Exeter's space thread!

rip

 

The latest photo from New Horizons, a high definition colour photo of Charon!

 

Well Charon looks to me like a bath bomb and Pluto wants to give everyone love because of its visible heart shape.

 

According to a new exoplanet indexing system, we have a few planets that score HIGHER than earth for potential habitability.

 

Earth is only habitable because microorganisms terraformed it for billions of years. There are planets out there that are ALREADY better terraformed than the early earth was and would be if not for all kinds of organic processes. In star trek these are M-Class Planets. In Mass Effect these are Garden Worlds.

 

I used to have a big interactive pad that taught all about the planets when I was a kid. I spent hours with it. It gave all sorts of cool facts about every planet.

I could never keep straight which planets we had visited, and which we hadn't. One day, I finally took inventory.

You can imagine how sad I was.

 

Stuff in space isn't flat, it has structure!!!!!!!!!!

 

Possibly the best thing ever. It's really cool how the stars in the foreground at the bottom appear to trace out a huge rippling sheet.

 

Oh my god! That's amazing!

 

Oooooooo there is really interesting evidence for a massive planet beyond the orbit of Pluto! It explains the alignments of a bunch of the trans-Uranian objects, predicts the existence of more, and could actually be found pretty much immediately now that we know where to look! If it's close most telescopes will be able to pick it out. But if it's at the farther end of its predicted orbit, we'd need the biggest and best telescopes to spot it.

http://www.caltech.edu/news/caltech-researchers-find-evidence-real-ninth-planet-49523

It's also notable that it fits into the range that most planets we see out there occupy. Stars are invariably host to a crew of small rocky worlds, some hot, most cold, and big gassy planets like the one that this research predicts. Huge gas giants like our big four are less common it seems, so our system is a little unusual without a planet like the one we seem to have discovered!

Now all we have to do is confirm it and the IAU will probably take a vote for a name!

 

Big and gassy? All in favor of naming it Planet Taco Bell say aye!

 

This info pleases me

 

We actually don't know for sure. Mass is mass, whether it's gassy or rocky remains to be seen

 

A galaxy hidden behind all the stars and dust and clouds of the milky way. It's only 10 million lightyears away!

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35524440

 

It's super fascinating! Up to 300,000 years after the big bang the universe was full of opaque plasma, so when we look out at the depths of spacetime, we hit a point where we can't see any further because light wasn't able to get around the universe back then. But now we have techniques that can help probe the early universe. Now we can see gravitational waves that travelled through that plasma and get a glimpse at a stage of the universe's life we've never seen before!

 

Not sciencey, just a pretty cool picture.