hugh_

13 ms·

91.
by hugh_ 17y ago
This can be obtained by looking at the red/blue-shift of the star as it wobbles back and forth due to the planet's motion. Combine this with the mass of the star, and you can figure out the mass of the planet. I forget how you get the mass
92.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Well, theoretically this could result in destruction by less-plausible method number eight: "Destroyed by God". (Of course, so could anything else, what with the ways of God being impenetrable to Man and so forth, so it's probably safest to
93.
by hugh_ 17y ago
It makes more sense to view such statistics on a 'per trip' basis (i.e. x% of drunk walking trips end in death and y% of drunk driving trips end in death). You'd really need to take the level of drunkenness into account, too. If you give
94.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Indeed, that's some poor use of statistics by the freakonomics guys. Another example: during the Battle of Britain, 1547 British aircraft were shot down. Of these, the pilot was (I'm guessing) not drunk in 1547 cases. By the same logic, and
95.
by hugh_ 17y ago
That's a rather generous description of the downsides of San Francisco. Parking and traffic suck in a lot of places, and the one-way streets aren't so bad once you get used to them. The two worst problems of San Francisco are still the filt
96.
by hugh_ 17y ago
They did already send a probe to Titan, but the Europa probe project was in direct competition with a project to send another probe to Titan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Saturn_System_Mission This one would have included a lake lan
97.
by hugh_ 17y ago
I've read that this is how NYC has "taken care of their homeless problem": they simply let the homeless die, which is quite easy to do in NYC during the winter by forcing the homeless to sleep outdoors, where the weather is much more deadl
98.
by hugh_ 17y ago
You can dress however you want, men can wear nail polish, etc., and nobody bats and eyelash. One should not underestimate the importance of this sort of tolerance. Ah, but try wearing a "Bush/Cheney 04" t-shirt and see what kind of reacti
99.
by hugh_ 17y ago
No, they didn't -- getting the absorption spectrum of a transiting exoplanet is an order of magnitude or two beyond the capabilities of present-day instruments. They just measured the density. From the density, though, you can get a pretty
100.
by hugh_ 17y ago
They haven't yet done spectroscopy on it. It's mentioned as a future possibility, but right now it's not feasible to do spectroscopy on an exoplanetary atmosphere -- the signal-to-noise you get when you try to measure something as tiny as t
101.
by hugh_ 17y ago
GJ 1214b might be more like Earth than any other known exoplanet, but given the murky reporting it's hard to tell. I'd say the most Earthlike exoplanet discovered so far is CoRoT-7b, discovered a few months ago. It's about five times more
102.
by hugh_ 17y ago
Actually it'd be more like a small Neptune/Uranus than a large Earth. Those two planets are made up mostly of a water/ammonia/methane mixture with a solid core and a H/He outer atmosphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune#Composition_a