Three ‘Earth’ sized planets, potentially in the Goldilocks zone, within range and capability of out current atmospheric analysis techniques/technology.
yeah, very exciting, and a little more detail (and pretty artist impressions!) here:
MikeJ
1684
Yeah it sounds like something a mad scientist from Girl Genius would come up with.
SpaceX is in the process of launch a Geostationary satellite and barge landing with a high degree of difficulty.
http://www.spacex.com/webcast
The professionalism and educational value of their webcasts increase each time they do one.
Any new and imagine most veteran Kerbal space players will learn something.
And despite re-entrying at twice the speed of the previous flight, requiring 4 times the energy, and needing to dissipate 8 times the heat. They stuck the landing again.
That is so amazing. I really like in the video where the guy says “we don’t expect to succeed on this one” because of the increased speed, heat and forces involved and then bam, it’s suddenly sitting upright on the pad.
It’s really cool, for me, that it’s private industry that is doing all of this. For a long time they’ve said that if you can make space travel profitable, the private sector will figure out how to do it better than any government agency ever could. That is starting to look more and more accurate as we go, with two innovative corporate giants (and I guess, to a lesser extent, a 3rd if you want to count Branson) driving towards commercializing space.
The stage 1 booster landed on the autonomous drone ship Of Course I Still Love You. Evidently Elon Musk has a sense of humor (and good taste in SF).
Not exactly happening in space, but related and pretty cool.
William Gadoury, 15, was fascinated by the ancient Central American civilization and spent hours poring over diagrams of constellations and maps of known Mayan cities.
And then he made a startling realisation: the two appeared to be linked.
“I was really surprised and excited when I realised that the most brilliant stars of the constellations matched the largest Maya cities,” he told the Journal de Montréal.
In hundreds of years of scholarship, no other scientist had ever found such a correlation.
Studying 22 different constellations, William found that they matched the location of 117 Mayan cities scattered throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. When he applied his theory to a 23rd constellation, he found that two of the stars already had cities linked to them but that the third star was unmatched.
The Canadian Space Agency agreed to train its satellite telescopes on the spot and returned with striking pictures: what appears to be an ancient Mayan pyramid and dozens of smaller structures around it.
Article Link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/10/canadian-teenager-discovers-ancient-mayan-city-lost-in-jungles-o/
Already posted it in the youtube thread, but I can’t get enough of this: yesterdays Mercury transit of the sun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJzvRLsIrYE
It also makes for a great wallpaper: [http://i.imgur.com/R5mAO4x.jpg[/img]"]
]([img)
Awesome!
Please God, let us soon find evidence of life outside of planet Earth (and yes i know this will put you in an awkward situation, but the future of humanity is not yours alone) :)
‘Tightly packed four-planet system formed by planet migration’:
cool.
‘Io’s 10-mile-high mountains result from a shrinking crust’:
Jupiter’s moon Io is notable for being the most volcanically active body in our Solar System. But Io also has some of the highest mountains we’ve seen yet, as well, the tallest rising about 17km above the surrounding terrain—Boösaule Montes is roughly twice the height of Mount Everest. And, unlike Mars’ Olympus Mons, it isn’t volcanic. In fact, many of the moon’s tallest peaks aren’t associated with volcanoes. They don’t form in chains, either, instead rising as isolated blocks roughly 100km across.
Since Io doesn’t seem to have plate tectonics, it’s not obvious what could build these sorts of peaks. But a new study suggests they’re created as a result of volcanism, but only very indirectly. Io’s volcanism, it seems, is emptying its interior out fast enough to create intense stresses on its crust.
very interesting, and i guess a clue that it must be a very unstable body (so not good for building any future science outpost on?).
CraigM
1697
Or the best, just imagine the science bonus on that thing! Must be at least +50%!
Just don’t put people on said science outposts.
I mean, realistically, we just did. We confirmed what we’ve always suspected: that the earth is an utterly common planet, in universal terms, where rare events happen all the time.
When you combine this finding with recent advances in cosmology, which have shown our universe’s beginnings to be fairly inevitable, it makes the prospect that life itself might be eternal seem reasonable. That’s pretty damn romantic. Star dust, eat your heart out.
Where? When? Have we found ‘life’ and i missed it!? i mean clear unequivocal evidence of ‘alien’ (not from planet earth) life? Give us a link for the love of our sanity! :)
(my original remark was based around us needing something solid and concrete to redefine our place in the universe, as our reliance on religion (and i have a great respect for the true messages of nearly all religions, and value that contribution to our evolution as social animals) is not proving ‘unifying’ enough to stop our sleep-walking to extinction)
‘Black hole outburst may starve it of matter in the future’:
Well think about it. We’re not here because some god carved us from the dust of the earth. We’re here because an utterly ordinary star heated a rock with a fortuitous mix of chemicals to the right liquid states, and whatever random event triggered the beginnings of molecular replication. Natural selection & environmental factors take it from there.
Now we know that rock planets in the goldilocks zone are plentiful. They’re not even rare by cosmic standards. Since there’s no reason to suppose there’s anything unusual about our solar system (anymore than anything else we find across the universe), there’s no reason to suppose that there aren’t billions or trillions of similar systems out there. Some percentage of those must have similar chemical compositions, and some percentage of those have probably given rise to life. The one thing we can always count on in a universe this big & old is that rare events are happening all the time in any direction we can point a telescope.
Combining this with recent findings in cosmology, which basically amount to the idea that universes like ours literally do spontaneously appear from a sum total of zero energy, and you have potentially unending chances at recreating the conditions of earth. (My understanding of the physics is about as rudimentary as that sentence, unfortunately.)
So we don’t have any direct observations of it, but we have all the necessary information to make a reasonable assumption that it has probably happened elsewhere.
