The Space Thread

[Dan Vito Corleone]

16 hours ago, Dougie Do'ins said:

Posted this a while back.

 

My mate is seriously into all things in space and things in the sky. Seriously into it.

 

Anyway, a few years ago now I was telling him I wanted to get a telescope. He asked me why and what I wanted to look at. I said, erm you know, the planets and stuff. He was looking at me like, 'here we go again, another one'.

 

Anyway, he goes on to explain that your lucky to get 30 good viewing nights a year and then you have to take into account a few different other things. Light pollution, the position your house facesas apparently east is best for viewing but most importantly, times and dates. This mate sometimes stays up till the early hours or gets up at 3:00 am onwards in order to see certain things. 

 

I eventually spent £150 (I think) on a telescope. Sure I posted it in here. It was OK to begin with but the setting up and of the thing was a pain in the fucking arse and storing it while in it's tripod was also a pain. The novelty wore off and it ended up going back in the box and becoming a dust collector. I ended up binning it last year.

 

For anyone thinking of taking the plunge, I'd think about the above. Also unless you've got a at least some knowledge of where to even start looking, I'd consider getting a go to telescope.

 

Thanks for the insight here mate. Someone else told me to get a pair of binoculars as there's good views to be had of the moon. 

 

There's a place in between St Helens and Wigan called Billinge Lump which has very little light pollution. I reckon it would be a good place to stargaze. 

[Dougie Do'ins]

Just watched that 8 Days: To The Moon and back. Superb bit of telly. 10/10

 

Get it watched if you haven't already.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0006p5f/8-days-to-the-moon-and-back

 

 

[Redder Lurtz]

On 03/07/2019 at 15:40, Agt Provocateur said:

 

Thanks for the insight here mate. Someone else told me to get a pair of binoculars as there's good views to be had of the moon. 

 

There's a place in between St Helens and Wigan called Billinge Lump which has very little light pollution. I reckon it would be a good place to stargaze. 

Pretty sure I had her at a house party in Hull in 1998 

[Davelfc]

An asteroid about 100 metres in diameter and racing at 24 kilometres a second has just missed the Earth.

The rock, called Asteroid 2019 OK, sped by our planet at 11.22am on Thursday, passing within about 70,000 kilometres – which is a long way away but closer to us than the moon’s orbit. (On average, the distance from Earth to the moon is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km)

 

Due to the trajectory of the asteroid – flying towards us from the direction of the sun – astronomers had no warning it was headed our way.

It is the largest rock to fly at such close quarters to the Earth this year, and possibly for many years.

Astronomers believe the asteroid is between 57 and 130 metres in diameter.

Telescopes only began to pick it up a couple of days ago, with a confirmation it was an asteroid only coming in the past 24 hours.

 

"It’s impressively close. I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet. It’s a pretty big deal," says Associate Professor Michael Brown, from Monash University’s school of physics and astronomy.

"[If it hit Earth] it makes the bang of a very large nuclear weapon – a very large one."

How big?

"It would have hit with over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast at Hiroshima," says Swinburne University astronomer Associate Professor Alan Duffy.

"It's a city-killer asteroid. But because it's so small, it's incredibly hard to see until right at the last minute.

"It's threading tightly between the lunar orbit. Definitely too close for comfort."

 

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed the discovery. The asteroid passed Earth just 73,000 kilometres away, and was sized between 57 and 130 metres in diameter, according to the lab's data.

"This is one of the closest approaches to Earth by an asteroid that we know of. And it’s a pretty large one," says Professor Brown.

By comparison, the rock that killed the dinosaurs was about 16 kilometres across, said Professor Gretchen Benedix, a planetary science researcher at Curtin University.

"It’s not totally out to lunch, these things happen. It’s more rare they happen within a lunar distance," she said.

 

"If that were to hit the Earth, that would be bad. Something 100 metres across would leave a noticeable hole on the planet."

The Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded over Russia in 2013, was only about 20 metres in diameter.

Astronomers typically try to pick up asteroids long before they pass by Earth.

But this one was particularly difficult to see because it was coming toward the Earth from the direction of the sun, Professor Brown said.

 

"It was faint, it was close to the sun. It’s been getting closer to us, getting brighter and brighter, and finally some smaller telescopes have picked it up. Literally, right about now, it’s about 70,000 kilometres from Earth," he said.

A person armed with a pair of binoculars and looking at the right spot in the night sky may even have been able to spot it, he said.

Several dozen smaller asteroids in the six-to-12 metre range fly past Earth at a distance closer than the moon every year, according to NASA.

But such a large rock passing so close is unusual.

"These events are rare. But we know, sooner or later, there's going to be one with our name on it," says Professor Duffy.

Australian National University astronomer Dr Brad Tucker said it may be that many rocks of similar size whizz by close to the Earth – we just don't detect them.

[ZonkoVille77]

Pity it didn't land right on top of Trump's fuckin mush.

[Redder Lurtz]

What's the best space map app out there? Found Google sky map frustrating. Currently using Star Walk 2 which is wank. 

[Dougie Do'ins]

Water found for first time on potentially habitable planet

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49648746

[Bjornebye]

On 28/08/2019 at 07:39, Redder Lurtz said:

What's the best space map app out there? Found Google sky map frustrating. Currently using Star Walk 2 which is wank. 

Just wait until its dark then look up mate. 

[Dougie Do'ins]

Has another interstellar visitor been found?

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49676757

[Anubis]

Forget Clovid 19. Full on extinction beckons....

 

 

 

 

[Bjornebye]

God is fuming at us and I don't blame him. I hope it hits Washington. And I don't wanna miss a thing. 

 

 

[Mudface]

Sadly, it's going to miss by 3.5 million miles. Still, fingers crossed the Yellowstone caldera blows this year, it's well overdue.

[Bjornebye]

25 minutes ago, Mudface said:

Sadly, it's going to miss by 3.5 million miles. Still, fingers crossed the Yellowstone caldera blows this year, it's well overdue.

Nah its in too nice a part of the states. Texas now thats a place I'd like to get fucking battered. Dallas not the borderlands. 

[TheHowieLama]

37 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

God is fuming at us and I don't blame him. I hope it hits Washington. And I don't wanna miss a thing. 

 

 

As if.

 

The Space Force would ride that thing like a bucking bronco as they steered it past the blue planet.

[Mudface]

1 hour ago, Bjornebye said:

Nah its in too nice a part of the states. Texas now thats a place I'd like to get fucking battered. Dallas not the borderlands. 

I'm sure I read somewhere if it does go, it'll cover most of the States with a yard depth of molten ash. You have to take the rough with the smooth, I guess.

[Dougie Do'ins]

16 minutes ago, Mudface said:

I'm sure I read somewhere if it does go, it'll cover most of the States with a yard depth of molten ash. You have to take the rough with the smooth, I guess.

There's a good BBC documentary about that and your right. If it goes off with the force it's expected to, the Sates is pretty much fucked and it's effects wont stop there.

 

Anyway, in other space news.

 

MYSTERIOUS RADIO SIGNAL IS COMING FROM A NEARBY GALAXY, SCIENTISTS ANNOUNCE

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/radio-signal-frb-galaxy-space-universe-fast-burst-a9273356.html

[cloggypop]

Aliens trying to get a ticket for the Palace game, the big match beauts. 

[Bjornebye]

9 minutes ago, cloggypop said:

Aliens trying to get a ticket for the Palace game, the big match beauts. 

Hahahaha 

[Mudface]

Cool. Now that's how to deal with a Coronavirus pandemic.

 

Biggest cosmic explosion ever detected left huge dent in space
Eruption in black hole 390m light years away punched cavity the size of 15 Milky Ways


The biggest cosmic explosion on record has been detected – an event so powerful that it punched a dent the size of 15 Milky Ways in the surrounding space.

 

The eruption is thought to have originated at a supermassive black hole in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is about 390m light years from Earth.

 

Simona Giacintucci, of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, the lead author of the study, described the blast as an astronomical version of the eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980, which ripped off the top of the volcano. “A key difference is that you could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s hot gas,” she said.


Galaxy clusters are among the largest structures in the universe, containing thousands of individual galaxies, dark matter and hot gas. At the heart of the Ophiuchus cluster there is a large galaxy that contains a supermassive black hole with a mass equivalent to 10m suns.

Although black holes are known as sinkholes that consume anything that drifts too close, they also expel prodigious amounts of material and energy. These jets occur when a disk of plasma accretes around the central black hole. When the inward flow reaches a certain limit, a proportion escapes being swallowed by the black hole and is redirected into jets that blast out in two perpendicular beams at close to the speed of light.

In this case, scientists think a jet would have travelled in a narrow beam for a certain distance, then hit something in space, which caused the beam to explode outwards in a burst of radio emissions. Maxim Markevitch, of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, a co-author of the paper, compared the process to a stream of air travelling down a drinking straw and then turning into a bubble at the end of the straw.

The first hints of the giant explosion were spotted by Nasa’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in 2016, which showed an unusual concave edge in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. However, at the time the possibility of this being caused by an explosion was discounted due to the huge amount of energy required to create such a large cavity.

The latest observations combined data from Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory and radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India to provide compelling new evidence for the gigantic explosion.

The observations confirm the presence of the curved edge and also reveal a huge patch of radio emissions tightly bordering the curve, which would correspond to the expected bubble. “This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here,” said Markevitch.

Scientists think the observed explosion may have occurred due to a spike in supply of gas to the black hole, perhaps when a galaxy fell into the centre of the cluster.

The amount of energy required to create the cavity in Ophiuchus is about five times greater than the previous record holder, an event in a galaxy cluster called MS 0735.6+7421, and hundreds and thousands of times greater than typical clusters.

The event is thought to have taken place several hundred million years ago, with the black hole showing no signs of dramatic activity at present.

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

[johnsusername]

My feeble human brain can't comprehend any of that. 

[Mudface]

Just now, johnsusername said:

My feeble human brain can't comprehend any of that. 

Black hole go boom. Bit like your arse after a night on the Guinness and kebabs.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Mudface said:

Cool. Now that's how to deal with a Coronavirus pandemic.

 

 

 

Deonatay Wilder has asked if he can wear one for the rematch.

[dockers_strike]

390 million light years away, that's some distance.

[Mudface]

4 minutes ago, dockers_strike said:

390 million light years away, that's some distance.

The whole thing is mind boggling. I think I posted this before in the same thread, but the sheer scale of it is just astonishing-

 

 

[Numero Veinticinco]

For me, this is the best video that shows the size of the universe. Some try but don’t quite get it.