The Astronomy Thread

Eomer

Eomer

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Dandain_sl said:
So this documentary is difficult for me to chose a category. I love astronomy so I'll make the post here. I found it well worth my two hours, the visualization of the data is remarkably well done. PBS Spacetime is so boss, PBS I feel has earned more shilling from me on this one.
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Haha, far out. Partway through watching this, at around the 58 minute mark, there's a sped up clip of driving down a road. It's only about six seconds. I instantly recognized that as driving North into Vernon, BC. Made that drive so many times it was instantly recognizable to me.

Cool doc. Found a better version of it elsewhere; the Youtube link is pretty shitty quality wise for something where the visuals are fairly important to see clearly.
 
Dandain

Dandain

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Eomer_sl said:
Haha, far out. Partway through watching this, at around the 58 minute mark, there's a sped up clip of driving down a road. It's only about six seconds. I instantly recognized that as driving North into Vernon, BC. Made that drive so many times it was instantly recognizable to me.

Cool doc. Found a better version of it elsewhere; the Youtube link is pretty shitty quality wise for something where the visuals are fairly important to see clearly.
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Yeah the PBS link allows full quality full screen streaming. I was uncertain if international users get to stream from PBS. The youtube link is ass - I just wanted to give people a taste without hitting the PBS website first. It certainly clips the borders hard and isn't everything. Link your better link.
 
Eomer

Eomer

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Just found a download of it on Pirate Bay. PBS doesn't allow us Canucks. Which is gay as shit, as I have PBS Spokane on cable. Ah well.
 
Moogalak

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Essentially they were able to receive the signal in different wavelengths at different times due to the matter the signal traveled through to get to earth, allowing them to "weigh" the material the signal passed through on it's way here.

I'm sure someone else can explain it better
 
Woolygimp

Woolygimp

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Tripamang_sl said:
I'd rather somebody (preferably not the Russians) be testing something to protect us. I'd put asteroid impact up there with climate change as things that we're all too satisfied to ignore until it's becomes a large problem we may not be able to overcome.
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Humans will be the ones to destroy humanity. We'll see to that long before an asteroid hits us.
 
iannis

iannis

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The asteroid thing kinda strikes me as comet panic in previous generations.

The odds of a cataclysm like that happening are so incredibly low. Like it's happened a handful of times that we know of in the livable history of the earth? So yearly there's about a 1 in 1 billion chance? Frankly I'd put the Z1H1 virus much higher on the list of "shit that could potentially destroy the species".
 
Tripamang

Tripamang

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Iannis_sl said:
The asteroid thing kinda strikes me as comet panic in previous generations.

The odds of a cataclysm like that happening are so incredibly low. Like it's happened a handful of times that we know of in the livable history of the earth? So yearly there's about a 1 in 1 billion chance? Frankly I'd put the Z1H1 virus much higher on the list of "shit that could potentially destroy the species".
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Sure ones that cause extinction events are pretty rare, but there have been several in just the last hundred years that could of wiped whole cities off the map if they hadn't hit a remote location. A large modern city like New York burning up and entering the atmosphere could be enough to cause a small nuclear winter. It may not wipe out 8/10 of every species on the planet like an extinction even, but it could certainly cause widespread global devastation via famine and crop failures.

I just can't fathom why it wouldn't be a priority to prevent that kind of event, you know save a few million lives from the impact and who knows how many others from famine. Not to mention that if it hit a nuclear capable country they might see it as a first strike and launch a counter attack.
 
Furry

Furry

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Tripamang_sl said:
Sure ones that cause extinction events are pretty rare, but there have been several in just the last hundred years that could of wiped whole cities off the map if they hadn't hit a remote location. A large modern city like New York burning up and entering the atmosphere could be enough to cause a small nuclear winter. It may not wipe out 8/10 of every species on the planet like an extinction even, but it could certainly cause widespread global devastation via famine and crop failures.

I just can't fathom why it wouldn't be a priority to prevent that kind of event, you know save a few million lives from the impact and who knows how many others from famine. Not to mention that if it hit a nuclear capable country they might see it as a first strike and launch a counter attack.
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Umm, I disagree.
 
Cybsled

Cybsled

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The probability is low, but more dangerous ones are the small-yet-large-enough meteors that pack power close to a small nuke.

I remember reading that in the Tunguska meteor had struck a few minutes later than it actually did, the Earth's rotation would have ensured it would have exploded over Saint Petersburg I believe.
 
Alex

Alex

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It would take way more than that to cause a global disaster I would think. Massive cities have been burned to the ground before - even in the past 100 years - with little to no effect outside of the immediate area.
 
Ukerric

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Tripamang_sl said:
A large modern city like New York burning up and entering the atmosphere could be enough to cause a small nuclear winter.
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All of NYC, or just Manhattan? (people underestimate the real size of NYC)

Manhattan is survivable. I mean, assuming it impacts Manhattan itself, you only have most of the east coast wiped out by Richter 9+ earthquake, a 40 mile-wide crater making sure the Atlantic level drops a feet, tsunamis wracking the european coasts, but China is probably relatively unimpaired, save for the fact that it's main customer just dropped out of the economy.

A NYC sized (20km wide) asteroidisan extinction level event. Chixculub, the asteroid that almost certainly wrecked enough Earth to kill the dinosaurs was half that. Thankfully, there's probably less than 5000 of those, and the estimation is that only a 1-2% of those have escaped detection. That's still a lot, but they're extremely not likely to impact us by surprise.
 
khorum

khorum

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You what would be cool? If we could take a spacerock on an NEO trajectory, strap an engine and a bootstrap robotic colony on it so that by the next time it comes around it'll be a hollowed out space colony then we could just alter its trajectory towards Tau Ceti or something.

Apophis is about the size of the Burj Khalifa is mass spectrometry suggests heavy metals, gypsum, ice and even some organics. It comes within range of a simple intercept in 2029 where it wouldn't take too much to land a good sized self-replicating robotic colony on it.

Apophis already at 10.28 km/s, we could strap a project orion engine on it to fire up near neptune's orbit to achieve solar escape velocity (7.7km/s around Neptune).
 
Tripamang

Tripamang

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Ukerric_sl said:
All of NYC, or just Manhattan? (people underestimate the real size of NYC)

Manhattan is survivable. I mean, assuming it impacts Manhattan itself, you only have most of the east coast wiped out by Richter 9+ earthquake, a 40 mile-wide crater making sure the Atlantic level drops a feet, tsunamis wracking the european coasts, but China is probably relatively unimpaired, save for the fact that it's main customer just dropped out of the economy.

A NYC sized (20km wide) asteroidisan extinction level event. Chixculub, the asteroid that almost certainly wrecked enough Earth to kill the dinosaurs was half that. Thankfully, there's probably less than 5000 of those, and the estimation is that only a 1-2% of those have escaped detection. That's still a lot, but they're extremely not likely to impact us by surprise.
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The 20m asteroid that blew up over Russia in 2013 had the equivalent explosive power of 500kt of dynamite (approx 31 Hiroshima's). There are a ton of factors that play into where in the atmosphere an asteroid can explode (trajectory, momentum, mass, composition) but an air blast over a large city could be very very destructive. For comparison the Tunguska event was caused by an asteroid somewhere between 60m and 190m and that had a 2150 sq km blast radius.

I can't find the right combination of words to bring up the article I read a few years ago that went into a deep analysis of what a modern city would put into the atmosphere if it were vaporized. It detailed how it wasn't comparable to WWII city destruction as most of the buildings were primarily wood, and something like downtown New York which contains many many buildings built of concrete that are much more dense in terms of material. They had estimated a few small air blasts (300kt) over a dense city could put a great deal of material into the atmosphere enough to negatively affect world temperatures.
 
Jive Turkey

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Tripamang_sl said:
The 20m asteroid that blew up over Russia in 2013 had the equivalent explosive power of 500kt of dynamite (approx 31 Hiroshima's). There are a ton of factors that play into where in the atmosphere an asteroid can explode (trajectory, momentum, mass, composition) but an air blast over a large city could be very very destructive. For comparison the Tunguska event was caused by an asteroid somewhere between 60m and 190m and that had a 2150 sq km blast radius.

I can't find the right combination of words to bring up the article I read a few years ago that went into a deep analysis of what a modern city would put into the atmosphere if it were vaporized. It detailed how it wasn't comparable to WWII city destruction as most of the buildings were primarily wood, and something like downtown New York which contains many many buildings built of concrete that are much more dense in terms of material. They had estimated a few small air blasts (300kt) over a dense city could put a great deal of material into the atmosphere enough to negatively affect world temperatures.
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Even if we had the means to deal with something that size, just seeing it coming before it's too late is another thing all together.
 
Dandain

Dandain

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So SpaceX had a zero second abort on Sunday due to a boater in the danger zone. I thought this gif was pretty awesome to see their abort system in action. The rocket even begins to fire.

Apparently the gif was too big.

http://i.imgur.com/Mz46zRW.gif
 
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