Science General Discussion

[Legend]

[Xevross]

All this Jupiter stuff is really interesting. The auroras are so fudgy cool!

[Legend]

Juno

[Legend]

Seems that the BFR from spacex will be able to lift ~236 tons to low earth orbit. The Saturn V could do ~140.

[DD_Bwest]

Seems that the BFR from spacex will be able to lift ~236 tons to low earth orbit. The Saturn V could do ~140.

ooo more details emerging?   we are going to mars!

[the-pi-guy]

Astronomers have discovered a planet with three suns - NeoGAF

Link.  Searched and didn't see a thread.What the orbit might be like (YT video).

 

Luke Skywalker's home planet, Tatooine, in the Star Wars saga, was a strange world with two suns in the sky, but astronomers have now found a planet in an even more exotic system, where an observer would either experience constant daylight or enjoy triple sunrises and sunsets each day, depending on the seasons, which last longer than human lifetimes. This world has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona, USA, using direct imaging at ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. The planet, HD 131399Ab (1), is unlike any other known world — its orbit around the brightest of the three stars is by far the widest known within a multi-star system. Such orbits are often unstable, because of the complex and changing gravitational attraction from the other two stars in the system, and planets in stable orbits were thought to be very unlikely. Located about 320 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), HD 131399Ab is about 16 million years old, making it also one of the youngest exoplanets discovered to date, and one of very few directly imaged planets. With a temperature of around 580 degrees Celsius and an estimated mass of four Jupiter masses, it is also one of the coldest and least massive directly-imaged exoplanets."For about half of the planet's orbit, which lasts 550 Earth-years, three stars are visible in the sky; the fainter two are always much closer together, and change in apparent separation from the brightest star throughout the year," adds Kevin Wagner, the paper's first author and discoverer of HD 131399Ab

 

Although repeated and long-term observations will be needed to precisely determine the planet's trajectory among its host stars, observations and simulations seem to suggest the following scenario: the brightest star is estimated to be eighty percent more massive than the Sun and dubbed HD 131399A, which itself is orbited by the less massive stars, B and C, at about 300 au (one au, or astronomical unit, equals the average distance between the Earth and the Sun). All the while, B and C twirl around each other like a spinning dumbbell, separated by a distance roughly equal to that between the Sun and Saturn (10 au). In this scenario, planet HD 131399Ab travels around the star A in an orbit with a radius of about 80 au, about twice as large as Pluto's in the Solar System, and brings the planet to about one third of the separation between star A and the B/C star pair. The authors point out that a range of orbital scenarios is possible, and the verdict on the long-term stability of the system will have to wait for planned follow-up observations that will better constrain the planet's orbit.

 

[Legend]

That's pretty cool, hehehe

[the-pi-guy]

This is probably not the place to put this, but whatever!  



Bill Nye gets a tour of Noah's Ark.
Bill Nye Visits the Ark Encounter | Answers in Genesis
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BUT THIS IS WAAY EXCITING!!!

First Water Clouds Reported outside the Solar System

Signs seen on brown dwarf, an object bigger than a planet and smaller than a star

First Water Clouds Reported outside the Solar System - Scientific American

[DD_Bwest]

that thing is so sad..  it really highlights how absolutely bat shame the idea is

[Xevross]

BUT THIS IS WAAY EXCITING!!!
First Water Clouds Reported outside the Solar System - Scientific American

Wow that object is really cool and its very close to Earth!

[the-pi-guy]

Wow that object is really cool and its very close to Earth!

"very"

If you say so!  

It's certainly closer than a lot of things.  (Most things, almost all things really).  But still so so so far away.  

[Mmm_fish_tacos]

"very"

If you say so!  

It's certainly closer than a lot of things.  (Most things, almost all things really).  But still so so so far away.  

Only far away in the human way of thinking about things.

[Xevross]

"very"

If you say so!  

It's certainly closer than a lot of things.  (Most things, almost all things really).  But still so so so far away.  

Exactly!

Once we can travel at near the speed of light it will take less than 10 years to get there

[Legend]

[the-pi-guy]

A slice through the map of the large-scale structure of the Universe from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and its Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. Each dot in this picture indicates the position of a galaxy six billion years into the past. The image covers about 1/20th of the sky, a slice of the Universe 6 billion light-years wide, 4.5 billion light-years high, and 500 million light-years thick. Color indicates distance from Earth, ranging from yellow on the near side of the slice to purple on the far side. Credit: Daniel Eisenstein and SDSS-III.


Read more at: Biggest galactic map will throw light on 'dark energy'