♪♫ caek's corner ♪♫

Not my area at all but here’s a couple of posts on it by reliable scientists

https://telescoper.wordpress.com/2022/04/09/massive-excitement/

https://profmattstrassler.com/2022/04/08/a-few-remarks-on-the-w-boson-mass-measurement/

oh! thanks!

The James Webb Space Telescope analysing sound from the heart of the galaxy is amazing. I had no idea this was possible
(film courtesy of NASA) pic.twitter.com/mrOQ0LnlB6

— Chris (@justachrisaway) March 29, 2022

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098472567/image-black-hole-milky-way?t=1652362048265

https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/05/12/black-hole-milky-way-bb0124cb43ed0a77533657759baa424f5d5fce7c-s800-c85.webp

itt: stanm posts hole

pictured: the day after spicy food

how many billions of years do I have to wait before I'm pulled into the giant black hole?

make it now, please

dynamically extremely difficult for anything other than dust and gas to get pulled into a black hole, sorry for your loss.

you might get lucky when we collide with andromeda in 5bn years, but both galaxies are almost entirely empty space, so probably not.

i can wait

fun fact: you could easily fit all the other planets in the gap between the earth and the moon.

cannot stress enough how empty space is.

Andromeda, the closest galaxy, is 2.5 million light years away. 2.5 million years ago, the first homo habilis started to evolve. If humans could travel at the speed of light (in stasis, I suppose), look around a bit, make friends with some andromedans and then come back, what species would they report to, 5 million years in the future? (if they managed to find the solar system and Earth again and something was still alive here, that is).

And that is our closest neighbouring galaxy, remember.

there's a lot of space in space.

[cue Hawkwind's "Space Is Deep"]

dust and gas

ease yourself into
a body bag

A perspective view on Jupiter with artificial vertical relief applied. Processed using @NASAJuno imagery from Perijove 26https://t.co/5EVEk1zX8c pic.twitter.com/N5qlmYLCwT

— Kevin M. Gill (@kevinmgill) August 20, 2020

beautiful!

no.

uh oh, downvotes for Jupiter

"Upset stomach? Try Pepto Bismol."

"Upset stomach? Try Pepto Bismol."

*hiccup*

I stand with mookie

jwst about to do it

https://www.nasa.gov/nasalive
https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

me after a few pints

https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01GFRYYRTCTMX197BY86MBFCR9.png

that's where Tar Trek happens

damn whut

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2022/053/01GFRYSFM89AFADVAA0W625BSB?news=true

caek, would you be trying to submit propopsals for using jwst if you were still doing astronomy research, or would that not be especially relevant to the research you did/too much of a hassle/unlikely to succeed given jwst's priorites/etc.?

you're right that generally you use ground telescopes if possible, because getting time on them is less competitive. ground data was usually fine for my research area. i only used archival hubble data a couple of times, and never actually applied for new observations.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgQuVotWQAQ_biQ?format=jpg&name=medium

I get that space is fucking huuuge but what I find most startling about this scaling here is not how big "the pillars of creation" is, it's how big the oort cloud is that I find most mind boggling. Like how can a humble medium sized star exert such an enormous field of gravitational influence? Not really a question but wtf!

Because space is so so empty I guess, there are no other stars near the Oort cloud objects so the sun wins by default.

Right. Gravity is an incredibly weak force. It falls with distance squared so it’s tiny at the distance of the Oort Cloud. But it’s the only game in town.

was reading abou t this in a Carl Sagan book

https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2010/11/15/a-focal-mission-into-the-oort-cloud/

an incredibly weak force

stop

also someone tell me where proxima centauri's oort cloud is on that graph

gravity gets so much respect because it was the first 'invisible' force that was detected and quantified and also because we instinctively respect massive objects like stars and planets more than subatomic particles

"also someone tell me where proxima centauri's oort cloud is on that graph"

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star with a mass about 12.5% of the Sun's mass

I'd guess not very far at all, but also simultaneously much further than you'd expect!

awesome

i looked this up. apparently we have never observed an oort cloud around another star system, but based on what we know about how the one around the sun formed we would expect many/most stars to have one. given ours gets half way to proxima centauri it's not out of the question they overlap if PC does have one.

oort fite!

Andoortagain

thoughts on this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

Never heard of it. Looks clever in the best and worst ways.

write a better lede

https://www.science.org/content/article/near-disaster-federal-nuclear-weapons-laboratory-takes-hidden-toll-america-s-arsenal

Technicians at the government's Los Alamos National Laboratory settled on what seemed like a surefire way to win praise from their bosses in August 2011: In a hi-tech testing and manufacturing building pivotal to sustaining America's nuclear arsenal, they gathered eight rods painstakingly crafted out of plutonium, and positioned them side-by-side on a table to photograph how nice they looked.

it can't be done

Homer Simpson on the job

pics or it didn't happen

There are pics in the article

https://frinkiac.com/video/S05E03/99U3CK0l_3KajDa3RTOkLp_iB00=.gif

terrifying story, astonishing that intelliegent and qualified people can get so lax around that stuff. not all bad news though, "undermining the nation's ability to fabricate the cores of new nuclear weapons" oh no.