how hysterical would it be if the Sun decided to pull the earth into it.
Discussions on X, Reddit and HN titled "Is this it" or "Heat death is medically comfortable".
Crazy stuff.
'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
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Re: 'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But it seems unclear to me how the researchers would distinguish between one super-Earth and >10^10 smaller rocks? I have a similar feeling when life on earth is suggested to be "alien", arriving via debris in the solar system as the earth formed. Isn't everything in the solar system coalesced from the same debris?
That always felt like a deus ex machina answer to me too. We don't know exactly how abiogenesis happened on earth so some people just like to cut off the chain of causation with the idea of, "it was seeded"... but then how did abiogenesis happen elsewhere? I don't think that's a very popular theory among anyone who knows what they're talking about though.
A hypothesis I'd seen (from the "aliens" guy, Abraham "Avi" Loeb, at Harvard) is that early in the evolution of the Universe everything was roughly in the Goldilocks zone (warm enough for liquid water, not so hot as to generate steam, not so cold as to result in ice), and ... more dense. If life more-or-less inevitably arises under such circumstances, then there's some credence to the argument that life might have arisen in many parts of the Universe, potentially hybernating in some sort of spore / inactive form, until rocky planets arose later. But we have no specific proof of this, and it seems strongly plausible that life could instead have arisen independently on individual planets and/or moons.
See this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37850997>.
From which:
Kurzgesagt did a video on the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOiGEI9pQBs>.
Avi Loeb, "The habitable epoch of the early Universe". International Journal of Astrobiology, vol. 13, 4."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...>
Re: 'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But it seems unclear to me how the researchers would distinguish between one super-Earth and >10^10 smaller rocks? I have a similar feeling when life on earth is suggested to be "alien", arriving via debris in the solar system as the earth formed. Isn't everything in the solar system coalesced from the same debris?
The life-bearing debris would have to arrive quite some time after formation of Earth, as it was molten. Surviving atmospheric entry is hard, surviving after landing in lava is impossible.
If life-bearing debris exists, it would surely be floating around the galaxy forever.
Re: 'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
#44That sentence is kind of scary. Imagine being a civilization on a planet that knows it's going to be swallowed by their sun.. (during the lifetime of the living members)
The book Seveneves is about civilization confronting impending doom from the moon exploding. I never finished the book because I felt it was depressingly realistic.
Re: 'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
#45On a similar note, the Large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs) are structures in Earth's lower mantle that are hyothized to be remnants of Theia (the planetary-scale body that collied with, resulting in the formation of the Moon):
Re: 'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
#46This might just be me, but I find metaphors like ''Fingerprints' inside the Sun' harder to read than the title of the original paper, which is probably what should be linked here per HN submission guidelines: > Planetary engulfment as a solution to solar-model discrepancies and its implications for planetary systems https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stag1527 For the press release, something like The Real Sun and Its Simu…
There's been a lot of changed titles recently, and it is quite annoying. I feel like that used to get corrected.
This isn't a "changed"title. The title matches the linked "newspaper" article. But the op was saying that the research paper the article talks about has a better, easier to read, title.
Re: 'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
#47MESA, a piece of software referenced in this article, is a pretty incredible system. (Even referring to it as software underplays the extent of its community and impact.) Many people are involved in MESA and Bill Paxton was always quick to point out the many new folks that worked on it, but this article does a great job of celebrating his impact: https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/news/an-accidental-astrophysicist It's amazin…
Thank you, that definitely was an interesting read. Sad to learn of Bill Paxton's passing. Clearly his legacy and impact however live on, like this research demonstrates.
It seems he preferred the term "software instrument" to refer to MESA:
> Bildsten and Paxton have taken to calling programs like MESA "software instruments,” according to the latter. “Just like you can’t do observational astrophysics without an instrument like a telescope," he said, "you can’t do computational astrophysics without an instrument such as MESA."
It's amazing what impact one good piece of software, freely available to anyone anywhere to use, can have on a field. I think this quote illustrated the problem he was able to solve very well:
> Ideally, you want to be able to run an experiment, but you can’t go grab a star, run an experiment for a billion years, and come back later to see how it turned out.
Re: 'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
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