The Astronomy Thread

SpaceX puts historic flown rocket on permanent display – Spaceflight Now

SpaceX decided to put the first landed booster on display outside their office in LA. Lots of photos in the article to add more perspective to the size.

Yeah they'd have to build an even bigger Orion nuclear pulse ship to mount some kinda shield on it to survive microdebris. The largest version that was actually proposed by ARPA might be large enough since modern nukes would be about a third of the size of the proposed fuel bombs.

Someone actually made an accurate model of the NASA variant of that Orion spacecraft for Kerbal Space Program lol---all based on the declassified specs. It's the smallest version able to use the prototype hydrogen bombs (which was also invented by the same guy who proposed the Orion project in the first place--Stanislaw Ulam).

Found! Potentially Earth-Like Planet at Proxima Centauri Is Closest Ever

They discovered a potentially earth like planet (mass is 1.3 times that of earth which suggests a rocky world) that exists in the habitable zone of the star. Down side is they say due to it's proximity to the star it is probably tidally locked.

Well... while 4.2 light years away is not exactly close 1) We will never find an earth-ish exoplanet closer to us 2) It's at a distance that is at least conceivable. I mean, we can devise a contraption able to cover that distance in a non-geological time frame without requiring some breakthrough in our understanding of the physics of the universe. I doubt the first interstellar traveler is already born, but landing something on that planet within the next couple centuries? That might happen.

AladainAF said:

I'm convinced the universe really is like Star Ocean 3 and God, or whomever was responsible for the big bang, and all the rules of the universe did it to simply "challenge" us. They did this to multiple planets. First one to center of universe wins. Obviously the big ass challenge atm is traveling great distances in a reasonable amount of time.

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Once mankind gets to the center of the universe, God pulls them back at the last moment and makes us evolve from scratch all over again, except this time we keep our tech upgrades from the get go.

Great video on Dyson Spheres (Swarms?) and how we could achieve type II/III status in a relatively short period of time (50-100 years?) if we wanted to. We could build a partial Dyson Swarm using Mercury as materials then use the energy from the swarm to make tiny black holes we could use for energy production and propulsion. It's cool stuff, it makes me think we could get there a lot faster with a global effort.

Skanda said:

Found! Potentially Earth-Like Planet at Proxima Centauri Is Closest Ever

They discovered a potentially earth like planet (mass is 1.3 times that of earth which suggests a rocky world) that exists in the habitable zone of the star. Down side is they say due to it's proximity to the star it is probably tidally locked.

Click to expand...

Good a place to ask as any. What is it about being tidally locked that makes it harder for life to form? I can understand high winds and not-earthlike weather patterns from having one side baked all the time, and the other side dark. It also cuts down on the surface area where life has a chance to form (the border of light/dark where it is temperate as opposed to a whole planet for something to happen). Is there anything else besides those two reasons?

Urlithani said:

Good a place to ask as any. What is it about being tidally locked that makes it harder for life to form? I can understand high winds and not-earthlike weather patterns from having one side baked all the time, and the other side dark. It also cuts down on the surface area where life has a chance to form (the border of light/dark where it is temperate as opposed to a whole planet for something to happen). Is there anything else besides those two reasons?

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Huge amounts of X-rays and other radiation from being so close to the star. Depending on how and when the planet formed, it may or may not even have an atmosphere left.

One quote I saw from a scientist that I quite liked: "We used to wonder where we'd first start truly looking for life outside our solar system. Now we know." This is a pretty big deal.

Urlithani said:

Good a place to ask as any. What is it about being tidally locked that makes it harder for life to form?

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Scott Manley goes into it a bit.

The cool thing about this planet though, is clearly we have almost no better candidate to try and study/send a probe to and depending on what we find the first kind of colony ship. Its massively far, but anything else is just massively farther. Additionally if planets around red dwarfs are acceptable to humans, we will learn that early most likely, which puts a pretty cool road map to colonize the galaxy. Pretty exciting reality, even if none of us live to see the complete conclusions.

Reposting this in case anyone missed it on the old boards.

Space Engine - an incredible space simulator.

Curious what the Milky Way would look like from the perspective of a planet in the Large Magellanic cloud? Bam, Space Engine can answer that. Fly anywhere in the universe and marvel at the sights.

The idea behind dyson swarms is that they'd become so nested within each other that they'd eventually capture 100% of a star's energy TO POWER A COMPUTING SUBSTRATE---the so called Matrioshka Brains. This was Bradbury's answer to the Fermi Paradox. The optimal use of all that captured energy wasn't for agriculture or industry---it was to power the virtualization of a near-infinite amount of uploaded intelligences.

But of course if you had the ability to live out all the possibilities, then why would you ever leave the system? So all these end-state civilizations are out there encasing their own Suns living in virtual realities.