Scrutable

Mike Brown is trying to ruin western civilization, again.

https://astronomy.com/magazine/2020/01/ ... lanet-nine

https://mikebrown.caltech.edu/

More theoretical data, but I hope he finds it. Will be awesome when he does.

Al Capone Junior wrote: Fri Sep 10, 2021 4:05 am Mike Brown is trying to ruin western civilization, again.

https://astronomy.com/magazine/2020/01/ ... lanet-nine

https://mikebrown.caltech.edu/

More theoretical data, but I hope he finds it. Will be awesome when he does.

Is there anything more recent than that? I will go for a hunt.

Edit: doesn’t seem to be. All gone a bit quiet from Mike Brown, but of course since that article was published we’ve had Covid-19, so maybe his research has been delayed?

A useful 'rule of thumb' when thinking about the size of the Solar System and the distances to the nearest stars is:
If the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 1 inch, a light year is a mile.

So, on that scale, we're 1 inch from the centre, that 'FarOut' object, is just over 10ft away, and to get to the nearest star is over 4 miles.

Grumble wrote: Fri Sep 10, 2021 5:42 am

Al Capone Junior wrote: Fri Sep 10, 2021 4:05 am Mike Brown is trying to ruin western civilization, again.

https://astronomy.com/magazine/2020/01/ ... lanet-nine

https://mikebrown.caltech.edu/

More theoretical data, but I hope he finds it. Will be awesome when he does.

Is there anything more recent than that? I will go for a hunt.

Edit: doesn’t seem to be. All gone a bit quiet from Mike Brown, but of course since that article was published we’ve had Covid-19, so maybe his research has been delayed?

The project I'm working on has Planet 9 as one of the subsidiary science items (goal is too strong a word here). We'll be scanning 70% of the sky to 1 mJy per pixel per day, for 7 years, at wavelengths across the peak of the blackbody spectrum for Kuiper and Oort cloud objects.

Grumble wrote: Fri Sep 10, 2021 5:42 am
Is there anything more recent than that? I will go for a hunt.

Edit: doesn’t seem to be. All gone a bit quiet from Mike Brown, but of course since that article was published we’ve had Covid-19, so maybe his research has been delayed?

Haha I didn't even look at the date of the paper, it came to me as a link to a "news" story that was a few weeks old. Slow news week when you're rehashing theoretical derivations of unseen planets which are perturbing Kuiper belt objects (Plutinos? Minor planets? I can't remember which is which*).

*But I know Pluto, as interesting as it is, ain't no planet. It doesn't clear its orbit. Third criterion fail.

And I'm not sure about it being the primary thing in orbit, as Charon is not that much smaller, and thus they orbit a common center of mass. Are double planets cool? Does that one have wiggle room? Or have those evil astronomers conspired against poor Pluto again?

But if you really think about it, a planetary lineup that had both Pluto and Jupiter would really just not be right. Yes, earth is dinky next to Jupiter, but you can still see it. Jupiter has side-eddies on its smallest storms that would render dinky Pluto null and void.

Actually I found the whole Pluto hullabaloo quite humorous, especially what happened to Neil Degrass tyson with the 5th grader hate mail.

Anyone who likes space and planetary science, especially if you also like history, should watch Parallax Nick on youtube

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC0QdW-H7_l0zh_CoNhlwoBw

Maybe surprisingly little attention has been given to the first completely private crewed orbital space mission.
Proper space tourism. Cost ~ $30 M, about $113 M raised in a raffle for charity.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... ilian-crew

A nice tweet thread from someone we know who is looking to get into sci communications.
https://twitter.com/DrJeniMillard/statu ... 87457?s=20

Might start a new thread as this is really Archaeology and Space.

https://theconversation.com/a-giant-spa ... dom-167678

I had come across the 2015 hypothesis (mentioned in the nature article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3 the author links to) but this obviously has several years more evidence and analysis.

TLDR: There's evidence for a cometary airburst in the Dead Sea area around 1650 BCE. Three cities so fare have been identified as having a destruction layer at that time. With no evidence of military action and at least one was too hot to even be vulcanism.

jimbob wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:15 am Might start a new thread as this is really Archaeology and Space.

https://theconversation.com/a-giant-spa ... dom-167678

I had come across the 2015 hypothesis (mentioned in the nature article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3 the author links to) but this obviously has several years more evidence and analysis.

TLDR: There's evidence for a cometary airburst in the Dead Sea area around 1650 BCE. Three cities so fare have been identified as having a destruction layer at that time. With no evidence of military action and at least one was too hot to even be vulcanism.

Some comments
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 6856282113

https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 0497966089

https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 0854800385

Gfamily wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 10:39 am

jimbob wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:15 am Might start a new thread as this is really Archaeology and Space.

https://theconversation.com/a-giant-spa ... dom-167678

I had come across the 2015 hypothesis (mentioned in the nature article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3 the author links to) but this obviously has several years more evidence and analysis.

TLDR: There's evidence for a cometary airburst in the Dead Sea area around 1650 BCE. Three cities so fare have been identified as having a destruction layer at that time. With no evidence of military action and at least one was too hot to even be vulcanism.

Some comments
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 6856282113

https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 0497966089

https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 0854800385

Yeah as Mark Boslough eventually realizes, it's not a Nature article, it's in Scientific Reports. They publish any old sh.t.

shpalman wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 11:17 am Yeah as Mark Boslough eventually realizes, it's not a Nature article, it's in Scientific Reports. They publish any old sh.t.

Ah Scientific Reports. Or as some of the people who published there call it: Nature's Scientific Reports

Venus as a beautiful new evening star just drifting down through a pinky cloudy haze towards the horizon.

Shatner at t-minus 15 minutes...

https://www.blueorigin.com/

jimbob wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:15 am TLDR: There's evidence for a cometary airburst in the Dead Sea area around 1650 BCE. Three cities so fare have been identified as having a destruction layer at that time. With no evidence of military action and at least one was too hot to even be vulcanism.

Also great to read of the "Evidence for an extraterrestrial impact 12,900 years ago that contributed to the megafaunal extinctions and the Younger Dryas cooling" by the appropriately named Firestone et al.

Tiny single-element Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope :

https://youtu.be/HxwhCmO90UQ

basementer wrote: Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:34 am Tiny single-element Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope :

https://youtu.be/HxwhCmO90UQ

That’s really fun. The video on optical logic gates using interference patterns was good too!

tenchboy wrote: Sun Oct 10, 2021 6:04 pm Venus as a beautiful new evening star just drifting down through a pinky cloudy haze towards the horizon.

Venus should be in focus of our cameras, in the same way as it is in focus of multi-functional exploration missions planned for deep understanding!

Venus is difficult for observation for several reasons:
- atmospheric conditions; it is necessary that the atmosphere is ‘calm’, which is difficult near to horizon
- observing Venus is better during the day, when the contrast between the body planetary and sky is less, the planet's brightness is less.
If it is not about naked eye, polarized filters should be used.

Astra, whose business model is daily launches of cheap expendable rockets, finally reaches orbit.

Pishwish wrote: Sun Nov 21, 2021 1:32 am Astra, whose business model is daily launches of cheap expendable rockets, finally reaches orbit.

Great to see they at least have a real achievement right now. I wish more this kind of productivity to them

Gfamily wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 10:39 am

jimbob wrote: Wed Sep 22, 2021 9:15 am Might start a new thread as this is really Archaeology and Space.

https://theconversation.com/a-giant-spa ... dom-167678

I had come across the 2015 hypothesis (mentioned in the nature article https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3 the author links to) but this obviously has several years more evidence and analysis.

TLDR: There's evidence for a cometary airburst in the Dead Sea area around 1650 BCE. Three cities so fare have been identified as having a destruction layer at that time. With no evidence of military action and at least one was too hot to even be vulcanism.

Some comments
https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 6856282113

https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 0497966089

https://twitter.com/MarkBoslough/status ... 0854800385

Belated thanks for the reference to this Boslough analysis which results in a reasonably clear, but not completely proven, identification of this as clever pseudoscience in the furtherance of religion. Unfortunately the hypothesis was quoted as likely fact in The Economist recently. I initially felt like writing them a letter, but then remembered my previous letters, pointing out they had been conned by clever pseudoscience, got nowhere.

I was thinking about this question for a long period of time. Mars is the planet that is going be colonized sooner or later. And in my mind, the questions about possibilities popped up. And the questions are the following:

1. Civilian fly to space;
2. Civilian cameras to take pictures from space (dragonfly startup which SpaceX and NASA have). When we will have similar cameras?
3. Start of civilian launches to Mars. How many years do we need to launch civilians to Mars on a regular basis?

What do you think about that, guys? Would be interesting to fantasize all together about this topic!

Just knowing that a human was standing on Mars would be amazingly cool.

The resources required to do that would be vast. The resources required to get them off Mars and home again would be staggering. I have a feeling that realising that they'll be stuck there and will not survive for long would take a lot of the shine off the "because it's there" desire to get people to Mars. It would feel like planned failure.

To survive on Mars, people would need a pressurised habitat, probably underground to protect from radiation. Even more staggeringly resource hungry, and would need to be built before the humans arrived. And it would need regular resupply from Earth.

Making it independent of resupply would need (among other things) some kind of terraforming to make agriculture possible, and I suspect even the most ambitious ideas for that would take many thousands of years.

Yes, getting people to Mars is comparatively easy, when you compare it to getting them there and back again.

I liken it to people who argue that Mallory was the first to conquer Everest, because there is some evidence he was the first person to get to the summit. But if he did, he died on the way back down, so he didn't really *conquer* Everest, it conquered him!