5 ms·
Disclosure: A rare self-post. I'd be very grateful for any and all corrections to the story, as I am far from an expert is astrophysics, geology, or pretty-much
by braythwayt 9y ago
Disclosure: A rare self-post. I'd be very grateful for any and all corrections to the story, as I am far from an expert is astrophysics, geology, or pretty-much anything else.
- angersock 9y agoWell, at least you recalled the story toothfully.
- braythwayt 9y agoWriting is an exercise in literary mastication.
- pstuart 9y agoSmall typo: "Neutron stars to not hang, fixed in space" I'm guessing that it should be "do not"
- braythwayt 9y agohttps://github.com/raganwald/braythwayt.com/commit/dc07b496dbffe03d3bcc3b14d3a9a4260fdb1362 https://github.com/raganwald/braythwayt.com/commit/dc07b496d...
- pstuart 9y agoAnother: "May tiny such creatures, when they died" Many?
- szafranek 9y agoProbably another typo: "planet our side" -> "planet our size"? Also, this is a beautiful piece of writing! I love it.
- braythwayt 9y agohttps://github.com/raganwald/braythwayt.com/commit/981362fad28c8b664d2e07ca6d2bf58ab53dd374 https://github.com/raganwald/braythwayt.com/commit/981362fad... Thank you or sharing your appreciation. I will treasure that.
- davidw 9y agoIs that you racing cross on the book cover?
- braythwayt 9y agoYes it was, when the stars were younger than today :-)
- WaxProlix 9y ago> I would have found that while my scale tells me that I am about 86 kilograms on Earth, I would have weighed 8.6 trillion kilograms on this neutron star. Kilograms are a measure of mass, not weight. Pounds would be a more appropriate unit there.
- bryanl 9y agoMost of the people world weigh themselves in kilograms.
- braythwayt 9y agoTrue, but WaxProlix is correct. Ten kilograms is 22 pounds on Earth, but 2.2 trillion pounds on the given Neutron Star.
- bloat 9y agoI was going to jump in and say that the pound is also a unit of mass. But it turns out its both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(force) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(force) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)
- braythwayt 9y agoAnd then there's the foot-pound, a unit of torque much prized by the owners of muscle cars until eclectric vehicles went from obscure to early-adopter status.
- platz 9y agoAlso, assuming we're talking about rest mass, since without that distinction the word mass is ambiguous in accelerated contexts.
- uxp 9y agoOr just general torque in the United States. Electric vehicles still have tires that are joined to wheels which are fastened to an axle by the tightening of a nut on a threaded stud. For safety, we generally state that the nut should have X foot-pounds of torque applied to ensure it doesn't fall off. Unless Tesla et al. have suddenly decided to use a more universal standard in the states, I'd assume they still publish that value in ft/lbs, since 98% of tools designed to measure these things owned in the U.S.A. have this unit on them.
- gwking 9y ago> At some point, a satellite the size of Mars came crashing into the earth, so hard and so fast that about a third of the earth was blasted into space. It didn’t go far–the debris formed a ring around the earth, and gravity eventually compacted it into a single satellite, our moon, but a satellite much larger than our planet’s gravity would normally be able to capture. Something seems off about "a third": according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon, the Moon's radius is a bit less than a third of Earth's, but its volume is 2% and its mass is just 1%. I'm no expert, but "about a hundredth" seems more accurate. For what it's worth, I only looked it up because I've come across this discrepancy before, so perhaps I'm missing something!
- braythwayt 9y agoI could be wrong about this, but note also that not all of the material ejected from the impact wound up in Earth's orbit.