The Space Thread

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A new investigation with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface.

https://www.nasa.gov/universe/exoplanets/webb-discovers-methane-carbon-dioxide-in-atmosphere-of-k2-18-b/

Sun Ra applied for a NASA grant to make music for their space program

  On 9/8/2024 at 11:27 PM, decibal cooper said:

Sun Ra applied for a NASA grant to make music for their space program

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It is some cool thing to do but why does it look like a language test for school kids age 12? 

A Hubble Space Telescope image of the host galaxy of an exceptionally powerful fast radio burst, FRB 20220610A. Hubble’s sensitivity and sharpness reveals a compact group of multiple galaxies that may be in the process of merging. They existed when the universe was only 5 billion years old. FRB 20220610A was first detected on June 10, 2022, by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope in Western Australia. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile confirmed that the FRB came from a distant place.

https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/2024/001/01HK5FQ72Z75MJJKSAXFEC8GHV

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-finds-weird-home-of-farthest-fast-radio-burst/

Largest ever black hole jet pair discovered in the distant Universe

An enormous pair of black hole jets has been discovered by an international team of astronomers. Given the nickname Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, the jets are the biggest ever observed, spanning 23 million light years across and having a total power output equivalent to trillions of Suns.

"This pair is not just the size of a solar system or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total," said Dr Martijn Oei, one of the study authors from the California Institute of Technology. “The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions."

https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/largest-ever-black-hole-jets

https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/quantum-physics/stephen-hawking-s-black-hole-radiation-paradox-could-finally-be-solved-if-black-holes-aren-t-what-they-seem

  On 9/21/2024 at 10:28 PM, Rubin Farr said:

https://www.livescience.com/physics-mathematics/quantum-physics/stephen-hawking-s-black-hole-radiation-paradox-could-finally-be-solved-if-black-holes-aren-t-what-they-seem

"The frozen star is a non-singular, ultracompact object that, to an external observer, looks exactly like a Schwarzschild black hole, but with a different interior geometry and matter composition. The frozen star needs to be sourced by an extremely anisotropic fluid, for which the sum of the radial pressure and energy density is either vanishing or perturbatively small. Here, we show that this matter can be identified with the string fluid resulting from the decay of an unstable D-brane or a brane-antibrane system at the end of open-string tachyon condensation. The string fluid corresponds to flux tubes emanating from the center and ending at the Schwarzschild radius of the star. The effective Lagrangian for this fluid can be recast into a Born-Infeld form. When the fluid Lagrangian is coupled to that of Einstein's Gravity, the static, spherically symmetric solutions of the equations of motion are shown to be the same as those describing the frozen star model. Frozen stars can therefore be viewed as gravitationally back-reacted BIons."

Yes I've often thought that.

Seriously though there are some models of black-hole-type things that avoid a singularity and its an interesting approach to take - perhaps singularities just can't happen in the real universe for some reason and we are chasing down a blind alley with all this black hole stuff. It would sortof make sense that "cmon infinitely dense things can't really exist". Another take on this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetospheric_eternally_collapsing_object

  On 9/21/2024 at 11:18 PM, zazen said:

perhaps singularities just can't happen in the real universe for some reason and we are chasing down a blind alley with all this black hole stuff. It would sortof make sense that "cmon infinitely dense things can't really exist". 

Could also be that we're just not using the correct math to treat objects which "appear" to show singularities.

Comet filmed from the ISS

Sunset from ISS

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/10/the-us-militarys-x-37b-spaceplane-is-preparing-for-a-novel-space-maneuver/

unreal

i'm scrolling and i see "NASA sounds alert: stadium-sized asteroid heading straight towards Earth at 16km per second"

of course it's passing by, not impacting. at a distance of 4.6 million miles (19x further than the moon)

so i look to see when it was discovered. september 1st. a month and a half ago

an asteroid that big is bad

there's an online asteroid simulator that's good. input data about an asteroid and it tells you which ones would burn up and how bad the impact would be for those that wouldn't burn up in the atmosphere

https://neal.fun/asteroid-launcher/

so i input the data for this one

• 700 ft diameter
• 36,000 mph
• left it as "iron asteroid" because i can't find data on its composition
• i had it land in a rural area of new jersey
• i left the angle as 45 degrees

the result:

• 2.9 mile wide crater
• An estimated 1,549 people would be vaporized in the crater
• The crater is 1,528 ft deep
• Your asteroid impacted the ground at 35,039 mph
• The impact is equivalent to 918 Megatons of TNT
• More energy was released than all the nukes in the world
• An impact this size happens on average every 23,000 years
• 239 decibel shock wave
• An estimated 19,133 people would die from the shock wave
• Anyone within 12 miles would likely receive lung damage
• Anyone within 15 miles would likely have ruptured eardrums
• Buildings within 26 miles would collapse
• Homes within 35 miles would collapse
• 7,658 mph peak wind speed
• An estimated 222,311 people would die from the wind blast
• Wind within 7.9 miles would be faster than storms on Jupiter
• Homes within 13 miles would be completely leveled
• Within 23 miles it would feel like being inside an EF5 tornado
• Nearly all trees within 38 miles would be knocked down
• 6.4 magnitude earthquake
• An estimated 1,355 people would die from the earthquake.
• The earthquake would be felt 54 miles away

if i set the composition to stone instead of iron it's a little less bad, but still causing an explosion with more energy than all the nukes in the world

i don't feel great that we discovered this a month and a half ago.

Orion 

How to catch 200 foot high explosive tube

Also this shot of it is pretty good

  On 10/31/2024 at 7:35 PM, MaartenVC said:

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Saw it as a monkey like face with a mouth bottom left until I image searched and the Dark Wolf popped out

NGC 2264 Christmas Tree Nebula

M51 via JWST

Star imaged in detail outside the Milky Way for the 1st time

WOH G64 is located a staggering 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite dwarf galaxy companion of the Milky Way. Astronomers have known of the existence of this star for some time, and it has earned the nickname the "behemoth star" because it is an incredible 2,000 times the size of the sun.

Astronomers have captured tens of "zoomed-in" images of stars within the Milky Way, but it has taken until now to capture a star beyond our galaxy with a similar level of detail. WOH G64 has been a target for Ohnaka and colleagues for some time, with the team studying it with the VLTI, located in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, in 2005 and 2007.

https://www.space.com/star-outside-milky-way-wohg64

https://www.spaceaustralia.com/feature/mapping-gravitational-wave-universe

https://www.shiningscience.com/2024/12/james-webb-telescope-confirms-we-have.html?m=1

https://www.scihb.com/2024/12/dark-matter-may-have-existed-before-big.html?m=1