JCC Space Thread

Discuss your favorite space related topics.

Planets, brown dwarfs, quasars, stars, moons, SpaceX, the whole gamut!

 

@anakinfansince1983
@PymParticles

Within a few years we’ll see people returning to space in usable/partially reusable rockets (NASA, SpaceX). Are you brave enough to hop on a ride one day?

 

No, I'd go nuts I wouldn't trust myself in space. 10 mins in and I'd have smeared my face with manure from the eco-pod and be stalking the deck in a military tank top looking for people to manipulate out of the airlock.

 

I like all the pictures we get from it. Looks awesome.

 

Space: Amiright guys?!

 

Black holes have always fascinated me.

 

Just the fact that we've managed to detect planets in other solar systems delights me to no end. I never thought we would see any real evidence of extrasolar planets in my lifetime.

... then again, I never thought we'd return to the moon in my lifetime, and that prediction has been true so far.

 

I never thought we'd see a car launched into space just for the heck of it in my lifetime, but there it is.

 

As the world’s most elaborate geek joke no less.....

 

Get me off this goddamn rock.

 

To be honest, I liked Elon Musk... before this summer. Now he's just having a Charlie-Sheen-level meltdown, it seems.

 

Pluto is still a planet ; change my mind

 

Any classification that would keep Pluto as a planet requires multiple so-called planetoids to be reclassified as planets, therefore still invalidating your nostalgic attachment to the nine planet structure and would ultimately leave you just as existentially unfulfilled. Pluto being or not being a planet is thus ultimately meaningless to your inevitable disappointment with the outcome, therefore we ought to prioritize the option with a smaller number of valid selections.

 

Me as well. What’s amazing is that Einstein’s ‘Miracle Year’ where he published four ageless papers predicted on paper the existence of black holes (others before Einstein also predicted it). Eventually we looked up in the sky and found them. Amazing that a stellar object could be predicted on paper first.

The movie Interstellar does a great job of showing the effects of a black hole on time. One of the revelations from Einstein is that time is not a man made concept but a ‘thing’. Something that can be warped, especially around a black hole. A person trapped in a black hole would appear to never reach it (even though they already fell in). From that persons perspective the outside world (billions of years) would flash by.

Another crazy thing about black holes is that singularities have infinite gravity and density. If you fall into a black hole you would never stop falling into an increasingly smaller hole, figuratively speaking.

 

My very good mother just gave us nine ...

Nine what mind you? It's used to be nine pizzas but not anymore! They ruined it! You could say gave us nuggets, but nine pizzas would be better!

 

Black holes sucking in stuff and crushing it into an infinitely dense singularity...that makes intuitive sense to me. But then I read some more, and there's this stuff about spin, Hawking radiation, "black holes have no hair", and black holes dissipating away over a long period of time...and then I just get lost and confused.

 

Well, I just wasted a nice chunk of time reading about Pluto, dwarf planets, the IAU definition of a planet, and how Mass Effect 1 was released before the reclassification, and Mass Effect 2 had to retcon that.

 

Astrophysicists need to recognize that from a cultural standpoint, Pluto is one of the 'classic' Nine Planets. Also, that the whole 'dwarf planet' category is a misnomer - I'll never consider Ceres, an asteroid, as any kind of planet, dwarf or otherwise.

Hawking radiation is fascinating, and is his claim to fame within the physics community; the idea is that there is always an energy density associated with spacetime, and that this causes particle-antiparticle pairs to constantly form and then meet again to convert back into energy. Hawking showed that near a black hole, the black hole would absorb the antiparticle, meaning that the particle would escape and the black hole would lose energy. The riddle that was only recently solved was the information paradox, because normally radiation tells you something of the object producing the radiation - but the unique nature of Hawking radiation meant that no information about the black hole was being revealed. Someone likened it to having a bag of Scrabble letters and always pulling out a "Q" no matter what actual letters were in the bag.

Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the atomic bomb project, had his big physics papers in the 30s laying out much of the early theoretical descriptions of black holes.

 

If Hawking radiation worked like that, then doesn't it mean that all celestial bodies are "leaking" mass and gravity is being defied?

 

It requires an event horizon to work, which only a black hole possesses.

 

Pfft, it was discovered in the 1930s, that's not classic, that's the avant-garde.

Although apparently we're about to go through a new round of serious arguments about this regardless because there's disagreement with the precedent the IAU cited. Wheeee~.

 

Still within the classic period of astronomy.

Besides, as any HP Lovecraft fan knows, it's Yuggoth. The mi-go don't put their bases on any ****ing scrub 'dwarf planet'.