Awesome shot, I've been meaning to get up and take some photos....perhaps tomorrow..

That tail is awesome.

In 1981 I bought a book titled "Evolution From Space" by Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, PhD and they argue that life beginning in Darwin's warm little pond of water is utterly impossible and in their view life arrived on earth from comets and meteors. Thus life is older than the earth itself.

That tail is awesome.

In 1981 I bought a book titled "Evolution From Space" by Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, PhD and they argue that life beginning in Darwin's warm little pond of water is utterly impossible and in their view life arrived on earth from comets and meteors. Thus life is older than the earth itself.

Their speculation doesn't explain anything. It would be more interesting if they had ideas on how life itself began. Currently, nobody has the least idea.

For sheer mindbogglingness, consider this: As stars age they go from a hydrogen-to-helium fusion process that gradually leads to more massive elements, peaking at iron. No fusion reaction can go beyond this. But when massive stars go supernova, they produce a whole range of elements beyond good ol' iron.

In other words, every atom more massive than iron is the product of a supernova, somewhere, somewhen. 😮

Billastro

We are stardust, we are golden

Billastro it's been years since I read Evolution From Space but if I remember correctly, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe suggested carbon based life as it exists on Earth was designed and created by Comsic high intelligence. And the small life in comets and meteors and the building blocks of life has rained down on all the planets and moons in our system.

Hoyle is dead now but Wickramasinghe, as far as I know, continues to peddle panspermia as the mechanism for life on Earth. Wickramasinghe calls himself an astrobiologist an expert in interstellar matter and dust.

In the 1950s Hoyle published two of the of the first papers EVER on the synthesis of the chemical elements heavier than helium by nuclear reactions in STARS! And Hoyle's second ground breaking paper on nucleosynthesis showed that the elements between carbon and iron can not by synthesized by thermal equilibrium among nuclear particles which explains the abundance of iron, but elements between carbon and iron, are attributed to specific nuclear fusion reactions between abundant constituents in concentric shells of evolved massive, pre-supernova stars.

In 1957 Hoyle joined 3 other scientists who published the famous paper B2FH paper known for the last name initials of the 4 authors which described how ALL the chemical elements in the universe were created which led to the creation of the field of nucleosynthesis.

Probably though what Hoyle is most famous for is coining the term Big Bang on the BBC in 1948 which stuck and became the name of a famous theory for the beginning of the universe though Hoyle himself held a Steady State model of the universe which has no beginning. Hoyle himself along with Gold and Bondi thought up the Steady State and how it would work. Years later this theory lost support with scientists when two Bell Lab engineers in New Jersey accidentally discovered the background radiation left over from the moment of creation and the big bang.

[Edited on 7/16/2020 by blackey]

Billastro it's been years since I read Evolution From Space but if I remember correctly, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe suggested carbon based life as it exists on Earth was designed and created by Comsic high intelligence. And the small life in comets and meteors and the building blocks of life has rained down on all the planets and moons in our system.

Hoyle is dead now but Wickramasinghe, as far as I know, continues to peddle panspermia as the mechanism for life on Earth. Wickramasinghe calls himself an astrobiologist an expert in interstellar matter and dust.

In the 1950s Hoyle published two of the of the first papers EVER on the synthesis of the chemical elements heavier than helium by nuclear reactions in STARS! And Hoyle's second ground breaking paper on nucleosynthesis showed that the elements between carbon and iron can not by synthesized by thermal equilibrium among nuclear particles which explains the abundance of iron, but elements between carbon and iron, are attributed to specific nuclear fusion reactions between abundant constituents in concentric shells of evolved massive, pre-supernova stars.

In 1957 Hoyle joined 3 other scientists who published the famous paper B2FH paper known for the last name initials of the 4 authors which described how ALL the chemical elements in the universe were created which led to the creation of the field of nucleosynthesis.

Probably though what Hoyle is most famous for is coining the term Big Bang on the BBC in 1948 which stuck and became the name of a famous theory for the beginning of the universe though Hoyle himself held a Steady State model of the universe which has no beginning. Hoyle himself along with Gold and Bondi thought up the Steady State and how it would work. Years later this theory lost support with scientists when two Bell Lab engineers in New Jersey accidentally discovered the background radiation left over from the moment of creation and the big bang.

[Edited on 7/16/2020 by blackey]

Blackey, thanks for the clarifications.

My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

J. B. S. Haldane ( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._B._S._Haldane )

It seems that the more we know, the more we realize how much there is for us to learn.

Billastro

Killer pic.

The new wallpaper on my phone.