5 ms·

NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1M Miles per Hour

94 points by mywacaday 2y ago

srvmshr 2y ago
If galactic location details weren't provided, I would have jokingly concluded that we finally spotted the nuclear manhole cover :) https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-objects-in-the-universe https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-o...
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > the nuclear manhole cover Manholes can weigh over 250 lbs (113 kg) [1]. Accelerating that mass to 25k mph takes about 7 GJ. Brown dwarfs are around 10 ^ 27 kg. That takes sabout 10 ^ 11 GJ to get to 1mm mph. To put that into perspective, the scale of the energy difference between these phenomena is so vast that were each GJ a second the interval it would define would span 32bn years, or roughly twice the age of the universe. [1] https://theapecgroup.com/how-much-does-a-manhole-cover-weight/ https://theapecgroup.com/how-much-does-a-manhole-cover-weigh...
schiffern 2y ago
> 1M Miles per Hour That's ~450 km/s, or 0.15% c. Importantly it's also the first object discovered by this project that's unbounded to the Milky Way. Like ʻOumuamua in relation to the Solar system, it exceeds the escape velocity and will never return to the Milky Way.
- vivzkestrel 2y ago
  imagine if we had an object moving at 1 million miles per second breaking the laws of known physics. Now that would be one hell of an HN post
ahaucnx 2y ago
With more affordable sensor technology, citizen science has a huge potential to become a strong force just by being able to deploy a large number of people in a short time span. However some of the problems is that it's not really recognized (yet) by academia and governments and thus also not adequately funded. It would be great if there is a more systematic approach to citizen science but only in astronomy but also global challenges like climate change and biodiversity.
- b112 2y ago
  Yes, but with the cost of lift dropping to dollars per kg, we could easily launch thousands upon thousands of short life, disposable sensor platforms away from Earth yearly, just in the spare space for some launches. Such platforms need only cost hundreds of dollars each, and could even use crowd source designs. We could iterate fast, tey different designs, discovering what cheap build method works. They could be tiny, with nuclear batteries, or very small solar panels. Something along these lines would be far, far, far more effective than ground sensors, or Hubble, as they could be networked and would be effectively millions of km apart. If even 90% of them died due to cheap design, who cares. If they only last a year, or even weeks who cares. People spent billions on things like hubble, because it used to cost enormously to launch. It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex. So our design and deploy methods should change too.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    >It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex. What innovation is expected to make this possible? The minimum amounts of fuel and oxygen necessary to leave the atmosphere are fixed, short of a chemistry breakthrough.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      I don't think the person you're responding to was thinking of this, but off the top of my head is the spin-launcher which gives a rocket a "kick", giving it a decent buffer before it has to start worrying about Tsiolkovsky's tyranny.
teruakohatu 2y ago
And would still take ~29 million years [1] to exit the galaxy (if it had started from the center). Space is large. [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+Milky+Way+in+miles+%2F+2%29+%2F+%281000000+mph%29+in+years https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+Milky+Wa...
- OnlyMortal 2y ago
  “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
  - jancsika 2y ago
    "If you could put the universe into a tube, you'd end up with a very long tube, probably extending twice the size of the universe. Because when you collapse the universe, it expands. And it would be-- you wouldn't want to put it into a tube." https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?t=74 https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?t=74
  - NKosmatos 2y ago
    I’ve posted it many times, given the opportunity, and I think it also fits nicely here: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex
arbuge 2y ago
Not sure about this one... according to this study the escape velocity of the Milky Way is around 550 km/s. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A%26A...649A.136K/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A%26A...649A.136K/abst... The authors of that study cited above are pretty confident it's above 497 +/- 8 km/s, at least in the solar neighborhood. 1M Miles per hour works out to 446 km/s. Granted these are all rough numbers, and it depends exactly where you are in the Milky Way, but it looks like it may be a bit short of actually escaping.
- uncivilized 2y ago
  If you actually read the research paper linked in the article, it says the speed may exceed that of the escape velocity of the Milky Way, suggesting that it is not proven as fact yet.
- _moof 2y ago
  Escape velocity varies with distance from the center of mass. Is the distance in that paper comparable to the distance of the discovered object?
huppeldepup 2y ago
Apparently no longer in pre-print: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607
vidanay 2y ago
Headed out to where the down boys go
adamredwoods 2y ago
Backyard World website, where you can help search for the elusive "planet 9": https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds-planet-9 https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-wor...
_justinfunk 2y ago
All motion in space is relative. Wouldn't it also be equally accurate to say this object is motionless and everything else is passing it by at 1M mph?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Djdjur7373bb 2y ago
  It would be as accurate and make as much sense as saying the 100m finish line traveled to Usian Bolt in 9.6 seconds.
  - _justinfunk 2y ago
    I'm not being snotty. What is the fixed point from which they are measuring the speed? Is the object moving 1M mph relative to earth? The black hole at the center of Milky Way?
    - gambiting 2y ago
      >> What is the fixed point from which they are measuring the speed? Rest of the milky way galaxy, presumably, given that it talks about escape velocity from it.
    - ianburrell 2y ago
      The paper says the Galactic rest frame.
yumraj 2y ago
A spaceship?
- mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
  The aliens sent Elon's car he launched in space hurling back at us.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
“Stellar engines are a class of hypothetical megastructures which use the resources of a star to generate available work,” for example, to “produce thrust [to] accelerate a star and anything orbiting it in a given direction” [1]. (I don’t think it works with a brown dwarf.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  Maybe it wasn't a brown dwarf when it started accelerating!
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Maybe they've spotted the reaction mass heading in the opposite direction. :)
MrGuts 2y ago
"Where are you...?" "Not far now." "Good, good, good..."

94 points by mywacaday 2y ago

If galactic location details weren't provided, I would have jokingly concluded that we finally spotted the nuclear manhole cover :) https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-objects-in-the-universe https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-o...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> the nuclear manhole cover Manholes can weigh over 250 lbs (113 kg) [1]. Accelerating that mass to 25k mph takes about 7 GJ. Brown dwarfs are around 10 ^ 27 kg. That takes sabout 10 ^ 11 GJ to get to 1mm mph. To put that into perspective, the scale of the energy difference between these phenomena is so vast that were each GJ a second the interval it would define would span 32bn years, or roughly twice the age of the universe. [1] https://theapecgroup.com/how-much-does-a-manhole-cover-weight/ https://theapecgroup.com/how-much-does-a-manhole-cover-weigh...

schiffern 2y ago

> 1M Miles per Hour That's ~450 km/s, or 0.15% c. Importantly it's also the first object discovered by this project that's unbounded to the Milky Way. Like ʻOumuamua in relation to the Solar system, it exceeds the escape velocity and will never return to the Milky Way.

vivzkestrel 2y ago
imagine if we had an object moving at 1 million miles per second breaking the laws of known physics. Now that would be one hell of an HN post

ahaucnx 2y ago

With more affordable sensor technology, citizen science has a huge potential to become a strong force just by being able to deploy a large number of people in a short time span. However some of the problems is that it's not really recognized (yet) by academia and governments and thus also not adequately funded. It would be great if there is a more systematic approach to citizen science but only in astronomy but also global challenges like climate change and biodiversity.

b112 2y ago
Yes, but with the cost of lift dropping to dollars per kg, we could easily launch thousands upon thousands of short life, disposable sensor platforms away from Earth yearly, just in the spare space for some launches. Such platforms need only cost hundreds of dollars each, and could even use crowd source designs. We could iterate fast, tey different designs, discovering what cheap build method works. They could be tiny, with nuclear batteries, or very small solar panels. Something along these lines would be far, far, far more effective than ground sensors, or Hubble, as they could be networked and would be effectively millions of km apart. If even 90% of them died due to cheap design, who cares. If they only last a year, or even weeks who cares. People spent billions on things like hubble, because it used to cost enormously to launch. It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex. So our design and deploy methods should change too.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  >It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex. What innovation is expected to make this possible? The minimum amounts of fuel and oxygen necessary to leave the atmosphere are fixed, short of a chemistry breakthrough.
  - pavel_lishin 2y ago
    I don't think the person you're responding to was thinking of this, but off the top of my head is the spin-launcher which gives a rocket a "kick", giving it a decent buffer before it has to start worrying about Tsiolkovsky's tyranny.

teruakohatu 2y ago

And would still take ~29 million years [1] to exit the galaxy (if it had started from the center). Space is large. [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+Milky+Way+in+miles+%2F+2%29+%2F+%281000000+mph%29+in+years https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+Milky+Wa...

OnlyMortal 2y ago
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
- jancsika 2y ago
  "If you could put the universe into a tube, you'd end up with a very long tube, probably extending twice the size of the universe. Because when you collapse the universe, it expands. And it would be-- you wouldn't want to put it into a tube." https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?t=74 https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?t=74
- NKosmatos 2y ago
  I’ve posted it many times, given the opportunity, and I think it also fits nicely here: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex

arbuge 2y ago

Not sure about this one... according to this study the escape velocity of the Milky Way is around 550 km/s. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A%26A...649A.136K/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A%26A...649A.136K/abst... The authors of that study cited above are pretty confident it's above 497 +/- 8 km/s, at least in the solar neighborhood. 1M Miles per hour works out to 446 km/s. Granted these are all rough numbers, and it depends exactly where you are in the Milky Way, but it looks like it may be a bit short of actually escaping.

uncivilized 2y ago
If you actually read the research paper linked in the article, it says the speed may exceed that of the escape velocity of the Milky Way, suggesting that it is not proven as fact yet.
_moof 2y ago
Escape velocity varies with distance from the center of mass. Is the distance in that paper comparable to the distance of the discovered object?

huppeldepup 2y ago

Apparently no longer in pre-print: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607

vidanay 2y ago

Headed out to where the down boys go

adamredwoods 2y ago

Backyard World website, where you can help search for the elusive "planet 9": https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds-planet-9 https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-wor...

_justinfunk 2y ago

All motion in space is relative. Wouldn't it also be equally accurate to say this object is motionless and everything else is passing it by at 1M mph?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Djdjur7373bb 2y ago
It would be as accurate and make as much sense as saying the 100m finish line traveled to Usian Bolt in 9.6 seconds.
- _justinfunk 2y ago
  I'm not being snotty. What is the fixed point from which they are measuring the speed? Is the object moving 1M mph relative to earth? The black hole at the center of Milky Way?
  - gambiting 2y ago
    >> What is the fixed point from which they are measuring the speed? Rest of the milky way galaxy, presumably, given that it talks about escape velocity from it.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    The paper says the Galactic rest frame.

yumraj 2y ago

A spaceship?

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
The aliens sent Elon's car he launched in space hurling back at us.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

“Stellar engines are a class of hypothetical megastructures which use the resources of a star to generate available work,” for example, to “produce thrust [to] accelerate a star and anything orbiting it in a given direction” [1]. (I don’t think it works with a brown dwarf.) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine

pavel_lishin 2y ago
Maybe it wasn't a brown dwarf when it started accelerating!
- justinclift 2y ago
  Maybe they've spotted the reaction mass heading in the opposite direction. :)

MrGuts 2y ago

"Where are you...?" "Not far now." "Good, good, good..."