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Science thread for space and earth and life and just all of that
BahamutZERO
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Science stuff is cool!
Some people are rich dipshits who like to use science as a coolness smokescreen for being horrible parasitic con artists!
Some people are rich dipshits who like to use science as a coolness smokescreen for being horrible parasitic con artists!
BahamutZERO on
+13
Posts
Really wish I didn't have to drive as far to get away from the light pollution around here.
We had near perfect weather and only had a small amount of hazy clouds in the area so I was able to see a handful from my deck. But it was unfortunately a far cry from the dozens per second they were hoping for.
You can explain that.
So uhhhhhh the last 16 years of Alzheimer's treatment research might have been based on a largely falsified study, which would explain why none of the drugs designed to treat the thing that paper convinced people was a targetable primary cause have worked in human trials
$56k a dose for this
Steam
Exciting for two reasons: first is that definite Denisovan remains and signs are so sparse, found only in Denisova Cave itself, and Tibet so far. Second is that Denisovan DNA has only been found in Australian Aborigines and Pacific Islanders, so it had been hypothesized before that Denisovans may have ranged more through Asia and Denisova Cave may actually have represented their furthest northwestern limits.
There's still also the possibility that other fossils that have already been discovered and labeled as "Neanderthal" or "archaic human" and then stuffed in a drawer may also be Denisovan, as that was actually the case for the Tibetan fossil.
Okay, so this is a doozy.
We have, for the first time, seen the light of a star* Billions of light years away. Capital 'B', Billions.
This is not easy to do.
For reference, the Milky way is about 50,000 LY across. Andromeda, our neighbour galaxy, is about 2 million LY away.
This star is 28 Billion light years away. More than 10,000 times more distant than Andromeda.
Now, normally you can't see anything this far away. Seeing a single star system beyond our immediate neighbourhood even within the Milky Way is difficult. Seeing a star in another galaxy is usually right out... unless we get exceptionally lucky with some gravitational lensing, magnifying a single point like, well, a magnifying lens hundreds of light years wide, bringing that light to a single point focussed here on Earth. Even then, seeing individual stars in other galaxies is still exceptionally novel and rare, a fluke on a cosmologically infintesimal scale. Fortunately, we have an entire universe to search through and get lucky.
So, we've been able to pick out the light from this star 28 billion light years away. The light didn't travel for 28 Billion years to get to us here, though. I mean, for starters, the universe is only about 13 Billion years old. The light was able to reach us because the universe used to be much smaller, and it used to be closer.
Which is also why it is now beyond our ability to ever affect it, ever.
Even if we shot back a message at the speed of light, back the other way through the gravitational lens... it would never reach its destination. The universe's expansion means that actually right now, any message, light, information we send out - will only get so far before the expansion of the universe means it won't ever get any further. That limit - essentially, a sort of event horizon for Earth - is about 15 billion light years. Nothing that happens on Earth will ever propogate more than 15 billion light years away.
So we can see this star thanks to a momentary fluke of galactic harmony - but will never be able to pass any information back.
Anyway, space is really big and fucks with your head.
*:
Finally got another paper from the Tanis site that formed minutes after the Chicxulub impact. The fossils found there all show consistent evidence of having died in the spring. This was something that actually had been hypothesized before due to patterns such as greater species diversity among a lot of older lines in the southern hemisphere and migratory birds mostly being Southern Hemisphere-ancestry birds that fly north rather than the other way around.
Also I'm glad there's still work being done there, since there was the big announcement of the site and then only little dribs and drabs after that (like this abstract from a colloquium that's just no-selling that they found a pterosaur egg when there had been paleontologists who believed that pterosaurs were already in decline if not extinct already by KT), despite all the hints of even more amazing finds there.
That's reasonable, clouds are pretty quiet.
name the probe to uranus
Because Uranus deserves the baddest dragon
at least they know the crew capsule escape system works
Wew, commercial spaceflight!
glad there was no one in it to get hurt at least
Check back in this evening to watch the DART mission smack the shit out of some smug asteroid who has it coming. Impact is estimated just before 7:15 EDT, stream starts at 6:00.
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
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Super nice dude too.
space rockkkkkks
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
Animated GIF of observations of the impact from the ATLAS project observatory in South Africa.
I was certain this was gonna fade to black and then be the beginning of Skyrim.
was expecting it to zoom in on a dickbutt
Thanks, brave little space robot. You did good, and we're proud of you.