The Astronomy Thread

Gaia creates richest star map of our Galaxy—and beyond

The new data release, which covers the period between 25 July 2014 and 23 May 2016, pins down the positions of nearly 1.7 billion stars, and with a much greater precision. For some of the brightest stars in the survey, the level of precision equates to Earth-bound observers being able to spot a Euro coin lying on the surface of the Moon.

Did you guys see his shit?

The Truth Behind This Amazing Video from the Surface of a Comet

Uranus smells like farts, rotten eggs, say researchers

Who woulda guessed?

Qhue said:

Who here has taken any sort of Astronomy course? What sort of a course was it and how much 'math' was involved?

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I took NAS 131 and 132 (Astronomy I / II) at my community college and there was zero math.

BrutulTM said:

That website sure is white. The asteroid mining thing always seems sketchy to me. Assuming you spend a billion dollars capturing and mining an asteroid but get 2 billion dollars worth of precious metals from it. Isn't dumping that much of a rare commodity on the market going to cause prices to crash?

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That really depends on a) the actual scarcity of the raw materials, and b) the application of the materials. Doubling the supply of a truly rare commodity would still leave the raw material fucking rare, and putting twice as much of the end result into the market would basically advertise itself. Doubling the supply of an artificially "rare" commodity (say diamonds for example) would demolish the artificially inflated market in a heartbeat, but it may also open up new markets due to its availability in quantities unavailable before.

In a nutshell, in the short term, people who can make asteroid mining happen will also be smart enough to judge what quantities of which materials they can bring to market and maximize profits.

In the long term, assuming capitalism is a thing that exists in the future, the actual availability of specific resources in all of the mineable asteroids will influence what is and what isn't treated as a rare commodity here on Earth, but keep in mind that the entire main asteroid belt put together is only like 5% of the mass of the Moon. So being able to use those materials without bringing them back to or lifting them up from Earth's surface is the real end game. Exactly like the undocumented immigrants that flooded into America before the US existed, asteroid miners are going to create new supplies, new demands, and invent new industries to fill new needs that have never existed before. Eventually.

Or maybe they'll all die of dysentery, Idk.

LachiusTZ said:

Not saying that matters, but it might.

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No, this is a good quality community college and the program of study was a STEM + transfer degree.

you'd need to drag carbonaceous rocks to orbit to produce that much graphene and CNT for those structures. While theyve found a few out there, it's definitely rarer and needs to be refined out of methane/compex organics ice which would require a fairly sophisticated refinement chain to exist in orbit. On the plus side, gas-centrifuge production for graphene is probably ideally done in zero g.