The answer is no. There are no resolved images at any wavelength of black holes or black hole candidates that demonstrate their lensing effect.
There are of course lensing images due to massive objects that probably have black holes at their centres (e.g. Courbin et al. 2010 and see below), but that is not the same thing.
A quasar acting as a gravitational lens - Courbin et al. (2010)
The article doesn't go into specifics and appears, not to be written by Dr. Evans at all, but I'll pull some quotes.
When it is completed his work will be published as two scientific
papers. Both papers are undergoing peer review
and
He has been summarising his results in a series of blog posts on his
wife Jo Nova’s blog for climate sceptics.
He is about half way through his series, with blog post 8, “Applying
the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Earth”, published on Friday.
(footnote, I'm guessing in Australia, summarizing and skeptics are spelled differently than in the US, cause that's a copy-paste)
I've only read one of his summaries, and in Mathematics, you have to look at the details, which he's not provided, so, he's basically saying little more than "this is true, here's generally why, I've done the math, please take my word for it, I'll publish the numbers later". Now Michael Mann is also presenting non peer reviewed work to Paris, so, what's good for the goose is good for the gander I suppose.
Now, I'm just a guy who likes science, but my understanding is that ideas have been presented before they are finished or peer reviewed fairly often. Einstein did this in fact regarding general relativity and another scientist actually beat him to publishing the theory (though, the other scientist was gracious about it and gave Einstein full credit), so, I don't think it's necessarily bad to present a summary prior to peer review.
I think it is, however, unusual to post summaries of an idea on a blog saying "I figured it out, the majority of research on this subject is wrong". Dr. Evans is saying he has proof, but he's acting like a junk science blogger.
Dr. Evans "trust me I did the math" claim kind of requires that we look
at his track record, and his track record isn't very strong, though he will say, he's being attacked by the establishment.
According to this site, he hasn't published anything peer-reviewed since the 1980s and he's on a their Climate Denier List. He's also on Skeptical Science's Climate Misinformers List.
And here's a list of debunked claims he's made (and if this list is accurate, he's not a scientist at all, just a guy on a fishing expedition. No good scientist would agree with pretty much every counter argument against climate change cause that's not how the scientific method works. You can disagree with something, that's fine, but to agree with every counter argument - that's silly. Here's another more detailed explanation of what he's gotten wrong, from 2011. Evans seems to be in this debate to disagree with it much more than he's in it to do scientific research.
It's pretty much impossible to make a true scientific argument against Evans "proof" without his specifics, and, that kind of proof/disproof can get a little long and complicated, but for now, disproving him is impossible. But should we listen to him?
It says above he's published 8 blogs related to his recent research. I'm not going to dig up all 8, but here's the most recent one. Applying the Stefan-Boltzmann Law to Earth. Now, I'm just a layman, but even I can see problems with his argument here (and he should too given that he's an engineer with a PhD). The Stefan-Boltzmann law is an approximation. It's a physical model to calculate radiation into space.
The problem with his approach is, the best way to measure how much heat/energy leaves the earth by radiation is to measure it directly, by satellite. The amount of energy that radiates from the Earth into space varies with temperature, snow cover, cloud cover, even humidity, and probably 1 or 2 other things I'm overlooking. If you try to calculate this energy leaving the earth into space by playing with with the Stefan-Boltzmann Law instead of relying on direct measurements, you're allowing yourself a lot of fudge factors and inviting a far greater error than direct measurements would give you.
On the quoted article, let me pull out an example:
Dr Evans has a theory: solar activity. What he calls “albedo
modulation”, the waxing and waning of reflected radiation from the
Sun, is the likely cause of global warming.
OK, so, which is it, solar activity or albedo modulation, cause they're not the same thing. The first takes place on the sun, the 2nd, the earth. This paragraph makes no sense to me.
He predicts global temperatures, which have plateaued, will begin to
cool significantly, beginning between 2017 and 2021. The cooling will
be about 0.3C in the 2020s. Some scientists have even forecast a mini
ice age in the 2030s.
Now, this paragraph is particularly devious. El Nino's tend to warm the earth, La Nina's cool it. The effect is temporary and not huge, but enough to cause yearly variation. A strong El Nino drove the big spike in global temperature for 1998 and we're in an El Nino now (edited my answer, since 2014 they've been talking about entering an El Nino, I gather it's officially started now).
We had more La Nina years than El Nino 2006-2013 with the only small El Nino coinciding with 2010, which set records for temperature. A lot of the hiatus in warming that is often talked about is related to there being only 1 small El Nino over 7 years.
Predicting 2017 as the time when the cooling will "begin" is devious because that could be around the time the El Nino has ended and the oceans could switch back to a La Nina (which usually follows El Nino). This will create a temporary cooling for a year or two, which he, no doubt, will take credit for if it happens. Now, he also predicts 2021 which could go either way and he gives an amount, but that doesn't change the fact that he's making a prediction and hoping the El Nino of 2015 will end and make it prediction look good.
Real global warming or cooling can't be measured in 1 year anyway, unless, maybe, if it's ocean current and the occasional mega-volcano adjusted - then, maybe you can get some measure of warming/cooling based on one year, but it's still only one year. That's a really really short period to make any predictions on and not something I'd trust very far at all.
and on the "scientists have predicted a mini ice age in 2030", that's not actually true. There was a study on sun-spots and they predicted that we could see a sun-spot low period around 2030, perhaps similar to the Maunder Minimum that may have caused the mini ice age, but the scientists who predicted that were very clear that they were not predicting a new mini ice age, they said the effect would be smaller than the effect of CO2.
Here's the mini ice age prediction, which a few people made (but not the scientists who did the research).
Here's an article that explains why it isn't true.
So, there's a lot of bad and a handful of false statements in that article you quoted, which, granted, wasn't written by Dr. Evans himself, but still, it's hard for me to take it seriously.
Until he publishes his results, he can't be proved or disproved but based on what I've read, I find it hard to take him seriously. My hunch is, he's not trying to reach scientists at all, but he's trying to reach his target audience. Those who question climate change and he gives them a name and an alternate argument that they can stand on. An argument doesn't have to be correct, it only needs to sound correct and with that, you can usually convince a percentage of people to agree with you.
Not sure how much that helps, but that's my take and I went through and tried to clean up my long answer a bit. If you'll forgive me, it reminds me of the the old joke. How can you tell Dr. David Evans is lying? He's talking or writing. :-)
This is a follow-up to How to interpret this old degree notation?
It is about an old calendar system which generates a luni-solar calendar with a procedural method, using a handful of calculations and some constants derived from astronomical observations.
This method originates from ancient India. Today it is used in Thailand to determine public holidays and observance days (uposatha days) for Buddhist monks, which fall on New- and Full Moon days.
Actually it's a neat system that had allowed village "astronomers / astrologers" construct a calendar with a method they could memorize by rote learning, without astronomical tools to make precise measurements. It is dreadfully underdocumented, and I've been collating the method and it's practices in Calculating the Uposatha Moondays.
Most useful have been the actual formulas in Rules for Interpolation in the Thai Calendar by J.C. Eade, it is just some basic arithmetic, but following his notation is a puzzle in itself.
Effectively I'm trying to implement these formulas (see image below), in a golang package.
With the earlier help, I arrived at step 13 (Mean Moon). Hooray :)
Step 14. and 15. is a puzzle again.
How would you interpret this? "(1780 + 80) * 3 on base 808, and add 2"
Eade has (8; 11 : 7) - (6; 27 : 12) = (1; 3 : 55), but that doesn't work.
That specific substr. gives me (1; 13 : 55), which could be a typo in the paper, but that value doesn't carry things forward either.
Things straighten up at step 16., 17., 18., which would produce the paper's results, to get there I faked the values for step 14. and 15, to work at least in the example case given in the paper.
In suriya.go
this business is happening in:
func (suDay *SuriyaDay) Init(ce_year int, lunar_year_day int)
Great question. The goldilocks zone is usually defined in terms of a region where the equilibrium temperature of the planet lies between some temperature limits (these temperature limits are somewhat debatable, but irrelevant for the purposes of this question - the boundary becomes fuzzy). This region can be calculated by working out how much flux is received from the star at a given radius.
In that sense - all stars have a goldilocks zone - you can always work out some distance from a star where the flux is roughly equivalent to the flux we receive from the Sun for instance. It is much closer to a dim star and much further away from a luminous star.
But, there is a difference between a habitable zone and a continuously habitable zone. If you seriously want life to evolve on a planet, then it will take time. How much time? No-one is sure but it seems to have taken a few hundred million years in our solar system. There are also good reasons to suppose that young planets are not going to be habitable - either they are still extremely hot after formation or they are being bombard by debris.
Thus you can probably exclude any star with a main sequence lifetime of less than about 100 million years (or longer if you feel conservative about how long it takes life to get going). This rules out stars of more than about 5 solar masses.
You might also rule out stars that evolve quickly. If a star changes its luminosity quickly on a short timescale then the habitable zone moves drastically too. This will happen near the ends of the lives of all main sequence stars and for all subgiant and giant stars. So for these, yes there is an instantaneous habitable zone, but no region is in a habitable zone for hundreds of millions of years or more.
You might want to consider not only the luminosity of the star, but its spectrum as well. For instance, both hot white dwarfs and low-mass M-dwarfs are reasonably stable and long-lived; they are faint, so have habitable zones close to the star (much closer than 1 au). However, for different reasons, both these types of object emit copious UV radiation. In hot white dwarfs it would be because they have hot photospheres. In M-dwarfs they can be highly magnetically active into old age, having a hot chromosphere and corona that would strongly irradiate any nearby planet. You might consider that their "habitable zones" were in fact uninhabitable. Of course an atmosphere and a strong magnetic field might counteract this.
A lot of this depends on your terms of reference and definition. The wikipedia page on habitable zones has quite a nice discussion, which emphasizes the debatable nature of this topic.
A final thought, which is not in the wiki page. Multiplicity could mess things up. Planetary systems will not be stable in the habitable zone of either star in a binary system if their separation is comparable with the orbital radius of the habitable zone. If you had two stars like the Sun, their separations would have to be less than a few tenths of an au or greater than of order 10 au in order to allow something to orbit at about 1 au around one of them. Even then, there could be all sorts of dynamical instabilities which prevent long-lived planets, especially if there were other planets in the system too.
The V838 Monocerotis expansion (not a supernova) and the observation of the subsequent "spectacular" light echo was quite a notable event! From Nature 422, 405-408 (27 March 2003)
From Astronom. J. 135, 2, 2008 or ArXiv
".Galactic light echoes are extremely rare. The only other known example of extent similar to that of V838 Mon was the echo produced by Nova GK Persei 1901 (Kapteyn 1902; Perrine 1902; Ritchey 1902). Following early misunderstandings, light-echo geometry was properly described by Couderc (1939), and more recent discussions are given by many authors, including Chevalier (1986), Felten (1991), Sparks (1994), Sugerman (2003), and references therein".
It was the sole topic of an international conference photo from here:
From here it's noted that the Hubble observations were inserted into the observing schedule using the Director's Discretionary time, since the peer review process is too slow to accommodate observations of transient events. While there is no mention of any reason why observations were not more frequent, nor continued in 2003, one can speculate.
"Based on the highly structured appearance of the initial ground-based images, our team proposed for Director’s Discretionary (DD) time on HST for a program of direct imaging and imaging polarimetry. The team members are as follows: S. Starrfield (Arizona State University); Z. Levay, N. Panagia, W. Sparks, B. Sugerman, R. White, and myself (STScI); A. Henden (AAVSO); M. Wagner (University of Arizona); R. Corradi (Issac Newton Group); U. Munari (Padova University); L. Crause (SAAO); and M. Dopita (ANU)".
"We received HST observing time at five epochs in 2002 through DD allocations: April, May, September, October, and December. All of the observations were made with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), which had been installed in HST during SM3b in March 2002. I need not emphasize to this audience how extraordinarily unfortunate it is that no HST observations were obtained during 2003—the loss of this opportunity is truly incalculable. However, the echoes were imaged twice in 2004 through the Hubble Heritage program, in February and October. More happily, the HST Cycle 14 allocation committee did award our team observing time for an intensive HST imaging campaign from October 2005 to January 2006, and we also have two more epochs of observations scheduled in Cycle 15 for late 2006 and early 2007".
Figure 2 of the Nature paper describes the preservation of the actual light curve (history) within the structure of the light-echo shell:
"FIGURE 2. HST images of the light echoes
The apparently superluminal expansion of the echoes as light from the outburst propagates outward into surrounding dust is shown dramatically. Images were taken in 2002 on 30 April (a), 20 May (b), 2 September (c) and 28 October (d). Each frame is 83" times 83"; north is up and east to the left. Imaging on 30 April was obtained only in the B filter, but B, V and I were used on the other three dates, allowing us to make full-colour renditions. The time evolution of the stellar outburst (Fig. 1) is reflected by structures visible in these colour images. In b, for example, note the series of rings and filamentary structures, especially in the upper right quadrant. Close examination shows that each set of rings has a sharp, blue outer edge, a dip in intensity nearer the star, and then a rebrightening to a redder plateau. Similar replicas of the outburst light curve are seen propagating outwards throughout all of the colour images."
Again from Astronom. J. 135, 2, 2008 or ArXiv
Figure 2. Images representing the degree of linear polarization, p, for each of the four epochs of data shown in Figure 1. Image scales and orientations are the same as in Figure 1. The image stretch is linear, ranging from black representing zero linear polarization to full white representing ~50% linear polarization. These images illustrate the apparent outward motion of a ring of highly polarized light in the light echo.
Abstract
Following the outburst of the unusual variable star V838 Monocerotis in 2002, a spectacular light echo appeared. A light echo provides the possibility of direct geometric distance determination, because it should contain a ring of highly linearly polarized light at a linear radius of ct, where t is the time since the outburst. We present imaging polarimetry of the V838 Mon light echo, obtained in 2002 and 2005 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope, which confirms the presence of the highly polarized ring. Based on detailed modeling that takes into account the outburst light curve, the paraboloidal echo geometry, and the physics of dust scattering and polarization, we find a distance of 6.1 ± 0.6 kpc. The error is dominated by the systematic uncertainty in the scattering angle of maximum linear polarization, taken to be θmax = 90° ± 5°. The polarimetric distance agrees remarkably well with a distance of 6.2 ± 1.2 kpc obtained from the entirely independent method of main-sequence fitting to a sparse star cluster associated with V838 Mon. At this distance, V838 Mon at maximum light had MV sime −9.8, making it temporarily one of the most luminous stars in the Local Group. Our validation of the polarimetric method offers promise for measurement of extragalactic distances using supernova light echoes.
Without checking the numbers in detail, according to Wikipedia, the volume of the observable universe is about $3.5cdot 10^{80} mbox{ m}^3$, and the volume of Earth is about
$1.08321cdot 10^{21} mbox{ m}^3$.
By dividing the two volumes we get a factor of $3.2cdot 10^{59}$, or written as decimal number: The observable comoving volume of the universe is about
320,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000-times the volume of Earth.
In the paper that this report is based on, 1, they simply see an annual period in the $beta$ decay rates of radioactive isotope samples in the lab. Basically, the rate is a fraction of a percent higher in winter than in summer. They conclude that absent any simple instrumentation explanation:
we conclude that these results are consistent with the hypothesis that
nuclear decay rates may be influenced by some form of solar radiation.
Several things can be changing in a laboratory during a year. Obviously, temperature and humidity changes and these were tested in the experiment. But, also radon levels change as the amount of outside air exchanged with inside air is changed. The solar cosmic ray flux (high energy electrons, protons, and He nuclei generated in the chromosphere of the sun) changes as the Sun angle changes, and neutrinos (produced in the core) also as Sun angle changes. These could be affecting nuclei decay rates directly or the instrument used to measure these (subtle changes in threshold energies, false counts from ions produced in the instrument, potential shifts, etc.).
