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I have been working in astronomy for a few years now and I recently have gone back to school for a PhD in orbital dynamics. Rubin is going to make a big differ

I have been working in astronomy for a few years now and I recently have gone back to school for a PhD in orbital dynamics. Rubin is going to make a big difference in our knowledge of the asteroid belt, it will likely more than triple the size of our known catalog of asteroids. Its actually somewhat difficult to know exactly how much it will increase our knowledge. The bigger the telescope we build, the fainter the asteroids we see. The difficulty is that while we can make a pretty educated guess as to how many smaller ones there are, this is such a jump that the error bars on that guess is quite large. I am quite excited to see how the catalog of asteroids changes, I expect we will be finding a LOT of smaller rocks near the Earth. Asteroids have a broad range of albedo, basically the brightness of the surface can vary from the blackest coal (like 3-5% of the light reflecting) to concrete (up to about 50%). All visible range telescopes will be susceptible to a bias in their observations, since a big black rock will be as bright as a smaller paler rock. We know that the asteroid belt favors the dark material. In a couple of years, the Near Earth Object Surveyor (NEOS) space telescope will launch. NEOS is an IR telescope and will not have the same albedo bias. The trade off is that it will measure the black body radiation, meaning asteroids have to be nearer the sun. Broadly these are very complementary surveys, Rubin will be fantastic for filling out the main belt, and NEO Surveyor will do a great job on our neighborhood. Source: I worked at Caltech on NEOS, I wrote the code they use to predict known asteroid orbits: https://github.com/dahlend/kete https://github.com/dahlend/kete Edit: I failed to mention that Rubin is a big deal for a lot of time-domain astronomy, I'm just being selfish talking about asteroids only.

sdoering 1y ago
I love your selfishness. Learned a lot, while sipping my second coffee and eating my breakfast before diving into work. Thanks kind stranger. I loved astronomy as a kid and the town I grew up in has a "solar system way", basically a long street where a kind fellow (who in his freetime taught astronomy to nerds like myself and had built his own oberservatory in his backyard) had - with the blessing of the city - built a scale model of the solar system on a length of about 1.5 kilometers (a bit less than a mile). I always found it fascinating when walking "through our solar system" with about 13 times the speed of light (normal walking translated into the distance at that scale) how veeeeeeeeeeery far apart things get in the solar system. Sadly only in German: https://www.muenchberg.de/erleben/tourismus/tourismus-und-freizeit/tourismus-und-freizeit/planeten-wanderweg/ https://www.muenchberg.de/erleben/tourismus/tourismus-und-fr... Edit: And yes - Pluto is still in there. It was built before the demotion - and they kept him in when doing the renovation last year (I was not in my home town since then - I so need to see it, when I visit the next time).
- teekert 1y ago
  Selfishness tends to work well for everyone when practiced by a rational individual ;)
  - earnestinger 1y ago
    I’m pedantic: s/rational/romantic|idealist|not-cycical-person/
    - teekert 1y ago
      No need for all that extra stuff, just be rational enough to realize humans do not exist in a vacuum, and trust those feelings that tell the healthy mind to be kind, and indeed, that other have those feelings too.
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      Not pedantic enough. You failed to define cycical, which may be a misspelling of cyclical, but is impenetrable in meaning if so.
      - masfuerte 1y ago
        Or maybe it's a typo of cynical rather than some craziness.
SiempreViernes 1y ago
Good luck with cleaning out the Musky foreground!
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Took me a bit to derive "Elon-Musk-created" from "Musky". In the meantime, I imagined high-jumping muskelunges...
throwobvious235 1y ago
[dead]
realityfactchex 1y ago
For anyone passionate about orbital dynamics: IMO it would be great to get more eyes on and thorough critiques of the Tychos model put forth at https://www.tychos.space https://www.tychos.space where there is a book, visual simulator, forum, etc. The sincere claim put forth appears to be that Tycho Brahe was almost right, and that something like this is in fact true: - The planets except for the Earth orbit around the Sun - The Sun orbits around the Earth - The Earth has its own small orbit It is pretty dense information, but seems important if true. I believe that the Tychos model is claimed to be just as consistent with observation as the conventional model, if not more so (with some arguments in the favor of the Tychos model as more likely, which escape me). The best intro to cut to the chase may be at https://book.tychos.space/chapters/4-intro-tychos https://book.tychos.space/chapters/4-intro-tychos but I think that the writers would do well to summarize their main arguments somewhere.
- colonCapitalDee 1y ago
  What is this, flat Earth theory for people with bachelors degrees? There is a 0% chance this is true.
  - realityfactchex 1y ago
    It can seem that way. They are more or less ultra-realists and ultra-skeptics. Here's a 1-page abstract from the 2025 Demysticon conference: https://files.catbox.moe/j8rd0s.pdf https://files.catbox.moe/j8rd0s.pdf An excerpt from the abstract is below, listing some issues they have with the mainstream heliocentric model, which are presumably resolved elegantly by the Tychos model: Anomalies of the Keplerian/heliocentric model include: 1: whether the Sun has a binary companion, 2: why only Mercury and Venus have no moons, 3: why Venus always presents the same face to Earth at its closest approach, 4: the “anomalous” precession of Mercury’s perihelion, and other aspects of Mercury and Venus, 5: the cause of the General Precession (Newton’s lunisolar wobble theory is not it, it does not match with observables), 6: why Mars and Sun exhibit 79-year cycles locked at a 2:1 ratio (and many other “harmonies” found between bodies), 7: why there is a sidereal diurnal variation of G, in interferometry results, and in the movements of stars, 8: why sunspot formation location shows a geocentric preference, and more.

sdoering 1y ago

I love your selfishness. Learned a lot, while sipping my second coffee and eating my breakfast before diving into work. Thanks kind stranger. I loved astronomy as a kid and the town I grew up in has a "solar system way", basically a long street where a kind fellow (who in his freetime taught astronomy to nerds like myself and had built his own oberservatory in his backyard) had - with the blessing of the city - built a scale model of the solar system on a length of about 1.5 kilometers (a bit less than a mile). I always found it fascinating when walking "through our solar system" with about 13 times the speed of light (normal walking translated into the distance at that scale) how veeeeeeeeeeery far apart things get in the solar system. Sadly only in German: https://www.muenchberg.de/erleben/tourismus/tourismus-und-freizeit/tourismus-und-freizeit/planeten-wanderweg/ https://www.muenchberg.de/erleben/tourismus/tourismus-und-fr... Edit: And yes - Pluto is still in there. It was built before the demotion - and they kept him in when doing the renovation last year (I was not in my home town since then - I so need to see it, when I visit the next time).

teekert 1y ago
Selfishness tends to work well for everyone when practiced by a rational individual ;)
- earnestinger 1y ago
  I’m pedantic: s/rational/romantic|idealist|not-cycical-person/
  - teekert 1y ago
    No need for all that extra stuff, just be rational enough to realize humans do not exist in a vacuum, and trust those feelings that tell the healthy mind to be kind, and indeed, that other have those feelings too.
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Not pedantic enough. You failed to define cycical, which may be a misspelling of cyclical, but is impenetrable in meaning if so.
    - masfuerte 1y ago
      Or maybe it's a typo of cynical rather than some craziness.

SiempreViernes 1y ago

Good luck with cleaning out the Musky foreground!

IAmBroom 1y ago
Took me a bit to derive "Elon-Musk-created" from "Musky". In the meantime, I imagined high-jumping muskelunges...

throwobvious235 1y ago

[dead]

realityfactchex 1y ago

For anyone passionate about orbital dynamics: IMO it would be great to get more eyes on and thorough critiques of the Tychos model put forth at https://www.tychos.space https://www.tychos.space where there is a book, visual simulator, forum, etc. The sincere claim put forth appears to be that Tycho Brahe was almost right, and that something like this is in fact true: - The planets except for the Earth orbit around the Sun - The Sun orbits around the Earth - The Earth has its own small orbit It is pretty dense information, but seems important if true. I believe that the Tychos model is claimed to be just as consistent with observation as the conventional model, if not more so (with some arguments in the favor of the Tychos model as more likely, which escape me). The best intro to cut to the chase may be at https://book.tychos.space/chapters/4-intro-tychos https://book.tychos.space/chapters/4-intro-tychos but I think that the writers would do well to summarize their main arguments somewhere.

colonCapitalDee 1y ago
What is this, flat Earth theory for people with bachelors degrees? There is a 0% chance this is true.
- realityfactchex 1y ago
  It can seem that way. They are more or less ultra-realists and ultra-skeptics. Here's a 1-page abstract from the 2025 Demysticon conference: https://files.catbox.moe/j8rd0s.pdf https://files.catbox.moe/j8rd0s.pdf An excerpt from the abstract is below, listing some issues they have with the mainstream heliocentric model, which are presumably resolved elegantly by the Tychos model: Anomalies of the Keplerian/heliocentric model include: 1: whether the Sun has a binary companion, 2: why only Mercury and Venus have no moons, 3: why Venus always presents the same face to Earth at its closest approach, 4: the “anomalous” precession of Mercury’s perihelion, and other aspects of Mercury and Venus, 5: the cause of the General Precession (Newton’s lunisolar wobble theory is not it, it does not match with observables), 6: why Mars and Sun exhibit 79-year cycles locked at a 2:1 ratio (and many other “harmonies” found between bodies), 7: why there is a sidereal diurnal variation of G, in interferometry results, and in the movements of stars, 8: why sunspot formation location shows a geocentric preference, and more.