Hang on, I thought 'Solar system' means the system orbiting the star 'Sol' i.e. our sun? Isn't the general term 'planetary system'?
Many say "moon" when they mean natural sattelitte of a planet
moon != Moon
Seven-Planet System Detected
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Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not disagreeing, but genuinely curious: what do astronomers call the "solar wind" in other systems? Referring to every wind by the star's name would seem odd.
Just replace solar with stellar.
This seems like yet another case of unnecessarily Earth/Sol-centric terminology, much like "apogee" being Earth specific such that you have to use "apoapsis" if you want to be generic. I mean, do we really need a new word for every planet, the sun, a star in general, a black hole specifically, and galaxies? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis#Terminology
We should declare terminology bankruptcy to wipe out our existing terminology/language debt, then pick sensible terms for everything. While I'm the topic, we should also do "kilogram"->"grave", "gram"->"micrograve".
Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would take about 15.6 years [0] to reach the star on a ship capable of a constant 1G acceleration. Here is the explanation and equations: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/rocket.h... [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6637131
15.6 years for the passenger, thousands of years from our perspective.
So after a few subjective years, you will be overtaken by newer and faster ships, and when you arrive, there will be a flourishing civilization already there to greet you.
Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#34Hang on, I thought 'Solar system' means the system orbiting the star 'Sol' i.e. our sun? Isn't the general term 'planetary system'?
It's bizarrely worded, yes. I think what they're trying to say is it's a planetary system very similar to the Solar system. Announcing it as a new "planetary system" would sound much less dramatic, since we've cataloged more than 700 of those.
Are we then not Solarians?
Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#35Just a big yellow screen here (firefox 24)
Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
15.6 years for the passenger, thousands of years from our perspective.
Meh. People were willing to go half-way across the world to try living somewhere new, probably never to return. Announce the trip, and you'll have to weed out volunteers pretty viciously.
[deleted]
Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is dubious we will ever travel faster than 10% the speed of light. But a probe might be able to.
Not dubious - speculative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4534359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6238297 Although, I certainly wouldn't bet against it long term.
If you did, you'd really be betting on your ability to collect / pay up the debt.
Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#38... and I know the Guy who created it!
Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
just three years at warp 9 =)
It's strange to realize that even at Warp 9, it still take a very long time to get anywhere much. In the TV shows and movies, they never seem to spend more than a few days at a time going anywhere at warp speed.
> In the TV shows and movies, they never seem to spend more than a few days at a time going anywhere at warp speed.
There are a few canon reasons for this:
1) Ignoring special episodes (and all of Star Trek Voyager) where they use a contrivance to hurl the ship tens of thousands of light-years, the working range of a starship on Star Trek is relatively small:
* The distance to the Romulan Neutral Zone, on the outer fringes of Federation Space, is only 28 light years away from Earth.
* Deep Space 9 (so named because it's on the outer frontiers of known space) is 70 light years away from Earth.
* Oo'nos, the Klingon homeworld, is ~100 light years away from Earth.
2) Ship speed exponentially increases as warp factor increases, and by the time the USS Enterprise-D is in service, warp 9 is fast, but not "I need to get there immediately because every plot shown on TV is an emergency" fast. The maximum sustainable speed for the Enteprise-D is warp 9.6, which is 1,909 times the speed of light. This would allow Picard to reach even Qo'nos from Earth in under 3 weeks.
3) With the exception of the JJ Abrams franchise (where they seem to keep going back to Earth after every mission), the ships featured in Star Trek are generally exploratory: between each episode, they'd roam their mission areas performing routine work. The episode plots would generally revolve around them dealing with an issue that happened to be close to wherever they happened to be at the time.
Of course, being a set of TV series and movies, liberties with distances were routinely taken. For example, in the first episode of Enterprise, they say Qo'nos is 4 days away from Earth at warp 4.5, which would place it less than half the distance between Earth and Alpha Centauri, the closest star system.
Re: Seven-Planet System Detected
#40Just a big yellow screen here (firefox 24)
it eventually loads in Firefox 17 but it is yellow for a fraction of a second (probably javascript that is slow to load?)