Space and Astronomy in general

garion333 wrote:

That's amazing. So much so I'm retweeting the original tweet.

Voulez-vous threadreaderapp?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...

Starhopper test flight. Elon bought the deluxe edition of Kerbal.

Nice! I love how chunky that thing is.

Also, Elon got his hands on an early copy of Kerbal 2.

Badferret wrote:

Starhopper test flight. Elon bought the deluxe edition of Kerbal.

That thing didn't have shock absorbers, did it? Something fell off of it when it landed, some panels are missing off of the legs in the end, and it looks like it's embedded into the concrete landing pad as well.

It was a bit of a rough landing something caught fire near the end just before landing, you can't really see the fire in that video, but you can tell when it starts by the change in color of the flame just before landing. There were pads on the bottom of each leg before launch and they are definitely destroyed after, I believe those are the "Shock Absorbers" The Everyday Astronaut youtuber recorded some great film of the hop, and he has a slowed down version of it where you can see the fire start, underneath the vehicle very close to engine. And yes one of the thrusters comes flying off the vehicle at the end. The hopper didn't embed itself into the concrete landing pad as far as I can tell. I believe the debris you see near the hopper are what's left of the shock absorbing pads that where on the bottom of each leg.

For a first test with a single engine, I think it did pretty good. They are building another test vehicle with three engines to test next.

Most massive neutron star ever detected strains the limits of physics

In the case of the newly detected neutron star, dubbed J0740+6620, it's 333,000 times the mass of the Earth and 2.17 times the mass of the sun. But the star is only about 15 miles across.

It can still collapse into a black hole if it sucks the life out of a companion star or through collision.

It seems the heaviest recorded neutron star is 2.27 solar masses.

The mass of the new star and the previous record holder use a more accurate method. The 2.27 solar mass star, along with several even larger ones, were measured using methods with a higher margin of error. There's one as high as 2.4 solar masses, and it also has a cool name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Widow_Pulsar

Quintin_Stone wrote:

It can still collapse into a black hole if it sucks

YOINK!

Pfft. Primordial black hole, that's preposterous. Clearly it is a Progenitor colony biding it's time until a sufficient mass of sentient life grows in our system. Then they will feast.

BadKen wrote:

Pfft. Primordial black hole, that's preposterous. Clearly it is a Progenitor colony biding it's time until a sufficient mass of sentient life grows in our system. Then they will feast.

It's definitely The Protector and his telescope protecting the earth from other protectors invading.

Maybe it is a mole of mole moles.

WizKid wrote:

Maybe it is a mole of mole moles.

I got that reference!

thrawn82 wrote:
WizKid wrote:

Maybe it is a mole of mole moles.

I got that reference!

A molé of mole moles sounds better to me.

garion333 wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:
WizKid wrote:

Maybe it is a mole of mole moles.

I got that reference!

A molé of mole moles sounds better to me.

oh man, but thats SO MUCH blending.

Everything about this mission sounds bonkers and yet it worked, mostly.
Luna 3

Feeank wrote:

Everything about this mission sounds bonkers and yet it worked, mostly.
Luna 3

Damn that's cool.

So the aliens are avoiding us not because we're horrible to each other but because there's a dangerous black hole, right....right?

Warp speeds in 'Star Trek' are achingly slow, and a simple animation by a former NASA scientist proves it

O'Donoghue chose to depict the Enterprise flying away from the sun and across the solar system toward a finish line at Pluto. The spaceship starts out at warp 1 and eventually accelerates to warp 9.9, or about 2,083 times light speed.

Warp 1, or light speed, makes the Enterprise look like it's at a standstill over the sun. At this light-speed rate, the ship would take 5 hours and 28 minutes just to reach Pluto, which is about 3.67 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers) away from the sun. Meanwhile, Proxima Centauri — the nearest star to our own — is a dismal four years and three months away.
Warp 5 is about 213 times faster, making a sun-Pluto journey just 1 minute and 30 seconds long. Proxima Centauri is still a weeklong voyage.
Warp 9.9 makes Pluto less that a 10-second trip away, and Proxima Centauri an 18-hour cruise.
This last rate of travel is thousands of times faster than the physics of our universe may ever permit.

Aren't warp number supposed to be logarithmic or exponential or something? (as if it's productive to try to apply logic to the magic physics exceptions in sci-fi) I know theres some stuff in Voyager about warp 10 being infinitely faster than the speed of light in a asymptotic way.

Still maybe JJ should have tried to understand that even warp doesn't magically make everything 5 minutes away

Stele wrote:

Still maybe JJ should have tried to understand that even warp doesn't magically make everything 5 minutes away

He did the same thing to Star Wars. Although TBF Lucas did a bit of the same thing, it looks like Alderaan is seconds away from Tatooine.

thrawn82 wrote:

Aren't warp number supposed to be logarithmic or exponential or something? (as if it's productive to try to apply logic to the magic physics exceptions in sci-fi) I know theres some stuff in Voyager about warp 10 being infinitely faster than the speed of light in a asymptotic way.

Warp factor definitions have been redefined several times (and ignored completely by writers all the time). In the TOS era anything warp 10 or above is was merely unsafe speeds that the Enterprise wasn't designed to withstand. In the TNG/DS9/Voyager era warp 10 was redesignated as infinite velocity. Warps 1-9 follow the formula of speed = wf10/3c but above 9.0 the speed increases exponentially, approaching infinity as the warp factor nears 10. Their calculated speed for 9.9 was 2,083 c, which would be accurate according to the 1-9 formula, but it's been previously defined as 3,053 c. Warp 9.99 is 7,912 c.
IMAGE(https://i.stack.imgur.com/Yx2Yc.png)
Regardless, the NASA scientist isn't "proving" anything with his animation. All of Star Trek takes place in our galaxy, and we hadn't even fully explored half of it by the TNG/DS9/Voyager era. That was the entire plot of Voyager, which was travelling home from the completely unexplored Delta Quadrant. It was estimated to take them 75 years to get back home (supposedly that was meant to be how long a non-stop direct path would take, realistically they couldn't just fly through the galactic core and with all the detours and stops for supplies the trip would actually take 200 - 400 years).

Three fun videos about fictional FTL systems:

Sten and Mike: Awww yisssss. that's the good sci-fi crunch i love