amazing science/nature images
The Bad Astronomer explains some odd things about exoplanet findings:
In particular: why doesn't OUR Solar System not have any planets in that 1.2-3 Earth-radius range given their apparent relative abundance in star systems around us? Our Solar System goes from Earth to Neptune (3.8 Earth-radius).
That dip at around 1.6 Earth-radii has been explained at least in part by how at around 1.5 Earth-radius an exoplanet would NOT have enough mass to retain its atmospheric hydrogen. Just a bit larger than that such planets would not lose any of their hydrogen, so most of these exoplanets are more likely to grow to be mini-Neptunes at least a bit more than 2.1 Earth-radii (unless, of course, something--perhaps a proto-Jupiter forming in a close orbit--steals most of that hydrogen away).
In particular: why doesn't OUR Solar System not have any planets in that 1.2-3 Earth-radius range given their apparent relative abundance in star systems around us? Our Solar System goes from Earth to Neptune (3.8 Earth-radius).
That dip at around 1.6 Earth-radii has been explained at least in part by how at around 1.5 Earth-radius an exoplanet would NOT have enough mass to retain its atmospheric hydrogen. Just a bit larger than that such planets would not lose any of their hydrogen, so most of these exoplanets are more likely to grow to be mini-Neptunes at least a bit more than 2.1 Earth-radii (unless, of course, something--perhaps a proto-Jupiter forming in a close orbit--steals most of that hydrogen away).
Tardis obviously.
If a boat is a hole in the water you throw money in, do you really want your ship to come in?
Aw, he's no fun, he fell right over.
Science is Truth for Life. In FORTRAN tongue the Answer.
...so I'm supposed to find the Shadow King from inside a daiquiri?
Science is Truth for Life. In FORTRAN tongue the Answer.
...so I'm supposed to find the Shadow King from inside a daiquiri?
Neither do we. Our brains do a hell of a lot of processing to create what we consider "reality", and it takes several milliseconds (11-12ms on average) for it to finally pop out of the pipeline. Everything we experience happened a small time before we realized it, and there are a tremendous number of processing shortcuts to make it that fast. It's the basis for why illusions work - we can sort of hack those perceptual shortcuts for fun and profit.
This is why, if I had to choose, my second choice of ways to go would be by massive explosion. Your nervous system would be completely obliterated before it had time to even realize something was wrong.
origin of "hypervelocity stars" possibly identified
pretty amazing to imagine that scenario ... boggles the mind
Now, a team of astronomers has used position and velocity data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as well as computer simulations of stellar evolution in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC, pictured above), a small satellite galaxy near the Milky Way, to show that these speeding stars may come from there. Lower velocity runaway stars can be produced when one half of a binary pair explodes as a supernova, blasting its partner away. Such an event in the LMC, which has 10% of the Milky Way’s mass, could easily eject it from the satellite galaxy altogether.
pretty amazing to imagine that scenario ... boggles the mind
"TOS ain’t havin no horserace round here. “Policies” is the coin of the realm." -- iDaemon
It's been posted before, but this has a link to the rest of them.
