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A Thread For Random Links


Thrakazog

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  • 2 months later...

Swap out "serial killer" and swap in "plane-bombing terrorist": In his book Most Wanted Particle, particle physicist Jon Butterworth describes carrying a slab of lead tungstate crystal in his luggage from England to CERN in Geneva.  Lead tungstate is a scintillator (it sparkles when you send high-energy particles through it), it is transparent with a slight yellowish tinge, and it's about a factor of 4 more dense than glass; there's a bunch of it in the CMS experiment in the Large Hadron Collider.  It is also quite opaque to x-rays, and the guys with x-ray machines at the security station at the airport were quite puzzled when they come across a block of something that blocks the x-rays but looks otherwise like glass.

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Jet Propulsion Laboratory's "Small Body Database Browser"

 

Enter in the identifier for some asteroid, comet, trans-neptunian object, ..., and it'll barf up some data.  Try "1P/Halley" to get Halley's Comet; or more or less any integer of five digits or less to get one of the "numbered" asteroids (these have good orbital determinations).  Or grab something out of Wikipedia (in particular I recommend some things off the list of "near Earth objects").

 

You'll initially get a wall of numbers, but then click on the "Orbit Diagram" link and you have some interactive graphics you can play with.  N.B.: you'll need a mouse with a scroll wheel to zoom your view in and out (For RSI reasons, I have an old trackball mouse on my office box, which lacks a scroll wheel -- first time I've missed having one).  And if you are looking at a NEO, then click open the "Show close approach data" link too.

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