Cancer Posted August 15, 2018 Report Share Posted August 15, 2018 Hey, I can only throw rocks around so fast, and Earth is a tiny, wiggling little target. It's not like Jupiter where you almost have to work to miss it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted August 16, 2018 Report Share Posted August 16, 2018 6 hours ago, Cancer said: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=99942;old=0;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=1#orb Pop open the orbit viewer and step forward to about 13 April 2029. The viewer is only approximate, so for the real poop, click "Close-Approach Data" and scope out that date. EDIT: fwiw, 0.0166 LD (LD means "Lunar Distance') ~ 1 Earth radius; and also, 0.0000425 AU ~ 1 Earth radius. Make sure to count the zeros correctly. I'm glad there is no uncertainty in orbital mechanics at all. This bit was also appreciated: Also known as Apep, the Destroyer, Apophis is the Egyptian god of evil and destruction who dwelled in eternal darkness. Fortunately it only weighs 27 billion kg. Cancer 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted August 16, 2018 Report Share Posted August 16, 2018 Double post ungood. Bazza 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted August 24, 2018 Report Share Posted August 24, 2018 Not exactly destroying the Universe, but here's a concept where absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong! Really! Use Artificial Intelligence to look for signals from extraterrestrial aliens Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted August 24, 2018 Report Share Posted August 24, 2018 Look for signals, or reply to them? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted August 24, 2018 Report Share Posted August 24, 2018 Something smart enough to look for and recognize signals from, oh, the Kree ... is surely going to negotiate with those ... Oh, hi, Ultron, whatcha doing? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Logan D. Hurricanes Posted August 24, 2018 Author Report Share Posted August 24, 2018 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted August 25, 2018 Report Share Posted August 25, 2018 I have to fight the Machine Overlords. My daily interaction with electronics tells me I am marked for extermination. And I am the type that has to at least go down futilely fighting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Logan D. Hurricanes Posted August 30, 2018 Author Report Share Posted August 30, 2018 I knew this was going to be trouble. Gravitational Waves Could Collide Sucking Earth Into a Black Hole https://www.newsweek.com/gravitational-waves-could-collide-sucking-earth-black-hole-1097203?utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=NewsweekTwitter&utm_medium=Social Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted August 30, 2018 Report Share Posted August 30, 2018 As I have noted before in contexts like this, the hard part is delivery time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted September 7, 2018 Report Share Posted September 7, 2018 Presented without comment other than a smirk: Asteroid currently being visited looks like ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted September 8, 2018 Report Share Posted September 8, 2018 Come to think, tonight, didn't some of the networks have a benefitting standing up to you? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duke Bushido Posted September 8, 2018 Report Share Posted September 8, 2018 On 8/18/2016 at 12:40 AM, Cancer said: <pet peeve mode> I am just about certain that this illustration, like just about all of them you will find, give an important and drastically wrong impression. There are lots of astrophysical phenomena which are powered by an accretion feeding onto a central massive object; in this case, a black hole. Accretion disk phenomena are difficult to treat, but the above picture gives the impression that the disk is thin compared to the diameter of the central massive object. At the point where the matter is coming down onto the central thing, that may or may not be true. But further out, it is certain NOT the right picture. The accretion disk is a big fat slab of gas, with the gas moving in orbit around the center thing, and grinding against its neighbor gas, which means the faster it goes the hotter it is (and since it moves faster the closer it is to the center, the hotter it is in the middle), and most (?) of the gas gradually makes its way into shrinking orbits and eventually joins the thing in the middle. A fraction of the gas in the periphery of the disk, though, actually moves outward. This slab is fat. Many many times larger than the central object. In the immediate vicinity of the center object, the disk is pinched thinner. This naturally makes it hotter, as the disk material is grinding against more and more of its neighbors, at higher and higher speeds. And Hot equals Bright, in terms of giving off light. Black holes, kind of by definition, are the most compact things in the Universe. So that fat slab of a disk has to pinch down by a very large factor in the center for the material to feed onto the black hole. And, that only happens in space a few times the black hole's size. The traffic problem is ferocious, and most of the time, some stuff has the spectacular crash with something else that's also trying to cut in line, and pieces go flying. And the only way they can go and keep flying is if they go straight out the pole axis (both "up" and "down" out of it). (Lots of pieces don't go that way; those just rejoin the general spiral-in flow once they've bounced around off of everyone else in the vicinity.) The rest just makes for a nastier hotter traffic snarl in the center, as every car in the Los Angeles Basin tries to swirl down the open manhole in the middle of the intersection of Broadway and 1st Street in the middle of L.A. itself. THE BLACK HOLE IS TINY COMPARED TO THE THICKNESS OF THE DISK. All the pretty pictures of this skimpy disk like an old vinyl LP around the midline of a bowling ball is VERY WRONG. The black hole is a single fleck of black pepper in the middle of a big round fountain a foot deep with pancake batter. If you aren't looking direct down the throat of one of the polar axes, you have NO HOPE AT ALL of having a sightline to the black hole. All you see is either the edge of the disk (if you are kind of in the plane of the disk), or a MOFO INSANELY HOT BRIGHT ZIT right in the middle of the disk, maybe sitting in a dimple but it's hard to see that for sure. And if there has been a cosmic crunchola collision very recently, you may also see the insanely hot blast fragments of the incinerated guts of the sumbeech who tried cutting into line feeding the on-ramp, and those blast fragments have been reduced to fully ionized ten-million-degree plasma and are being expelled at very healthy fraction of lightspeed. But this image of the Big Looming All-Consuming Black Orb looming over the paper-thin sheet of stuff feeding into it ... No. WrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongwrongWRONG! </pet peeve mode> Grumble. You know, I am so glad someone brought this thread up into view because it lead to the discovery of this rant. Pet peeves are strange: so much "why can't we make an effort to understand the science we are discussing" vibe in this rant-- all of it totally understandable and, given the media's claims that the are in some small way educating the layman, I would go so far as to say Cancer's frustration is totally justified. Yet in spite of all the righteousness of his unsettlement, it is still _exactly_ how I feel when someone says "hose pipe" or "hot water heater." Go figure. Duke Cancer 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Starlord Posted September 8, 2018 Report Share Posted September 8, 2018 My pet peeves are people who don't spay and neuter their pet peeves and people with pet peeves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted September 8, 2018 Report Share Posted September 8, 2018 On August 18, 2016 at 10:14 PM, Badger said: SIlver Surfer probably busy playing Pokémon Go. Interesting game concept, but with that name, I imagined at one point a game where you had all those weird nasty little pets ... and you had to walk them in the morning. And they all gotta sniff every tree and signpost in the neighborhood. "All of 'em gotta go!" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lucius Posted September 8, 2018 Report Share Posted September 8, 2018 5 hours ago, Duke Bushido said: how I feel when someone says "hose pipe" Hose pipe?? Lucius Alexander The palindromedary isn't sure what to make of that Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted September 8, 2018 Report Share Posted September 8, 2018 ATM machine? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted September 8, 2018 Report Share Posted September 8, 2018 Unique individual? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
novi Posted September 9, 2018 Report Share Posted September 9, 2018 8 hours ago, Old Man said: ATM machine? Oh, come on. We can do better than that Enter your PIN number into the ATM machine. Old Man 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Duke Bushido Posted September 9, 2018 Report Share Posted September 9, 2018 ATM machine and PIN number used to bother me; really they did. But at this point, it's just background noise-- I really think people no longer remember that PIN and ATM actually are acronyms. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Logan D. Hurricanes Posted October 19, 2018 Author Report Share Posted October 19, 2018 Godzilla has been given a constellation! https://comicbook.com/anime/2018/10/18/godzilla-anime-nasa-constellation/ https://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/constellations/pages/godzilla.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted October 20, 2018 Report Share Posted October 20, 2018 After I looked at that picture, I re-noticed your "just as our forefathers intended". I do wonder if Ben Franklin intended to have a constellation in honor of a Japanese monster. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted October 20, 2018 Report Share Posted October 20, 2018 Actually, the minor constellations were still kind of fluid back then, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, IIRC. It wasn't until about a century ago that the boundaries and names were agreed upon once and for all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Badger Posted October 20, 2018 Report Share Posted October 20, 2018 Don't ruin it, I want a Ben Franklin/Godzilla team up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cancer Posted October 21, 2018 Report Share Posted October 21, 2018 Franklin's a bit early for steampunk, but he certainly would have fit in well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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