The Astronomy Thread

BrutulTM

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Europe trying to regulate the moon. Makes sense.
 
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Tuco

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While the space station doesn’t have its own time zone, it runs on Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, which is meticulously based on atomic clocks.
What this article doesn't say is what the different agencies use that isn't UTC.

Describing "moon time" as a time zone is misleading because it's not about what time moon farmers should wake up to milk their moon cows. Instead the problem is about relativistic time dilation. It's a mess but for the near future I don't know why UTC shouldn't be the standard for all the things in the Sol system.

Converting between UTC and GPS time is annoying because the IERS decides a couple times a year whether to yeet another leap second onto UTC. https://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/index.php In the future there will probably be a "moon surface UTC", "lunar orbit UTC" and "mars surface UTC" etc

For fun I asked ChatGPT to convert between them and it gave me this:

1677690284773.png


That leap_seconds = 18 is just the worst because the correct value changes over time so you need a lookup table.
 
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pharmakos

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They should just have lunar time be whatever time it is on Earth at the point closest to the lunar surface. I.e. the same as the time on Earth at the point perpendicular to 0°-0° in the selenographic coordinate system.
 

Tuco

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They should just have lunar time be whatever time it is on Earth at the point closest to the lunar surface. I.e. the same as the time on Earth at the point perpendicular to 0°-0° in the selenographic coordinate system.
What would the advantage of that over UTC be?
 

Borzak

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Does it matter, everyone will have a phone/watch and pretty sure you won't be out and about catching some rays.
 

Void

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Let's just skip ahead to Adeptus Mechanicus Time. I'm tired of this timeline anyway.
 
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pharmakos

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What would the advantage of that over UTC be?
I like time to be calculable by the movements of heavenly bodies. The point I mention takes roughly 24 hours to come full circle, the equations for relativity should work out beautifully.

Note that such a timing convention only works for tidally locked bodies. Calculating time on Mars vs. Earth vs. the Moon is going to be a whole different thing.
 

Cybsled

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The real answer will be: Whatever country creates a permanent base on the moon will dictate time zones for the moon
 

Lambourne

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It's not about which time zone on Earth to sync it to, it's because that's impossible because time does not run at the same rate on the moon due to relativity effects. Sync the clocks today and they will be out of sync by 50 µs tomorrow. You can ignore that difference for a while but eventually it becomes a problem, how soon depending on the accuracy needed.
 

Tuco

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It's not about which time zone on Earth to sync it to, it's because that's impossible because time does not run at the same rate on the moon due to relativity effects. Sync the clocks today and they will be out of sync by 50 µs tomorrow. You can ignore that difference for a while but eventually it becomes a problem, how soon depending on the accuracy needed.
Any time-keeping system used in space will have to handle drift that exceeds the kind of time dilation we'd see in manned vessels in the Sol system.

Just about everyone in the near future is probably going to use UTC and there's not much reason to change that.

 

pharmakos

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This might seem like a weird thought, but isn't the discrepancy between different clocks in different gravity wells actually due to a change in the way their chemistry works in different gravitation rather than being due to changes in the time they're actually shifting? I.e. quartz clocks don't tell us "time" per se, but rather they tell us the speed of causality in our present gravity well?
 

Captain Suave

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This might seem like a weird thought, but isn't the discrepancy between different clocks in different gravity wells actually due to a change in the way their chemistry works in different gravitation rather than being due to changes in the time they're actually shifting? I.e. quartz clocks don't tell us "time" per se, but rather they tell us the speed of causality in our present gravity well?
Same thing, different words. There is no "time" outside of the relative rate of of causal propagation.
 

pharmakos

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This might end up being a little rambley but I hope it makes sense. Been connecting a lot of recent theories lately and I think I'm onto something, but I'm not always as good at putting things into words as I am at visualizing all the moving parts.

Idk why it just now clicked for me. But that works so well for my thoughts about how, if superfluid vacuum theory is correct, the speed of light could be seen of as the equivalent to terminal velocity in classic fluid dynamics. The "terminal velocity" of an individual water molecule in a boiling pot of water is the speed at which it is travelling at 100°. This seemingly obvious thought actually was hard for me to find a source on. Most say that an individual molecule doesn't have a temperature. But at that critical point, the point at which it can't get any hotter than 100° without having to cross the meniscus and turn to a gaseous state, MUST be equivalent to the terminal velocity of the individual particle. The terminal velocity, if it's unclear, being the point at which a body moving through a fluid or gas cannot possibly gain any more velocity despite having additional acceleration applied. If you took calculus you can probably visualize what's going on there.

But then just recently, this research came out that was able to connect chaos theory, quantum theory, and fluid dynamics, to prove that you CAN actually pull out a temperature from an individual molecule. And so now it is possible to draw a direct connection between hadronic molecules at the liquid / gas boiling point, to photons at the "speed of light" maximum speed of causality critical point that we observe from here in our forms embedded in the condensate.


The math to connect this idea to the classical fluid dynamics formulas and then connect it to the formulas for relativity might be deceivingly easy at the critical point, but I'm a little intimidated to try to sit down and do it. It has been a lot time since I've actually gotten my hands dirty with the numbers rather than sitting back and trying to visualize all the moving parts. They're very similar formulas tho.

So if we conceive of spacetime itself as being of essentially two phases: 1. A condensed, solid phase, equivalent to the solid phase (ice) in classical matter essentially and 2. A fluid phase, essentially equivalent to the quantum foam that physicists are starting to let themselves see as real rather than made up of "virtual" particles. The thing is, we have to extend the concept of what a solid is and what a liquid is to a FOUR dimensional thought (think: conceiving a tesseract). Those "virtual particles" quantum foam are in a sense extending into a fourth dimension as they become liquid towards the speed of light. I'm not sure if we can extend the idea to a gaseous phase, but if we can, it's going to be through this recent proof that there are three time dimensions and one space dimension for particles at speeds faster than the speed of light.


So then what's possibly going on with the fact that time speeds up for the observer in a smaller gravity well, is that as you get further away from the other condensed hadronic matter that we know of on every day earth, we are literally becoming further dissolved into the liquid and gas phases that exist in these other temporal dimensions that extend outward from normal three dimensional space.

Wish I was better with the math but I really don't see a problem with this conceptualization of multidimensional superfluid spacetime.

One of the cool things about a superfluid is that once it starts moving in a wave, the wave keeps travelling bouncing around forever, as at the full critical phase where the entire substance is a superfluid, there is no friction slowing anything down. This is a great way to explain why matter looks like both a particle and a wave. In some sense, the matter that makes us up could be conceived as patterns of wave crests in waves coming from different directions, i.e. the different fields that make up quantum theory are what form the small scale disturbances that make us as the various superwaves coming from higher dimensional directions interact with each other.

And I think that's as far as I can take the thoughts at the moment but damn. I gotta go back to college and formalize some of this stuff, or prove myself wrong. Definitely feels like I'm onto something tho.
 

pharmakos

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Helps perhaps to visualize what's going on as being like the action at the meniscus of a boiling pot of water. The water molecule cannot possibly go faster than that 100° velocity unless it either forms a bubble or reaches the meniscus at the top, where the friction it was experiencing in the water below is no longer strong enough on all sides of the particle for the particle to have to adhere to that 100° speed limit. Extend this concept from a three dimensional space to the way a fluid would behave at the critical point if it existed in a four dimensional or higher space. It would form a sort of hypermeniscus. The particles, in this case photons, would need to reach a hyperspatial point where the friction from their neighboring photons is broken in MULTIPLE dimensions, not just like a water molecule that just needs to escape in the vertical dimension to achieve it's phase change.
 

Captain Suave

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Dude you are high off your ass. I don't think you understand boiling water, never mind advanced physics.
 
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Blantons4Ever

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This might end up being a little rambley but I hope it makes sense. Been connecting a lot of recent theories lately and I think I'm onto something, but I'm not always as good at putting things into words as I am at visualizing all the moving parts.

Idk why it just now clicked for me. But that works so well for my thoughts about how, if superfluid vacuum theory is correct, the speed of light could be seen of as the equivalent to terminal velocity in classic fluid dynamics. The "terminal velocity" of an individual water molecule in a boiling pot of water is the speed at which it is travelling at 100°. This seemingly obvious thought actually was hard for me to find a source on. Most say that an individual molecule doesn't have a temperature. But at that critical point, the point at which it can't get any hotter than 100° without having to cross the meniscus and turn to a gaseous state, MUST be equivalent to the terminal velocity of the individual particle. The terminal velocity, if it's unclear, being the point at which a body moving through a fluid or gas cannot possibly gain any more velocity despite having additional acceleration applied. If you took calculus you can probably visualize what's going on there.

But then just recently, this research came out that was able to connect chaos theory, quantum theory, and fluid dynamics, to prove that you CAN actually pull out a temperature from an individual molecule. And so now it is possible to draw a direct connection between hadronic molecules at the liquid / gas boiling point, to photons at the "speed of light" maximum speed of causality critical point that we observe from here in our forms embedded in the condensate.


The math to connect this idea to the classical fluid dynamics formulas and then connect it to the formulas for relativity might be deceivingly easy at the critical point, but I'm a little intimidated to try to sit down and do it. It has been a lot time since I've actually gotten my hands dirty with the numbers rather than sitting back and trying to visualize all the moving parts. They're very similar formulas tho.

So if we conceive of spacetime itself as being of essentially two phases: 1. A condensed, solid phase, equivalent to the solid phase (ice) in classical matter essentially and 2. A fluid phase, essentially equivalent to the quantum foam that physicists are starting to let themselves see as real rather than made up of "virtual" particles. The thing is, we have to extend the concept of what a solid is and what a liquid is to a FOUR dimensional thought (think: conceiving a tesseract). Those "virtual particles" quantum foam are in a sense extending into a fourth dimension as they become liquid towards the speed of light. I'm not sure if we can extend the idea to a gaseous phase, but if we can, it's going to be through this recent proof that there are three time dimensions and one space dimension for particles at speeds faster than the speed of light.


So then what's possibly going on with the fact that time speeds up for the observer in a smaller gravity well, is that as you get further away from the other condensed hadronic matter that we know of on every day earth, we are literally becoming further dissolved into the liquid and gas phases that exist in these other temporal dimensions that extend outward from normal three dimensional space.

Wish I was better with the math but I really don't see a problem with this conceptualization of multidimensional superfluid spacetime.

One of the cool things about a superfluid is that once it starts moving in a wave, the wave keeps travelling bouncing around forever, as at the full critical phase where the entire substance is a superfluid, there is no friction slowing anything down. This is a great way to explain why matter looks like both a particle and a wave. In some sense, the matter that makes us up could be conceived as patterns of wave crests in waves coming from different directions, i.e. the different fields that make up quantum theory are what form the small scale disturbances that make us as the various superwaves coming from higher dimensional directions interact with each other.

And I think that's as far as I can take the thoughts at the moment but damn. I gotta go back to college and formalize some of this stuff, or prove myself wrong. Definitely feels like I'm onto something tho.

 
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Tuco

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Pharmakos is 100% correct in everything he's said. His deep understanding of how hot water swirls around when it boils is fundamental to connecting the speed of light with the concept of terminal velocity. These revelations are how civilizations break through great filters.
 
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