Seeing blessed car wheels going BACKWARDS,while the car goes FORWARD is enough to drive me to drink,but that is how my eyes see ruddy car wheels.[NO smart answers thank you]

Remember the old days when you went to the Sat. matinees ....the wagon wheels always went backwards while the wagon went forward.

Try NOT to blink Mona and see how you go. I'll bet your eyes water

I blinked just to see it reverse Supergold.Just when everything was starting to look NORMAL[to me that is]up pops Orca and his post.Now I am blinking well blinking at every blinking thing,I can possibly blink at.Oh gawd,go to blinking bed Mona.

"Seeing blessed car wheels going BACKWARDS,while the car goes FORWARD is enough to drive me to drink,but that is how my eyes see ruddy car wheels.[NO smart answers thank you"

So THAT'S your excuse Mona!!

Me, I don't need one!

Sorry to change the subject back to the point of this thread, but the Chandra X-ray Observatory was named after an Indian/American Scientist by the name of Dr Chandra, known for determining the maximum mass for white dwarfs (nothing to do with racist Neo-Nazi's). Just thought I would give that bit of information into the mix.

Good subject, if people stick mostly to the theme.

Prior to successful launch, the Chandra Observatory was known as AXAF, the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility. AXAF was assembled and tested by TRW (now Northrop Grumman Space Technology) in Redondo Beach, California. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, due primarily to the high angular resolution of the Chandra mirrors. Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes, requiring a space-based telescope to make these observations.

"Good subject, if people stick mostly to the theme."

You know us Kragus, anything and everything, that's us. You know "Old People" wandering around in a daze!

Ha ha, no worries Bryan, I'm often in a daze meself m8, so it wasn't really a grumble, just a subtle probe. Good subject this tho, could be interesting. being civil and exchanging gossip is all part and parcel of human dialog.
Cheers

Oi Kragus.

"I'm often in a daze myself"

Watch out Benny's got his eye on ya mate.

Cheers.

Kragus: interesting comment on the naming of "Chandra," a shortened version of the Indian laureate Chandrasekhar name, which he preferred among friends and colleagues, was chosen in a contest to rename the X-ray telescope. "Chandra" also means "Moon" or "luminous" in Sanskrit. The winners are a high school student in Laclede, Idaho, and a teacher in Camarillo, Calif.g, NASA sent an X’ ray Laboratory into space, on 23rd July 1999. It was named ‘Chandra’ in honour of Lalitha ’s husband, Chandrasekhar Subramanyan.

Sithalakshmi Balakrishnan was overjoyed to get a son on 19th November 1910, after two daughters. As if they had foreseen his destiny they named him ‘Chandra’ (moon). Instead he became a glittering star in the sky of Astronomy.

A very interesting topic as to the name and I did some further digging after your comment, which I enjoyed reading, I have some limited understanding of Hinduism.

But as you say the "Chandra" telescope is of immense value to the scientific community , the Maori word for moon is Marama and the Samoan word is Masina.

An artist's impression of Chandra

because it makes things interesting.

Oi,

You know, I reckon these scientists know diddly squat about that solar system out there.

Odd new solar system spotted
Published: 12:07PM Thursday February 03, 2011 Source: Reuters

Astronomers have spotted a strange new solar system with small "puffy" planets packed in close orbit to their sun.

The discovery, published in the journal Nature, is mystifying astronomers for the time being and illustrates just how much variety is possible in the universe.

The team at NASA and a range of universities has named the system Kepler-11, after the orbiting Kepler space telescope that spotted it.

"One of the most striking features about the Kepler-11 system is how close the orbits of the planets are to one another," they wrote in their report.

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The star resembles Earth's own sun. But five of the planets orbiting it are packed into a space equivalent to the distance between Mercury and Venus in our own solar system.

And they are bigger and puffier than the rocky inner planets of our solar system, Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury, the scientists said. However, they are some of the smallest exoplanets - planets outside our solar system - ever seen.

"They are much more closely packed ... than any other planetary systems known, including our own," said Jack Lissauer, a scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.

"It is clear that such planets need not resemble the Earth in any way," Jonathan Fortney of the University of California, Santa Cruz, added in a telephone briefing.

"The low-mass planets in the Kepler-11 system appear to be more like small Neptunes than giant Earths." Neptune, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus are the giant gassy planets on the outer reaches of our solar system.

Astronomers have now found more than 500 exoplanets. Most are giant, because they are so far away that only the biggest are detectable. But researchers are certain there are Earthlike planets out there.

Fortney believes Kepler can eventually find them, if the telescope designed to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars can orbit Earth long enough to collect the data.

"If it goes past its three-year mission - six, eight, 10 years - then we might get enough data," he said.

No telescope is powerful enough to directly visualise a planet orbiting another star. Instead, scientists use indirect means to find them.

Kepler measures the light coming from a star. A planet passing in front of the star as it orbits will dim this light just slightly. The researchers can them compute the planet's size and how quickly it is orbiting from this information.

In this case, the flickering light suggests a system of at least six planets, spinning rapidly around the star. One is orbiting farther out that the other five but they all appear to be made mostly of gas and orbiting in a very flat, circular plane.

Kepler, launched in March 2009, is measuring the light from 100,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyrae. The hope is to find planets about the size and composition of Earth, inside the so-called habitable zone, where it is warm enough for liquid water to exist but not too hot for life.

Last month Kepler scientists confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b and just 1.4 times the size of Earth.

"We think it is likely that Kepler is going to find oodles and oodles of Earths," astrobiologist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington said in 2009.

Cheers.