JCC The All-New, All-Different JCC Astronomy Thread

New New (erm) Horizons photos of Pluto and Charon from today:

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-and-charon-new-horizons-dynamic-duo

I dunno guys I'm upset my astronomy kids books were all wrong. Pluto is not a gray uniformly-cratered sphere. My childhood was a lie.

 

To see colour photographs of Pluto is absolutely extraordinary.

 

My school books always had Pluto as purple, because the Solar System was supposed to be like a rainbow or something.

But yeah, Pluto was always my favorite, the mysterious misfit. Awesome to finally see clear pictures of it!

 

Getting to Pluto in a decade

 

the women of New Horizons

 

Pluto...

 

Very (n)ice... And not in a galaxy far far away....

 

Charon, the best-known moon of Pluto...

 

More Pluto news...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/scientists-just-got-first-glimpse-164300066.html

Its sky is blue, and its atmosphere extends more than 1000 miles (even higher than Earth's).

 

If you can get up early enough to see it the Moon and Jupiter and Nevus and Mars are all lined up right now. I have been up and out between 4 and 6 am.

 

The space news just isn't stopping, now they've found lots of frozen water on Pluto!

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/first-photos-water-pluto-challenging-180313134.html

 

Mars is hella faint, but it's easy to see if you know to look for it.

 

I recently took a free tour of NASA's Jet Propulsion lab and I have to say, I highly recommend it. Life sized models of many of their probes and rovers, a visit to the massive clean room where they are assembling test vehicles for Mars 2020, and of course their mission control. You can see the control stations for Curiosity, Galileo, etc. And see what data the Deep Space Network is currently sending and receiving for missions from many countries. Very, very cool tour.

 

In non-Pluto, non-water news... scientists have discovered a very unusual Star they plan to investigate further:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/

 

Many headlines are calling this a potential alien artifact. Others not so much

 

After my department's colloquium this past Friday, we had a lively discussion about the causes. It seems like there are not many common options that could account for a 20 percent non-periodic decrease in a star's flux.

Although...

 

You have to admit, the natural theory is also pretty alarming - comet fragments or a swarm of comets. You think about it and realize that it would need to be a crapton of comets (some large object passing through the system's Oort cloud and knocking a bunch of stuff closer to the star), or some very, VERY large comets or comet fragments. Neither of those options sound like a picnic for any potential inhabitants of that star system.

Of course, if it is a Dyson array/system (whatever it is that isn't a sphere), then it would be an interesting find and also lead to more questions than answers. What would the energy gathered by this array be used for? Are the users friendly? Do they have any idea that somebody else can see this? Is this a passive sort of way to show off their intelligence to other races in the galaxy who cannot yet figure out interstellar travel? Of course, nobody will jump the gun and say "ALIENS!!", but you have to admit that most everybody who has read up on this has likely had similar thoughts to some degree or another.

 

"It's Unicron!"

 

Missing mass of the Universe

 

wolf 1061

3 planets. The middle one is 4.3 times the mass of Earth. But, it is a red dwarf and hence in the Goldilocks Zone.

 

Penis - shaped asteroid to pass by Earth on Christmas Eve.

Thanks for upping this VadersLaMent.