51–60 of 182 posts
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Because it just so happens that Forbes has an article about astronomy.
Yes, but it's probably rubbish clickbait. They locked me out of the site when I opted out of tracking. Good riddance and I look forward to their receiving a hefty fine from the EU for GDPR non-compliance.
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I did no math to confirm this but intuitively it seems incredibly unlikely to hit a rogue planet if you shoot something to a star randomly. How's it any different than shooting something inside Solar system and accidentally hitting an asteroid?
Collisions are not the problem. Gravitational perturbation is the problem. If most planetary systems are anything like this one, planetary orbits are quasi-stable, and a visitor could easily destroy that stability. It would take a while for that to play out - anything from months for a very unlikely very near miss, to many millennia for a distant visit.
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The article states that planets may outnumber stars 100,000 to 1. The Milky Way has 4E^11 stars. It has an upper estimate of 4E^16 planets. It has a lowest estimate diameter of 100kly. It has an estimated thickness of 2kly. It's lower estimate volume is 63,000 kly^2. ----------------------------- If planets are uniformly disrupted (they surely aren't), there are ~17 planets in every cubic light year. Sure, that's a h…
> ~17 planets in every cubic light year. The change of hitting one while traveling one light year is in the order of 10e-16.
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Yes, but it's probably rubbish clickbait. They locked me out of the site when I opted out of tracking. Good riddance and I look forward to their receiving a hefty fine from the EU for GDPR non-compliance.
The title doesn't seem to embellish the article, and others are noting that the author is credible. Sorry to hear that you were blocked from being able to read it.
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The title doesn't seem to embellish the article, and others are noting that the author is credible. Sorry to hear that you were blocked from being able to read it.
The author is not credible - he posts almost every day and he doesn't understand half of it. It's just fluff.
Interstellar travel now seems a lot more hazardous than it did before. To quote one of my TAs in college, "it's the stuff you can't see that gets you" ...
Interstellar travel now seems a lot more hazardous than it did before. To quote one of my TAs in college, "it's the stuff you can't see that gets you" ...
The article states that planets may outnumber stars 100,000 to 1. The Milky Way has 4E^11 stars. It has an upper estimate of 4E^16 planets. It has a lowest estimate diameter of 100kly. It has an estimated thickness of 2kly. It's lower estimate volume is 63,000 kly^2. ----------------------------- If planets are uniformly disrupted (they surely aren't), there are ~17 planets in every cubic light year. Sure, that's a h…
The earth itself is only 0.02 light seconds in diameter, yielding a cube of 8000 cubic lightmilliseconds. Compared to the 2.910^31 cubic light milliseconds in a cubic lightyear... It's a rounding error inside a rounding error.
For light seconds, you're looking at 2.910^22 (if my math isn't wrong). That's the amount of cubes fitting between earth and moon to fill a cubic light years.
Even superplanets with 15 times the size of the earth are simply dwarfed by the sheer volume of a cubic light year.
The largest stars we found measure 73 light minutes, a cubic size of 389017 cubic light minutes. How much of them fit in a cubic light year? 346 billion.
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Planets can be detected by their gravity field. Collision with planet sized object in space would be extremely rare. Even if you would travel blind it would be very unlikely that you would hit star or plant while traveling trough galaxy.
Well, if there's not much around it, it might be hard to detect it's gravitational effects. I'd imagine you could detect it blocking a circular patch of sky more easily and from farther off than you could detect the gravitational pull on your spacecraft. Just don't steer twords the black disc and you'll be fine.
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> ~17 planets in every cubic light year. The change of hitting one while traveling one light year is in the order of 10e-16.
Exactly, and I saw that when the Andromeda Galaxy collides with ours, it's unlikely many planets/systems will be colliding with one another.
I wonder what happens to the planets in the solar system when a rogue planets gets sucked into the star (sun) ? I mean, yeah it'd be bad if a rogue planet smashed into us, or even came close enough to mess with our gravitational pool (or the moons). but I imagine if an earth sized or bigger slammed into the sun, that we'd feel the effects of this. massive solar flare roasting our planet alive? a shower of ejecta from…
Napkin math (aka pure speculation) suggests that unless the rogue planet hit the star directly and at an angle that could send ejecta our way, the results would be more observational than catastrophic. The Earth is roughly 333,000 times less massive than the Sun. Think of it this way, If an asteroid hit the Earth that was, in relative terms, the size of the earth relative to the sun, it would be about 1/3 the size of…