71–78 of 78 posts
Something about the contrast in the image makes it seem to "pulse" as I look at it...eerie! Edit: Maybe it's just the coffee I drank?
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Regarding visible spectrum observations, I've been waiting to see if anyone can come up with a way to develop a consumer-accessible instrument that can sample a high enough resolution, to image all of the moon landing sites. For as long as I can remember, the same thing has been said about the surface of the moon, which is the primary fuel for hoax narratives. With all the buzz about high-resolution arrays being cobb…
Interesting read on the subject of capturing the lander sites: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/45-our-solar-syste...
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However according to Wikipedia this is: >the star where the Elder Gods came from to battle the Great Old Ones [...]. Betelgeuse is also mentioned as the homeworld of the 'Ithria, a star-faring fungoid race.
And if you say the star's name three times, you can judge the age of respondents on message boards by their response to the non-sequitir.
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Interesting read on the subject of capturing the lander sites: http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/45-our-solar-syste...
The conspiracy theorists who think we never went to the moon are mostly unaware of the retroreflectors we left behind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment
At the risk of uncovering my ancientness, I remember reading astronomy books as a kid which specified that stars are so far away that they can't appear as anything more than dots of light even when viewed through the largest telescopes. Always makes me wonder what can be achieved in the future, especially since we're probably somewhere on an exponential progress curve. Of course, assuming a lot of optimism about not…
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When we notice it exploding it would have actually exploded 600 years prior.
What is the right way to think about this? If we observe a supernova 600LY away, do we say that event is happening "now" from our frame of reference? Or should we think of it as happening "600 years ago", and the light from the event is only now reaching us? If you think of causality itself moving at the speed of light (which of course it does), and think in light cones rather than referring to a nonexistent universa…
No, because it already went nova a long time ago.
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Well, let's do the math. ALMA consists of 66 antennas, most of which are 12 meters in diameter. That's about 7000 square meters of receiving area. Betelgeuse is 642 light years away, which is 6x10^18 meters. The area of a sphere with that diameter is about 10^38 square meters. So 10^-34 of the power emitted from Betelgeuse ends up falling on the ALMA array. According to Wikipedia, the luminosity of Betelgeuse is 90-1…
That's a pretty good Fermi calculation!
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How many photons ?
Well, let's do the math. ALMA consists of 66 antennas, most of which are 12 meters in diameter. That's about 7000 square meters of receiving area. Betelgeuse is 642 light years away, which is 6x10^18 meters. The area of a sphere with that diameter is about 10^38 square meters. So 10^-34 of the power emitted from Betelgeuse ends up falling on the ALMA array. According to Wikipedia, the luminosity of Betelgeuse is 90-1…