Space stuff
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Incredible. Much congratulations. There are few more meaningful endeavors for humanity than space exploration.
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And sorry to bring a negative to this thread. But for fucks sake, this use of lack of clarity is pitiful, or is it unwoke to say what actually happened....
"Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause," SpaceX posted on X."
"OK face up to it - you're useless but generally pretty honest and straightforward . . . it's a rare combination of qualities that I have come to admire in you" - Geo 2011
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@Giles "One of our more resource intensive performance vectors..." Quote from the Simpsons parody of the military, wish I knew which episode...
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@Giles space is really hard. They may not know exactly what happened yet, but I agree with you and I despise the dumbing down or obfuscation of information with things like "rapid unscheduled disassembly" phrasing. Just be up front; we don't know yet and will get back when we know.
But today's SpaceX launch was incredible. Even more incredible was this footage of the second stage breaking up over t&c
https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662 -
Beautiful @pechelman !
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Apologies in advance for any existential dread this creates, but here is a to-scale rendering of the solar system if the Moon were 1 pixel: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
If we consider the solar system to include the sun’s gravitational influence all the way out to the farthest suspected reaches of the Oort Cloud, I think the diameter would be something like 6 light years. This is probably the most generous estimate as to the size of the solar system, as you could define the boundary to end at the heliosphere instead. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is something like 100,000 light years. So the most generous sizing of our solar system relative to (divided by) a fairly conservative sizing of the galaxy is 0.00006 or 0.006% of the galaxy’s width if I’ve done my math correctly.
Then the closest major galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away, and the observable universe has a diameter of 93 billion light years. To me the preponderance of evidence suggests that the universe continues infinitely beyond the boundary of this observable universe.
So that’s space. We are less than a speck in it.
What about time?
The universe is thought to be 13.8 billion years old. Most cosmologists believe that the universe will expand infinitely and ultimately reach maximum entropy and conditions where star formation is no longer possible, stars will burn out, and even black holes will evaporate. It will become impossible for life to exist. This will play out over 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, and the dead universe will as far as we can tell continue in this state infinitely. The conditions where life is possible will asymptotically approach non existence over this time scale.
All this to say, we occupy a place in time in space that is beyond infinitesimal and we should embrace this with gratitude.
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Here is a counterintuitive fact. The coldest known place in the solar system is very close to home, on our moon, at 26 kelvins: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermite_(crater)
When you consider how close that is to the sun relative to the size of the solar system that is very surprising. At least to me.
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@sophisto000 stunning.
Looks like it could be, or have been, a star forming region?
Speaking of star forming, it’s fascinating to me that the most extreme physical environments and phenomena stem from the weakest fundamental force: gravity. Turtle beats hare!
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@mclaincausey
http://hendrenimaging.net/astrophotography.html
I’m well out of my depth here. Seeing this thread for the first time, and it made me think of some of the great photos he’s shared with me. There’s a brief description on the photo in the link, hope you enjoy! -
Wow these are fascinating. Thanks again!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_2244
Described as a young region only 5MM years old with a bunch of really big, really hot, really rare stars. Wouldn’t want to be anywhere near it but sure is beautiful to look at.
