The Astronomy Thread

Cad

scientia potentia est
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Nope, slightly different warpage. Alcubierre's works by warping space-timearoundyour ship, not inside your drive, and having the local flat space-time "slide" along that warp. That's why it can go FTL, while this gravity drive can't.

Of course, Alcubierre's drive has good and strong math foundations, and a model of why it works, it just needs materials with negative mass which don't exist. While the emDrive has no model, no math, and thus, anything goes!
Your drive sounds kinda like the teleportation drive in Battlefield Earth also.
 

khorum

Murder Apologist
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Your drive sounds kinda like the teleportation drive in Battlefield Earth also.
There's a super-tiny model of the Alcubierre drive that is actually more feasible than the NASA mockup since if you oscillate the field and shrink down the warp envelope, you bring down the requirements for exotic matter down to something we can already observe via casimir effect.

We're talking like one-person sized tho. So they'll need to replace that Alcubierre-drive ship in the NASA mission patch with a TARDIS box.

A9p-8NrCUAAoXT0.jpg
 

Dandain

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I remember when that comet slammed into Jupiter. Left a mark for like a year.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Over the next 6 days, 21 distinct impacts were observed, with the largest coming on July 18 at 07:33 UTC when fragment G struck Jupiter. This impact created a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and was estimated to have released an energy equivalent to 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (600 times the world's nuclear arsenal)
 

Itzena_sl

shitlord
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I liked Terry Pratchett's take on it: "one particular planet whose inhabitants watched, with mild interest, huge continent-wrecking slabs of ice slap into another world which was, in astronomical terms, right next door -- and then did nothing about it because that sort of thing only happens in Outer Space."
 

khorum

Murder Apologist
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So the Japanese found their black hole satellite, but it's flipping the fuck out andnoone knows exactly what went wrong with it. But the little data it DID return was "transformational":

Space News_sl said:
Hitomi did manage to collect a little bit of data before it lost communication with JAXA. "It's fabulous data, it's transformational data," said University of Maryland astronomy professor Chris Reynolds, noting that it would likely be the subject of an upcoming paper.
 

Tuco

I got Tuco'd!
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It sounds like transformational data on how the controls engineer who fucked up one of the rotation thrusters is going to get fired.
 

Ukerric

Bearded Ape
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I can imagine twice, 10x, maybe even 100x bigger, but 10,000,000,000 times bigger than our sun? That is incomprehensible...
You're thinking of stellar blackholes (i.e. black holes created from stars). Those are galactic black holes, whose formation is still relatively mysterious, but who almost certainly appear along their galaxies, or maybe before.

Fun bit: The black hole Gargantua in Interstellar is one such supermassive black hole. But smaller than the one in the article.
 

khorum

Murder Apologist
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Supermassives are supposed to be at the heart of galaxies so the space around Gargantua should've been white from the density of stars and refracted through ejecta.

I guess it would've been weird to viewers tho.
 

meStevo

I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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As they plan the final acts of Cassini, who will enter Saturn's atmosphere in September of 2017, I was wondering what planetary science looks like around then and was pointed to this helpful blog:Planetary Exploration Timelines: A Look Ahead to 2016 | The Planetary Society

...there are no main belt / comet missions that will be active in 2018 and likely 2017 (depending on how long Dawn's fuel lasts); and no more giant planet missions beginning in 2018. There is a period in the beginning of 2018 when the only planetary target from which NASA or ESA will be returning science data is Mars. That's sobering. So enjoy 2016's bounty of space missions, because we're at peak planetary.
 

gogusrl

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I'm starting to hate Mars. I'm still hoping to see some new pics of Uranus in my lifetime but that's getting less and less likely.