Viewing profile — throwaway_yy2Di

It's easy to tell computer engines aren't analyzing perfectly, because when we tell to them to play themselves, they lose a large fraction of their games, as both colors. Perfect p…

Apropos, to anyone who wants to watch the live moves, with expert commentary, they are here (this is the defendant from the Reuters story): https://chess24.com/en/read/news/chess24…

Not my workaround: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/titan-callin... http://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/seminars/abstracts/viewgraphs/H... This was an extremely serious bug…

Apropos, the Gaia space telescope's first data release is next week. It's an extremely large dataset of the kinematics (3d position + velocity) of Milky Way stars. http://www.cosmo…

...tidally locked, possibly losing their water and atmosphere in tens or hundreds of millions of years. How would this happen?

Here's a better answer on /r/askscience: Can we directly image the planet from earth? 1. "The planet/star contrast is 10^-7 " This basically means for every 10,000,000 photons from…

To piggyback on this, the Nature paper (which is paywalled) has a free preprint version here: http://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/es... (PDF)

However, there is reason to hope that the even larger European Extremely Large Telescope will have enough resolution (about 5e-8 radians? hard to tell from their official publicati…

You're exactly right; good catch.

Yes, because the lifespan of low-powered red dwarfs is vastly longer than the sun's. The wiki page cites a figure of 4 trillion years (!) for Proxima: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

The planet is about 0.05 AU from Proxima Centauri, meaning we need an angular resolution of about 1.9e-7 radians to even distinguish it from its host star. Is that realistic? Much …

I don't think JWST could even resolve it from its parent star, judging by [0]. They're too close together. Proxima Centauri has a luminosity of 0.0017 suns [1], so Earth-like condi…