The Astronomy Thread

It was Facebook's satellite. So aside from the rocket, nothing of value was lost.

Ryanz said:

It's gonna be funny when we contact a type II civilization and their all like, "Oh hi, that's a nice planet full of resources you have there.".

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I do not think this will be the case. Asteroids will be easier to mine. Gas giants will be easier as well. A type II needs this planet as much as a logger needs a single tree in a horse pasture.

Only reason a type II comes here is to kill us for pure enjoyment and "Oh hey, might as well snag these resources to make up for what we lost."

This makes me sad. :-(

Just explosion+sound synced.

Fucking insurance companies. Typical.

Theres the huge chance that so many civilizations have, grown and died over so many milenia, we could never know because they have already died out, and it would still be 600 million years before we could even first be able to detect them. Same as ones billions of years before us. Or so far outside of horizon of our viewable universe that we will never have a chance of contact.

We cannot even directly image a planet next door yet. And who knows if an intelligent lifeform even invented radio, and invented something we Haven't even discovered or even concieved of in ficton.

I think its impossible with the scale of just the visable universe, that our planet so rare and unique.

The gap between a Type-2 civilization and where we're at is farther than where we're at and the cognitive reflection outcomes of raccoons.

They would account for our "degree" of sentience versus their collective need for our resources and we would barely rate above the value of our fellow mammals. That's if they consider our meager accomplishments above the merits of a beaver dam or an ant hill at all.

second "dyson star" found, probably not a dyson

A Young, Dusty, Disk-Bearing Star Debunks 'Alien Megastructures' Theory
Researchers just found a second 'Dyson Sphere' star

From the Nasa release on Jupiter linked above. Mostly because its always nice to have an expert geeking out for context, these quotes are also relevant to the videos above for what they are measuring. I can't wait to see what's next. 1.5 days to download 6 megabytes of data was also mentioned.

“First glimpse of Jupiter’s north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It’s bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to -- this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We’re seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.”

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I think from slightly closer, and basically just the polar region in close up.

“JIRAM is getting under Jupiter’s skin, giving us our first infrared close-ups of the planet,” said Alberto Adriani, JIRAM co-investigator from Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, Rome. “These first infrared views of Jupiter’s north and south poles are revealing warm and hot spots that have never been seen before. And while we knew that the first-ever infrared views of Jupiter's south pole could reveal the planet's southern aurora, we were amazed to see it for the first time. No other instruments, both from Earth or space, have been able to see the southern aurora. Now, with JIRAM, we see that it appears to be very bright and well-structured. The high level of detail in the images will tell us more about the aurora’s morphology and dynamics.”

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Southern Aurora

“Jupiter is talking to us in a way only gas-giant worlds can,” said Bill Kurth, co-investigator for the Waves instrument from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. “Waves detected the signature emissions of the energetic particles that generate the massive auroras which encircle Jupiter’s north pole. These emissions are the strongest in the solar system. Now we are going to try to figure out where the electrons come from that are generating them.”

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Well, all of our radio communications barely even make it past a light year out of the solar system. After a few light-years even our most powerful signals become indistinguishable from background noise. By the time it reaches Proxima Centauri, any transmission from Earth would BE background radiation. The inverse-square law rapidly reduces the attenuation of our most powerful radio transmissions beyond two light years.

Even if our radio propagation wasn't shit on by the inverse-square law, the sheer distances involved in the time scales we live in mean our oldest and most powerful radio transmissions haven't made it too far past Tau Cygni Beta anyway. In fact, our oldest high-powered transmissions (Hitler's 1936 Olympics opening address) would be right around Archenar now.

This map from Princeton is about 10 years old but still cool, but it shows how far our radio transmissions have gone. Which isn't to say an alien civilization couldn't reconstruct our transmissions from background noise, somehow, but we it's hard to imagine how. If they're advanced enough to do that they probably already know we're here anyway.