"N.C.I.S.", Simple Economics

http://www.online-literature.com/melville/mobydick/84/

THE LITERATURE NETWORK

Moby Dick

Herman Melville

CHAPTER 83

Jonah Historically Regarded

Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.

One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew story was this:- He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head- a peculiarity only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small. But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless.

Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body and the whale's gastric juices. But this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a dead whale- even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head; and, I would add, possibly called "The Whale," as some craft are nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle." Nor have there been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver- an inflated bag of wind- which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days' he was vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast. How is that?

But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make modern history a liar.

But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his foolish pride of reason- a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages, speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which Mosque was a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.








https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0677-y

nature

Letter Published: 14 November 2018

A candidate super-Earth planet orbiting near the snow line of Barnard’s star

I. Ribas, M. Tuomi, […] G. Anglada-Escudé

Nature volume 563, pages 365–368 (2018)

Abstract

Barnard’s star is a red dwarf, and has the largest proper motion (apparent motion across the sky) of all known stars. At a distance of 1.8 parsecs1, it is the closest single star to the Sun; only the three stars in the a Centauri system are closer. Barnard’s star is also among the least magnetically active red dwarfs known2,3 and has an estimated age older than the Solar System. Its properties make it a prime target for planetary searches; various techniques with different sensitivity limits have been used previously, including radial-velocity imaging4,5,6, astrometry7,8 and direct imaging9, but all ultimately led to negative or null results. Here we combine numerous measurements from high-precision radial-velocity instruments, revealing the presence of a low-amplitude periodic signal with a period of 233 days. Independent photometric and spectroscopic monitoring, as well as an analysis of instrumental systematic effects, suggest that this signal is best explained as arising from a planetary companion. The candidate planet around Barnard’s star is a cold super-Earth, with a minimum mass of 3.2 times that of Earth, orbiting near its snow line (the minimum distance from the star at which volatile compounds could condense). The combination of all radial-velocity datasets spanning 20 years of measurements additionally reveals a long-term modulation that could arise from a stellar magnetic-activity cycle or from a more distant planetary object. Because of its proximity to the Sun, the candidate planet has a maximum angular separation of 220 milliarcseconds from Barnard’s star, making it an excellent target for direct imaging and astrometric observations in the future.








From 11/18/1996 ( premiere US film "Star Trek: First Contact" ) To 11/14/2018 is 8031 days

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 10/29/1987 ( premiere US TV series episode "Spiral Zone"::"In the Belly of the Beast" ) is 8031 days



From 2/20/1968 ( premiere US TV series pilot "Columbo" ) To 11/14/2018 is 18530 days

18530 = 9265 + 9265

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 3/16/1991 ( my first successful major test of my ultraspace matter transportation device as Kerry Wayne Burgess the successful Ph.D. graduate ) is 9265 days



From 12/2/1960 ( premiere US TV series episode "The Twilight Zone"::"The Lateness of the Hour" ) To 11/14/2018 is 21166 days

21166 = 10583 + 10583

From 11/2/1965 ( my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 10/24/1994 ( premiere US film "Stargate" ) is 10583 days


http://www.manyworlds.space/index.php/2018/11/14/barnards-star-the-great-white-whale-of-planet-hunting-has-surrendered-its-secret/

Many Worlds

Barnard’s Star, The “Great White Whale” of Planet Hunting, Has Surrendered Its Secret

Posted on 2018-11-14 by Marc Kaufman

Astronomers have found that Barnard’s star — a very close, fast-moving, and long studied red dwarf — has a super-Earth sized planet orbiting just beyond its habitable zone.

The discovery relied on data collected over many years using the tried-and-true radial velocity method, which searches for wobbles in the movement of the host star.

But this detection was something big for radial velocity astronomers because Barnard-b was among the smallest planet ever found using the technique, and it was the furthest out from its host star as well — orbiting its star every 233 days.

For more than a century, astronomers have studied Barnard’s star as the most likely place to find an extrasolar planet.

Ultimately, said Ignasi Rablis of Spain’s Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia, lead author of the paper in journal Nature, the discovery was the result of 771 observations, an extremely high number.

And now, he said, “after a very careful analysis, we are over 99 percent confident the planet is there.”

The planet is at least 3.2 times the size of Earth and orbits near the snowline of the system, where water cannot be expected to ever be liquid. That means is it a frozen world (an estimated -150 degrees Celsius) and highly unlikely to support life.

But Rablis and others on the large team say it also an extremely good candidate for future direct imaging and next-generation observing.

Thousands of exoplanets have been identified by now, and hundreds using the radial velocity method. But this one is different.

“Barnard’s star is the ‘great white whale’ of planet hunting,” said Paul Butler, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, a radial velocity pioneer, and one of the numerous authors of the paper.

Because the star is so close (but 6 light-years away) and as a result so tempting, it has been the subject of exoplanet searches for 100 years, Butler said. But until the radial velocity breakthroughs of the mid 1990s, the techniques used could not find a planet.

Nonetheless, an early exoplanet hunter, the Dutch-American astronomer Peter van de Kamp of Swarthmore College, thought that he had indeed found two gas giant planets around Barnard’s star in the 1960s. He used a different technique based on the movement of the host star, and the findings even made it into some textbooks. But later the detection was found to be incorrect.

Even after the modern exoplanet era began Barnard’s star kept its planetary secret close.

As Butler explained it, the combination of the planet’s size and distance from the star ultimately pushed the technology (and astronomers) to the very limit — requiring a measurement of 1.2 meters per second of “wobble.”

In contrast, the first planets were found by radial velocity that would detect 70 meter per second of wobble caused by the gravitational pull of a planet, and 30 years ago the best instruments could detect only 300 meters per second.

The detected planet (which remains a “candidate” until further confirmed) was ultimately found following concerted effort by a large team of astronomers around the world. It was co-led and organized by Guillem Anglada-Escudé of the Queen Mary University of London. The young astronomer had made a major splash in 2016 with the detection of a planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own.

That discovery was part of the “Pale Red Dot” campaign, which had the goal of detecting rocky planets around red dwarf stars. After the Proxima discovery Barnard’s star went to the top of Anglada-Escudé list with the renamed “Red Dots” collaboration — which is supported by the European Southern Observatory and universities in Chile, the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany.

By 2015, there was already almost 18 years of modern data collected regarding a possible planet orbiting the star, and a faint but clearly present signal had been detected. But more was needed to confidently report a discovery, and the Red Dots effort took up the challenge.

To see if the result could be confirmed, astronomers regularly monitored Barnard’s star with high precision spectrometers such as the CARMENES (Calar Alto Observatory in Spain), and also the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher.)

Ultimately, the team used observations from seven different instruments taken over 20 years, making this one of the largest and most extensive datasets ever used for precise radial velocity studies.

“We all have worked very hard on this result,” said Anglada-Escudé. “This is the result of a large collaboration organized in the context of the Red Dots project, which is why it has contributions from teams all over the world including semi-professional astronomers.”

Cristina Rodríguez-López, researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía and co-author of the paper, said of the significance of the finding grow over decades.

“This discovery means a boost to continue on searching for exoplanets around our closest stellar neighbors, in the hope that eventually we will come upon one that has the right conditions to host life,” she said.

The next pr0ject for the Red Dots campaign is to study the star Ross 154, at 9.69 light-years away another of the closest stars to us.

The dramatically increased (and increasing) precision in radial velocity measurements is expected to continue with the next generation of ground-based telescopes and spectrometers.

Butler, for instance, said that Carnegie is in the process of upgrading its Planet Finding Spectrograph at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to reach a 0.5-meters-per-second measurement. Other groups including the European Southern Observatory and American teams based at Pennsylvania State and Yale Universities have similar efforts under way.

If they succeed, Butler said, it may well be possible to find potentially habitable planets around sun-like and other categories of stars using the radial velocity method.

Barnard’s a very-low-mass red dwarf star in the constellation of Ophiuchus. It is the fourth-nearest-known individual star to the sun (after the three components of the Alpha Centauri system) and the closest star in the Northern Celestial hemisphere.

Despite its proximity, the star is too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, though it is quite visible with an amateur 8-inch telescope. It is much brighter in the infrared than in visible light. Although Barnard’s Star is an ancient star, it still experiences star flare events, one being observed in 1998.

The star is named after the American astronomer E. E. Barnard. He was not the first to observe the star (it appeared on Harvard University plates in 1888 and 1890), but in 1916 he measured its proper motion –the apparent angular motion of a star across the sky with respect to more distant stars — as 10.3 arcseconds per year relative to the sun.

This is likely to be the fastest star in terms of proper motion, as its proximity to the sun, as well as its high velocity, make it unlikely any faster object will be discovered.

Barnard’s Star is among the most studied red dwarfs because of its proximity and favorable location for observation near the celestial equator. Historically, research on Barnard’s Star has focused on measuring its stellar characteristics and its astrometry — which involves precise measurements of the positions and movements of stars and other celestial bodies on the plane of the sky.

When planet hunters use astrometry, they look for a minute but regular wobble in a star’s position as seen in images. Van de Kamp, for instance, used astrometry to study Barnard’s star and (incorrectly) detected those two gas giants around it.

In contrast, radial (or Doppler) velocities look for the wobble of the star perpendicular to the plane sky, and astronomers have regularly, and now once again, made history with that method.








http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie8.html

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

(from internet transcript of incomplete dialog


Doctor Zefram COCHRANE: [ My God! ] They're really from another world.

RIKER: And they're going to want to meet the man who flew that warp ship.

VULCAN: Live long, and prosper.

(Cochrane attempts to return the Vulcan salute but settles for a handshake)

COCHRANE: Thanks.



- posted by Kerry Burgess 10:36 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Tuesday 20 November 2018