which rapidly decays into an antiproton). Individual protons can never be produced. Physicists have invented a quantity called baryon number to account for this. The proton, and many heavier particles, carry baryon number +1, the antiproton - 1. A law of baryon number conservation then demands that each newly created proton must offset its baryon number by accompanying another particle with baryon number -1. Similar ideas apply to leptons: an electron must be accompanied by a positron(au101)
The same proteins perform many different functions as the organism develops (EU184)
Even if we know the sequence of amino acids in a protein we do not know how to predict the protein’s final shape. It will seek the low energy state but there may be many low energy states (EU195)
The diversity of molecular keys is produced by a basically random mixing of bits of protein (EU247)
The gene for each protein is located in a specific spot on the DNA but may come in many different forms (EU271)
We have two probability amplitudes (one-half, one-half) and (-one-half, -one-half). The sum of these is (0, 0). The sum of the squares of this amplitude is zero. The event thus described will never occur. This is despite the fact that the probability for each of the two constituent events is not zero(fp17)
The key point is that probability amplitudes, unlike probabilities, are not just simple positive numbers. Probability amplitudes can be negative numbers as well(fp63)
Because probability amplitudes can be negative as well as positive, we can get some cancellation. This is what enables the quantum result to come out as 25 per cent, considerably less than the classical result of 50 per cent(fp65)
The final probabilities that we calculate for each of the mutually exclusive events (++, --, +-, -+) must add up to one. This means that even as some probability amplitudes cancel to lower the chance of some events, other probability amplitudes tend to reinforce each other to increase the chance of other events(fp66)
The key element in defining quantum entanglement is the probability of the two distinct ways in which the correlation can be realized must be determined by two probability amplitudes which have the same length but which may point in different directions(fp69)
For the last 4 million years the human population has consisted of about a hundred thousand breeding individuals with possible bottlenecks of 1000 or so (EU272)
Early humans were probably no more populous than chimpanzees today (EU276)
There are no sites in North America that indicate any human population was present before about 11,000 years ago (EU288)
Light's polarization In the wave picture refers to the direction in which the wave is vibrating; in the particle picture polarization is associated with the particle's spin(ftl164)
Poincare studied periodic functions, such as the sines and cosines of Fourier-not on the number line as Fourier had done, but in the complex plane(flt82)
In the complex plane, a periodic function could be conceived as having a periodicity both along the real axis and along the imaginary axis. Poincare went even farther and posited the existence of functions with a wider array of symmetries(flt82)
These were functions that had elements a, b, c, d, arranged as a matrix, forming an algebraic group. This means that there are infinitely many possible variations. They all commute with each other and the function f is invariant under this group of transformations. Poincare called such weird functions automorphic forms(flt83)
The automorphic forms were very strange creatures since they satisfied many internal symmetries. Poincare wasn't quite sure they existed. These strange functions did exist. Poincare extended them to even more complicated functions, called modular forms. The modular forms live on the upper half of the complex plane and they have a hyperbolic geometry, that is, they live in a strange space where the non-Euclidean geometry of Bolyai and Lobachevsky rules(flt83)
Descartes suggested that instead of anything physically moving from one place to another the universe was filled with some material (dubbed 'plenum') which pressed against the eyes. This pressure, or 'tendency to motion', was supposed to produce the phenomenon of sight. Some action of a bright object, like the sun, was supposed to push outwards. This push was transmitted instantaneously, and would be felt by the human eye looking at the bright object. Newton himself pointed out that a person running at night should be able to see, because the runner's motion would make the plenum press against their eyes(sk38)
Although examples of plasmas are sparse on Earth, the plasma state is by no means rare. Since the sun and stars are made of ionized gas, the plasma state is the most common form of baryonic matter in the universe(ftl57)
"Plasma" is another name for ionized gas(ftl62), often produced by heat.
Planck's constant is so small that the wavelength of a billiard ball rolling across a table is much less than the size of an atomic nucleus(dft73)
The Planck mass, formed entirely from the fundamental constants of gravity and quantum theory, is widely believed to play an essential role in any future theory of quantum gravity(au81)
At high temperatures, distinction between the three forces, and between leptons and quarks, is completely lost. Matter enters a new and rather featureless phase. The temperatures concerned are enormous, about 10 to the 28 - 10 to the 30 K, at which the average thermal energy k T is not far short of the Planck mass-energy(au104)
The energy necessary to probe the tiny distance of the Planck length can be computed, and it is called the Planck energy, or 10 to the 19 billion electron volts. This fabulous energy is almost beyond comprehension. It is 100 billion billion times the energy in a proton, an energy beyond anything we will be able to produce(h107)
Planck proposed that radiation was not entirely wavelike, as physicists thought, but that energy transfer occurs in definite discrete packets(be38)
Bohm proposed that particles are indeed particles- and at all times, not just when they are observed. Their behavior is determined by a pilot wave. Any effort to measure these properties precisely would destroy information about them by physically altering the pilot wave. Most physicists have objected to the pilot wave interpretation on grounds that it is too ugly to be right (ES89)
Why green plants? The color depends on exactly which wavelengths of sunlight are being absorbed, and green represents the surplus radiation which is not absorbed but is reflected back as visible light. Green plants use molecules of chlorophyll to do their energy absorbing, using light in the red and blue-violet parts of the spectrum and leaving most of the yellow and green sunlight to be reflected away. This is very curious, because our sun radiates a great deal more energy in the yellow-green part of the spectrum than in the red and blue-violet, and there are other compounds which could be used in photosynthesis much more efficiently than chlorophyll(itb93)
In the absence of charge disturbance, it is necessary to invent an additional sort of photon which differs from those that cause the sensation of light(au17b)
The starlight photons are far fewer than the primal heat photons(au99)