Space and Astronomy in general

I know someone working on this
The behind the scenes stuff they mentioned was inspiring!

Sweet!

Can't wait for the full reveal in which we find out the plumes are caused by humanoid-like aliens!

They're plasma bugs trying to shoot down our probes!

polypusher wrote:

They're plasma bugs trying to shoot down our probes!

IMAGE(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5taZGeD5jr0/maxresdefault.jpg)

*edit*

When I look at things like this I can't imagine how someone could believe there wasn't other life in the universe. It seems staggeringly, imprehensibly unlikely that it only happened on Earth.

NASA's New Exoplanet Hunter Releases Incredible First Image

On the way to its final orbit around Earth, NASA’s planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has sailed by the moon and snapped its first picture of space. We’ve said several times that TESS would be able to look at 200,000 stars in the 300 light-years around the Earth—but maybe this new shot will show you what that really means.

Here’s the entire image:

IMAGE(https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/efyvqmqset9gtyezo0xi.jpg)

This is just 0.25 percent of the amount of sky that TESS will image in its search for exoplanets.

Oh that's awesome

It's full of stars.

Did they not see Europa Report?

farley3k wrote:

When I look at things like this I can't imagine how someone could believe there wasn't other life in the universe. It seems staggeringly, imprehensibly unlikely that it only happened on Earth.

Agreed.

The universe isn't just really big, it's really old. The chances that there's intelligent life out there right now* is vanishingly slim. The chances that there's been intelligent life at numerous points throughout the previous 13 billion years seem pretty likely.

Spoiler:

*the concept of "now" gets murky at universe scale. Thanks Einstein!

Jonman wrote:

The chances that there's intelligent life out there right now* is vanishingly slim.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion. Even if the odds of life orbiting a single star was vanishingly slim, the odds of there being life out there in the universe somewhere at this very moment still seems pretty good. A one in a trillion chance seems pretty vanishingly slim, if there was a one in a trillion chance of intelligent life living around a star that means that we would expect 25 billion stars in the universe to harbor intelligent life.

Although personally I don't care too much about what's going on in the Universe as a whole, there is so much space between galaxies that I mostly limit all of my pondering to them (Andromeda is pretty close and getting closer, so honorable mention, but otherwise as far as I'm concerned if we're the only thing in the galaxy, we're all alone for practical purposes. It should be noted that the number I've pulled out of my ass, "one in a trillion" would mean that we'd expect to be alone in the around a quarter trillion stars in the Milky Way. Personally, however, I don't really see any credible reason to think that the chance of intelligent life was remotely that small.

Several decades ago a person could have some sort of defensible rationale to say "sure, OUR solar system has a collection of many rocky planets or moons with a wide variety of atmospheres at a wide variety of distances from the sun, but let's just handwave that and assume that almost no stars have planets, or if they do they just have one, so it must be really rare to have a wonderful water/oxygen planet right in the liquid water zone!"

Now we not only have modeling that says "so when stars form the matter is going to accrete into a bunch of different bands at a lot of different distances from the star. Not all of those will coalesce into planets, but typically you'd expect them to. The stuff in our simulations that keeps a band from coalescing into a planet is OTHER planets breaking them apart, so we're expecting to see quite a few planets out there. And we're starting to look for planets, and we're finding a crapton of them, even though we can only see very very particular sorts of planets in very particular geometries, we're still finding planets up the wazoo.

At this point we're no longer in "let's keep in mind that weird life may spontaneously develop in places we don't think are hospitable". It seems completely plausible to me that there are enough planets out there that we're going to be getting something WE consider livable relatively frequently.

Of course, that still just gives us "habitable", from there we have unknowns about "life" and then the transition to intelligent life, but I still don't think we're talking "vanishingly small".

This is where you starting getting into Fermi Paradox and Great Filter territory

Yonder wrote:
Jonman wrote:

The chances that there's intelligent life out there right now* is vanishingly slim.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion. Even if the odds of life orbiting a single star was vanishingly slim, the odds of there being life out there in the universe somewhere at this very moment still seems pretty good. A one in a trillion chance seems pretty vanishingly slim, if there was a one in a trillion chance of intelligent life living around a star that means that we would expect 25 billion stars in the universe to harbor intelligent life.

It's my gut-solution to the Fermi paradox. It's not necessarily that there's no intelligent life, it's that there's no intelligent life that we can see in the places we've been looking since we started looking.

It's tantamount to seeing no whales on a one-hour whale-watching trip and therefore declaring that whales don't, and have never existed.

Mind you, your "one-in-a-trillion" is just as arbitrary as my "vanishingly slim". I could accept that intelligent life is less likely than one in a trillion by a few tens-of-orders-of-magnitude.

Based on the one sample we've got, over 13 billion years, it took 4 billion to get to simple life, and another 9 billion (less some change) to get to intelligent life, which has been around a scant few million years, and on a scale to be detectable across galaxies, a few hundred years. The jury's out on how much longer we'll be around.

I think there's a good chance that intelligent life is not a stable configuration, and we haven't been around long enough to see any of the other flashes in the cosmic pan.

Jonman wrote:

...and on a scale to be detectable across galaxies, a few hundred years.

Except we're not detectable across galaxies now, not even close. This picture shows exactly how far our radio signals have traveled across our galaxy since we first started broadcasting. To anyone outside that blue dot, we're still totally undetectable!

IMAGE(https://hips.hearstapps.com/pop.h-cdn.co/assets/17/34/2560x2560/square-1503605434-20130115-radio-broadcasts-2.jpg)

...unless they have the technology to detect preindustrial civilizations, that is.

There probably aren't any Kardashev Type II civilizations nearby, since those would be fairly obvious even at a distance.Though we'd have a harder time detecting Type I. (And I think we can conclusively say there aren't any Type III civilizations in this galaxy.)

Yonder wrote:

Several decades ago a person could have some sort of defensible rationale to say "sure, OUR solar system has a collection of many rocky planets or moons with a wide variety of atmospheres at a wide variety of distances from the sun, but let's just handwave that and assume that almost no stars have planets, or if they do they just have one, so it must be really rare to have a wonderful water/oxygen planet right in the liquid water zone!"

What I'm really excited about at the moment is that we're getting amazing information about exoplanets that completely blow our prior expectations out of the water. In my lifetime we've gone from zero known exoplanets to 3726 (4587 if you count all of Kepler's candidate possibilities).

We went from not being sure if other stars had planets to knowing about systems with five gas giants tightly orbiting their star, planets that orbit two stars, giant planets with orbits so close that they're tidally locked to their stars, planets around neutron stars, planets that orbit four stars, multiple-star systems where there are planets orbiting different stars, gas giants where the atmosphere is being stripped off by the star, planets where the rain is corundum, planets that are probably giant diamonds, and Proxima Centauri b.

And our previous tech has just barely been able to detect earth-type planets, where 'earth-type' means "the rocky kind we're used to, but mostly much bigger" because that was our approximate lower limit for previous techniques--we currently only know about 23 planets that have a mass 3 times earth-mass or less. The lower limit keeps dropping, though, so I'm looking forward to us having a lot more data on earth-sized planets out there in the galaxy.

I mean, this video is already outdated.

Here's the thing. We know almost nothing about the universe, even (especially) in physics and cosmology. Quantum theory didn't even exist for us a little over a hundred years ago. Even now what we know about it is much more theoretical than experimentally tested.

Current models say there's a cosmic buttload of matter and energy out there that we can't even detect, much less theorize about. We *just* detected gravity waves, and only under very specific conditions. Practically every month, an astronomer observes something we've never seen before, don't know what it is or how it came to be.

For all we know, FTL observation, communication, or even travel might be how all the undetectable life out there is doing things.

That hyperspace bypass will be coming along any day now.

We just need to start checking all the cosmic basements with broken stairs behind the cosmic cougars.

and yea I'm not sure its reasonable to assume that every civilization will be screaming in the radio and microwave electromagnetic bands.

but then again the biologist in me jumps to this:
IMAGE(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fish.png)

EM drive doesn’t seem to work after all

The EM drive has been put to the test by a group from TU Dresden in Germany led by Martin Tajmar, who presented their results at the Aeronautics and Astronautics Association of France’s Space Propulsion conference on 16 May. It didn’t pass muster.

The team built their EM drive with the same dimensions as the one that NASA tested, and placed it in a vacuum chamber. Then, they piped microwaves into the cavity and measured its tiny movements using lasers. As in previous tests, they found it produced thrust, as measured by a spring. But when positioned so that the microwaves could not possibly produce thrust in the direction of the spring, the drive seemed to push just as hard.

And, when the team cut the power by half, it barely affected the thrust. So, it seems there’s something else at work. The researchers say the thrust may be produced by an interaction between Earth’s magnetic field and the cables that power the microwave amplifier.

Science articles with partial gotcha headlines irritate me.

“It’s not for sure that there’s no real signal there, but if it is present it’s very small"
“It definitely looks more bad than it looked before, but it will take another year of testing before we know for sure,” he says. “I will test everything.”

Anyway, interesting results.

"Autophage" Rocket Would Devour Itself For Fuel

A team of engineers from Scotland and Ukraine have developed what they call an "autophage" rocket that would consume its own structure as it hurtles into space. While this would be a poor choice for human spaceflight, it could present a cheaper alternative for small satellites.

The autophage engine ... would eat a propellant rod comprised of solid fuel on the outside and oxidizer on the inside that would also function as the rocket's "body."

Why Pluto Might Be a Billion Comets

Did anyone catch "One Strange Rock" yesterday?
I thought it was really interesting. But I love shows that geek out on science.

NASA has discovered organic chemicals, including seasonal methane, on Mars.

Mars cows confirmed! Futurama was right!

BadKen wrote:

Mars cows confirmed! Futurama was right!

BETSY!

The Milky Way is now estimated to be 200 thousand light years wide.

IMAGE(https://s26.postimg.cc/dvp5n34l5/prensa1385_3178.jpg)

The coloured region is the previously known Galactic disk. The present work has extended its limits much farther away: there is a probability 99.7% or 95.4% respectively that there are disk stars in the regions outside the dashed/dotted circles. Yellow dot is the position of the Sun. Background Milky Way image from “A Roadmap to the Milky Way". Credit: Artistic representation by R. Hurt, SSC-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech.

OBSOLETE

So, if I'm reading the paper right, the dropoff is more gradual than we thought. While we've observed other galaxies that do have an abrupt edge to their stars, ours just has a flared disk around 20,000 parsecs from the core and a gradual fade-out after that.

(Separately, there's also the galactic halo, which is the spherical cloud of stars that surrounds the galaxy, with metal-poor stars that are much older and spread much further apart. This study was specifically looking at the disk stars.)

Anyone have more galactic astronomy knowledge who can fill in the details?

That's awesome. Great way to start my Friday!

Wow, what a story!

The Lunar Orbiters never returned to Earth with the imagery. Instead, the Orbiter developed the 70mm film (yes film) and then raster scanned the negatives with a 5 micron spot (200 lines/mm resolution) and beamed the data back to Earth using lossless analog compression, which was yet to actually be patented by anyone. Three ground stations on earth, one of which was in Madrid, another in Australia and the other in California recieved the signals and recorded them. The transmissions were recorded on to magnetic tape. The tapes needed Ampex FR-900 drives to read them, a refrigerator sizes device that costed $300,000 to buy new in the 1960’s.

All the pictures of that setup they had in the McDonald's are wild.

Even cooler: the "McMoon" project lead, Dennis Wingo, showed up in the web page comments to answer questions!