Or the GC expressly hired for that purpose, for that matter
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Originally posted by Lang Spoon View PostSpace is the Place if yr Sun Ra. We're never going to do it properly, are we? So much spunked money for nothing, it's going to be nasty autocrat wanker regimes and Cosmic Disruptor East India Companies fighting proxy wars in our shitey solar system till this shitehole Terra rots completely and a few poor cunts are left stranded on even more blasted Mars.
i kinda Hope Musk loses the first space fought thermonuclear war over control of the asteroid belt, whatever happens.
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Space is the Place if yr Sun Ra. We're never going to do it properly, are we? So much spunked money for nothing, it's going to be nasty autocrat wanker regimes and Cosmic Disruptor East India Companies fighting proxy wars in our shitey solar system till this shitehole Terra rots completely and a few poor cunts are left stranded on even more blasted Mars.
i kinda Hope Musk loses the first space fought thermonuclear war over control of the asteroid belt, whatever happens.
I think you might underestimate just how mind bogglingly big the Asteroid belt is, or just how far apart each asteroid is. It's in the region between a third and half a trillion kilometers from the sun, so that's a pretty big circumference, and on average each asteroid is a million km from the next one. As for everything else Governments don't spend very much on space. NASA only gets $20 bn a year, which is about 0.1% of US GDP. European Space Spending is not far off that figure in total. Governments really don't spend very much on space in the sense you're thinking of at all. There's loads of money for miltary satellites. There's loads of money to be made in communications satellites.
In terms of human activity in space, we are emerging from a real low point, but But if you leave "Meatbags" out of it, there's an awful lot going on. For A start, there's people making a hell of a lot of money in space. It's mostly satellite operators, but the total value of commercial space, is about $360 Bn. SpaceX is about $2 bn of that, so they're really small fry. A good rule of thumb in the recent past was, You would pay $100 million, to launch a satellite that cost $500 million, that would make you $5-10 bn over 10 years). This whole market is about to change and grow massively.
NASA does huge amounts of stuff that you don't necessarily think about. Right now there's a table sitting on mars, with a load of instruments, studying the solid core of mars with instruments of unimaginable sensitivity. We've only ever examined the core of one planet before. We are going to learn a lot about Mars, and by extension Earth. NASA does loads of planetary stuff. We've got better maps of mars than we did of earth well into the 20th century. They Took a right good look at Pluto last year, and they've examined a couple of asteroids. Right Now the probe Osiris Rex is orbiting an asteroid, mapping it, and trying to figure out where to go down to try and grab 2 kgs of the surface, and send it back. ESA and JAXA are about to start investigating Mercury in a big way. Nasa runs a bunch of space Telescopes. Hubble does the visible spectrum, the Chandra X-ray observatory is even bigger than hubble, and there's the Spitzer telescope which is an infra-red telescope that is clinging onto life, 15 years after it was supposed to die. Hubble itself is starting to break down after an extraordinarily long career. The Thing about Hubble is that it is basically a National Reconnaisance Office satellite that is pointed away from Earth. Apparently when they were constructing Hubble, Someone from the NRO turned up with two telescope mirrors that they no longer needed. They were so massive that I suspect NASA may have been overwhelmed with questions, like a) Humans can't make something like this, Is this of Elven manufacture? b) Just exactly how much did this cost and c) exactly how much money do you have, that you can just give two of these to us?
Anyway, one of the mirrors is in Hubble, and the other is going to be in the WFIRST, which is basically hubble, but able to stare at 100 times as much area at the same time, in the same detail, and the James Watt Space telescope which is a actually built, but they're still testing it. It's 10 years over due, and has cost nearly $10 bn, but If you watch this you might see why. Of Course it took longer to do, and cost more than they thought it would. This is just an extraordinary thing. It's going to stare back to very near the start of the universe. God help them if it doesn't work. This video goes through the ones they want to build next. The Parker Solar probe is soon going to be flying through the corona of the sun, at 200 kms per second. There really is loads and loads of stuff happening.
The thing that isn't going so well is Manned Spaceflight. The ISS, has been on the go for nearly 20 years and is really starting to show its age, but it has been extended out to 2030. We've learned huge amounts of knowledge from the ISS about living in space, and they learned huge amounts in turn from Mir, and salyut before them. They weren't up in Skylab all that long but you've got to start somewhere. There are two main problems with the ISS. There should be six people on it, but it's been down to 3 for a long time, because you could only fly Soyuz up to the space station. And the ISS requires so much maintenance,that 2 of them on average are doing maintenance, leaving only one "person equivalent" to actually do science things. That's why this dragon mission last week is important. We're really only scratching the surface of knowing how to do things in microgravity. They've made a lot of progress, but it should really be a lot faster. and if you have four people doing experiments, and two people running around with spanners, and a worried look, you'll get a lot more done.But this is going to change very quickly.
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Two questuons:
1. How big is the black hole? I've seen reports suggesting it is the size of our solar system, then others saying it is "a billion times the size of Earth" which sounds an awful lot smaller.
2. Why does the surrounding disk of stuff appear brighter on one side than the other? Is that the side pointing at us, something like that? I'd have expected the disk to be uniform in brightness?
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The inside edge of the accretion disk or the outer edge we can see?
And as for it being 6 billion times the mass of the sun, isn't the thing about a black hole that all of that mass is compressed into a very small space - so the actual object at the centre of this might be smaller than the sun?
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Most black holes are in the order of 10-1000 solar masses so will be tiny in area.
6.5 billion solar masses is going to be fairly big even when compressed by gravity. And don't forget, the bit we can "see" ie. Outside the event horizon, isn't strictly speaking the black hole. It's the gravitational effect of the black hole. So the more massive the hole, the bigger the event horizon. But there'll still be some sort of singularity in the middle.
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Originally posted by Rogin the Armchair fan View PostTwo questuons:
1. How big is the black hole? I've seen reports suggesting it is the size of our solar system, then others saying it is "a billion times the size of Earth" which sounds an awful lot smaller.
2. Why does the surrounding disk of stuff appear brighter on one side than the other? Is that the side pointing at us, something like that? I'd have expected the disk to be uniform in brightness?
Indeed, the image is extremely similar to the theoretical ones produced by modelling the hole in advance. Close enough to raise an eyebrow about and want to know the robustness testing of their image processing algorithms, which presumably will be covered in great detail in the proper papers stemming from this work. Because, of course, this isn't a straight image in the generally accepted sense but a composite constructed from reams of data from multiple telescopes on multiple nights of observation, and an awful lot of signal/noise optimisation. And, well, when data is being processed by algorithms and the output is exactly what you expected to get, then one wonders a little if there was a selection bias on how the numbers were crunched.
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Originally posted by Wouter D View PostXkcd has your back:
Last edited by Rogin the Armchair fan; 11-04-2019, 10:41.
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Voyager 2 went beyond the Heliopause last year. That is approximately 3 times further than the orbit of Neptune (marks deducted for Xkcd for not using a planet on their graphic). Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune was in 1989. That was 12 years after it's launch. Since then, it has had another 30 years to travel further.
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