I Am Pleased To Announce A NEW RELEASE To My Space Opera Series. It Is Now Available On Amazon In Ebook

Thank you for your endless curiosity Dr. Hawking.

A Much-Needed Skills, Contributions, and Direction

There are many times I ask myself, why didn’t I start a trade skill from the get-go? We can never underestimate how much it is that the people who are dedicated in these professions are a large part of that which brings a higher quality of life to all of us in one form or another. No matter what we do, if kindness and well-being are parts of our central or internal value system, humanity might…

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My #mom went to be with my #dad yesterday morning. I will miss her dearly. #togetherforever they gave myself and siblings a home of #love and #kindness and they #taught us to be #loving and #kind I'll miss you both 💖 https://www.instagram.com/p/BvUjmvOAaac/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1xk08dpggqtaz

Out Now! . Pathway to the Stars: Part 7, Span of Influence . "To be worthy to journey the stars, conditions must be such that if a group of explorers were to return home many millennia later, humanity will not have faded away into nothing. Instead, they will have preserved the homeworld and home solar system, and even improved upon the beauty, the abundance, and the ability of longevity of life in every way that is positive and possible." . ~ Eliza Williams works with her team in the Pathway organization to increase her span of influence throughout the world. Journey with Vesha Celeste as she continues her adventures with Yesha Alevtina in the Virtual Universe, understanding more fully how Eliza's team has become the enigmatic propagator of the future. With tech cities spanning the Solar System yet hidden from those who have not been read-in, humanity will be breath taken to behold them. Eliza takes on some of the biggest titans of every industry and teaches them what she believes will fuel the future -- kindness, shared-well-being, compassion, and consent, or what she coins as Universal Ethics! . Span of Influence - ISBN: 9781951321055, LCCN: 2019918436 eBook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081XHLJ36 Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1951321073 . #sciencefiction #scifi #spaceopera #fantasy #stem #astronomy #industry #wellbeing #author #matthewjopdyke #ebook #paperback #amazon https://www.instagram.com/p/B5syxGIh4Ac/?igshid=1a0lrrqlkt4kv

All three versions (chill, rock, orchestra) ***** Further than Before: Pathway to the Stars, Part 1 -- Audible ***** “Nature and humanity can be amazing, but likewise, it can be brutal. Brutality, as far too many know it, is unnecessary if we consider and implement one thing, innovation with purpose—a good purpose is brutality’s ideal replacement, and it comes minus unnecessary misery. It’s starting to become clear to me now what it is that we can do and how we can do it.” - Eliza Williams to Yesha Alevtina (Further than Before: Pathway to the Stars, Part 1) ***** #books #sciencefictionbooks #SpaceOpera #scifi #ftbpathwaypublications #grahambessellieu #matthewjopdyke #politicalsciencefiction https://www.instagram.com/p/BxGgatnAtas/?igshid=1r6xgyjrd88m6

NASA Kepler’s Scientists Are Doing What Seems Impossible: Turning Pixels Into Planets

“It isn’t the image itself that gives you this information, but rather how the light from image changes over time, both relative to all the other stars and relative to itself. The other stars out there in our galaxy have sunspots, planets, and rich solar systems all their own. As Kepler heads towards its final retirement and prepares to be replaced by TESS, take a moment to reflect on just how it’s revolutionized our view of the Universe. Never before has such a small amount of information taught us so much.”

When you think about exoplanets, or planets around stars other than the Sun, you probably visualize them like we do our own Solar System. Yet direct images of these worlds are exceedingly rare, with less than 1% of the detected exoplanets having any sort of visual confirmation. The way most planets have been found has been from the Kepler spacecraft, which gives you the very, very unimpressive image of the star you see featured at the top. Yet just by watching that star, the light coming from it, and the rest of the field-of-view over time, we can infer the existence of sunspots, flares, and periodic “dips” in brightness that correspond to the presence of a planet. In fact, we can figure out the radius, orbital period, and sometimes even the mass of the planet, too, all from this single point of light.

How do we do it? There’s an incredible science in turning pixels into planets, and that’s what made NASA’s Kepler mission so successful!

Largest Batch of Earth-size, Habitable Zone Planets

Our Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in an area called the habitable zone, where liquid water is most likely to exist on a rocky planet.

This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system.

Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.

This is the FIRST time three terrestrial planets have been found in the habitable zone of a star, and this is the FIRST time we have been able to measure both the masses and the radius for habitable zone Earth-sized planets.

All of these seven planets could have liquid water, key to life as we know it, under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.

At about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, the system of planets is relatively close to us, in the constellation Aquarius. Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets. To clarify, exoplanets are planets outside our solar system that orbit a sun-like star.

In this animation, you can see the planets orbiting the star, with the green area representing the famous habitable zone, defined as the range of distance to the star for which an Earth-like planet is the most likely to harbor abundant liquid water on its surface. Planets e, f and g fall in the habitable zone of the star.

Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet has not yet been estimated.

For comparison…if our sun was the size of a basketball, the TRAPPIST-1 star would be the size of a golf ball.

Based on their densities, all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. Further observations will not only help determine whether they are rich in water, but also possibly reveal whether any could have liquid water on their surfaces.

The sun at the center of this system is classified as an ultra-cool dwarf and is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun.

 The planets also are very close to each other. How close? Well, if a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.

The planets may also be tidally-locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong wind blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.

Because most TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky, and they are very close to one another, scientists view the Galilean moons of Jupiter – lo, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede – as good comparisons in our solar system. All of these moons are also tidally locked to Jupiter. The TRAPPIST-1 star is only slightly wider than Jupiter, yet much warmer. 

How Did the Spitzer Space Telescope Detect this System?

Spitzer, an infrared telescope that trails Earth as it orbits the sun, was well-suited for studying TRAPPIST-1 because the star glows brightest in infrared light, whose wavelengths are longer than the eye can see. Spitzer is uniquely positioned in its orbit to observe enough crossing (aka transits) of the planets in front of the host star to reveal the complex architecture of the system. 

Every time a planet passes by, or transits, a star, it blocks out some light. Spitzer measured the dips in light and based on how big the dip, you can determine the size of the planet. The timing of the transits tells you how long it takes for the planet to orbit the star.

The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets. Spitzer, Hubble and Kepler will help astronomers plan for follow-up studies using our upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018. With much greater sensitivity, Webb will be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone and other components of a planet’s atmosphere.

At 40 light-years away, humans won’t be visiting this system in person anytime soon…that said…this poster can help us imagine what it would be like: 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

I love this kind of news!

“Voyager Spacecraft Fires Up Thrusters for First Time Since 1980”

 NASA scientists have recently fired up the thrusters on the Voyager 1 Spacecraft - the farthest spacecraft from Earth - in an effort to reorient its antenna towards Earth.  Originally, scientists would have used the attitude control thrusters aboard the spacecraft to make the adjustments, however these have been wearing out during the voyage. Instead, NASA scientists tried using Voyager’s ‘trajectory correction maneuver’ thrusters, located on the back side of the spacecraft.  Since these hadn’t been fired in 27 years, engineers were thrilled when they received an answer 19 hours and 35 minutes later that the four thrusters had worked perfectly.  "The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all,“ said Todd Barber, a propulsion engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/01/us/voyager-1-thrusters-fired-first-time-since-1980/index.html

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScl)

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I am pleased to announce the release of FTB Pathway Publications - Pathway to the Stars: Part 6.1, Trilogy!!! Enjoy the continuation of the journey!

The 4 Scientific Lessons Stephen Hawking Never Learned

“His work, his life, and his scientific contributions made him an inspiration to millions across the world, including to me. But the combination of his achievements and his affliction with ALS — combined with his meteoric fame — often made him immune to justified criticism. As a result, he spent decades making false, outdated, or misleading claims to the general population that permanently harmed the public understanding of science. He claimed to have solutions to problems that fell apart on a cursory glance; he proclaimed doomsday for humanity repeatedly with no evidence to back such claims up; he ignored the good work done by others in his own field. Despite his incredible successes in a number of arenas, there are some major scientific lessons he never learned. Here’s your chance to learn them now.”

Hawking’s contribution to physics, from the existence and meaning of singularities to properties of a black hole’s event horizon, entropy, temperature, and the radiation they generate were remarkable in the 1960s and 1970s. His popularizations of science were groundbreaking, too, exposing a general audience to a wide variety of wild and speculative ideas, igniting an interest in theoretical astrophysics in the minds of millions around the world. But as brilliant as Hawking was, there were a number of lessons about science and humanity that he never learned for himself, from the Big Bang and black holes to lessons about communicating speculative or unproven information as though they were facts. We have a tendency, when we turn people into heroes, to lionize their achievements and ignore their failings, but to do so cheats humanity out of recognizing all the facets of a complicated character.

Come learn, for yourself, the 4 scientific ideas that Stephen Hawking never managed to learn and incorporate while he was still alive.