petschge

54 ms·

541.
by petschge 8y ago
They got down at the expected speed just fine. Except that speed is enough to bounce two times if your harpoons fire but don't stick in the crust because it is even more crunchy than expected.
542.
by petschge 8y ago
At least in my field there is the running joke of "it was published in Nature, but it still might be correct."
543.
by petschge 8y ago
Saturns ring, the flattening of the accretion disk, the fact that planet systems will have most planets more or less in one plane and that spiral galaxies are flat (much thinner than they are wide at least) all have the same reason, yes. Ba
544.
by petschge 8y ago
I doesn't even need to be that big. A 60 meter dish would do nicely. Problem is, you would want to have several Gigahertz of (radio) bandwidth. You are not going to down link that raw, but rather as a number of channels, integrated ove
545.
by petschge 8y ago
Yes. But since you have a bright spot in the center of the larger image and you only have a limited number of baseline between pairs of telescopes there will be all kinds of artefacts in the outer portion of that large image. So it get&#x27
546.
by petschge 8y ago
Things don't simply form a halo around a black hole. Instead you get a relatively flat accretion disk of things that orbit around the black hole.
547.
by petschge 8y ago
The temperature is actually inversely proportional to black hole mass and the power that is radiated away even falls like the square of the mass. (A rough but illustrative derivation can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/
548.
by petschge 8y ago
Yes. They used 3C 279 which is more than 100 times further away than M87.
549.
by petschge 8y ago
There is non-manual ways to do it (called self-calibrating), but those need many more antennas. (What you really need is good coverage of the (u,v) plane AND many more different baselines between pairs of telescopes than the number of indiv
550.
by petschge 8y ago
55 million light years is about correct. Wikipedia still has 53.5 ± 1.63 Mly from older observations, but appendix I in paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab1141 has a bit more on the
551.
by petschge 8y ago
A lot of the problems with imaging the black hole at the center of the milkway is that we would have to look along the midplane of the galaxy towards the center. That is where a lot of gas and dust is to be found and the radio waves interac
552.
by petschge 8y ago
Most scientist I know have a reusable water bottle on their desk. And a coffee cup. But it will likely have a cat or a joke of the "astronomers do it in the dark" flavour on it. Not something you typically want to show on TV. Also
553.
by petschge 8y ago
Very good point. I was too much focused on resolution. Adding more telescopes would indeed give a better picture of large structures (most are cropped out of the current view because they are not well imaged and you would mostly see artifac
554.
by petschge 8y ago
Have a look at the papers listed at the bottom of https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/2041-8205/page/Focus_on_E... . Keep in mind that a lot of the details will NOT be in those papers as they have used CASA an
555.
by petschge 8y ago
The picture is not captured by lenses, or an optical telescope at all. It is created by inverting the data received at eight radio telescopes (or eighty individual dishes) around the world. And the smoothing is just due to the inherent limi
556.
by petschge 8y ago
The limit in some sense is the size of the Earth. This picture is from an interferometer observing at very high radio frequencies (wavelength of 1.3 mm) using telescope around the Earth. To improve resolution you would either have to go to
557.
by petschge 8y ago
The deterrence effect of punishment relies on two factors: severity of the punishment when caught and the probability of getting caught. You can only up the former so much before a single stupid mistake ruins your life. But we could increas
558.
by petschge 8y ago
Yes. The early seventies is when we so tens to hundres of GeV and even the LHC has only reached 6.5 TeV (per direction), well short of the alternative interpretation of 200 TeV.
559.
by petschge 8y ago
The long scale where "billion" means 1e12 is not that rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Long_sca...
560.
by petschge 8y ago
Ah the popular "the US is too large and too diverse to function" excuse. Not that long ago the size and diversity was seen as a unique strength of the US. When did "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning
561.
by petschge 8y ago
The problem with what you choose and how you weigh it is exactly why I listed more than one index. And btw: I did not skip over any index because it lists the US as number one, I only skipped indices that require registration to get the PDF
562.
by petschge 8y ago
You are not, you just have constant propaganda to that effect and you believe it because most of you never leave your country. And that is not just me personal opinion. Going over a (incomplete) sample of freedom indices listed on https:&#
563.
by petschge 8y ago
The request for additional funding for extra telescopes is always met with the question "but what use is that knowledge?" Politicians don't want Moon missions, they want Teflon coated no-stick pans. They don't want Higg
564.
by petschge 8y ago
I know that at least one big German chemical company is doing exactly the same for US trips, because they have evidence of industrial espionage attempts against then. Executives that have to go to any non-European country get a clean laptop
565.
by petschge 8y ago
They don't agree voulnatrily on that low payoiut per mile because Uber and indivudual drivers have very different bargaining power. A free market can only exist between well-informed rational actors that can both walk away from the dea
566.
by petschge 8y ago
The IRS deduction rate per mile plus minimum wage per hour. Anything below that is so low that it is immoral (and would be illegal in any civilized country).
567.
by petschge 8y ago
Fly-by-wire does not necessarily imply that there is software interfering. You can have a very linear system that just translates yoke input into control surface deflection, but uses software and cables instead of hydraulic lines.
568.
by petschge 8y ago
There is a few really great stories about the SR-71 on the internet, many out of the book "Sled Driver". I would not (as it is customary on other parts of the internet) leave the full copy-pasta here, but I do recommend the "
569.
by petschge 8y ago
The one reason to go from external match sticks to internal ignition using hypergolic fuels is to be able to relight in flight after an engine shutdown.
570.
by petschge 8y ago
0xAAAAAAA5 make a lot more sense as it is a 32 bit integer. Btw it is 3 6 * 5 2 * 157109, so not an integer, just like you expected. Then again you don't care about that, but the bit pattern. Any reason why use use 0xAAAAAAA5 instead

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