semaphoreP

9 ms·

31.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
It'll be in the near-infrared, but the light won't be separated from the star. How they observe the atmosphere is that when the exoplanets transit, they block out different amounts of light at different wavelengths. From that, one
32.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
Actually I don't think oxygen has been detected in any exoplanet atmosphere. And typically the atmospheres in which water has been detected are large Jovian exoplanets. My sense is that we don't yet have the telescopes/instru
33.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
If they have a 10 meter telescope in space, they may very well have the technology to see Earth.
34.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
At least in astronomy, this is pretty standard when publishing in Nature or Science. Typically all the press releases are coordinated together with the release of the actual publication.
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by semaphoreP 10y ago
I use supercomputers which only have a terminal interface. I found it was easier to do most of the development of the code on my machine with a GUI (e.g. Pycharm or VSCode) and then push code to the cluster for production runs. I use vim fo
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by semaphoreP 10y ago
I recently learned that some of the density waves in Saturn ( shown in the top picture in the article) are due to pressure waves in the interior of Saturn itself, so the rings can actually be used to study the composition of the interior of
37.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
Oh yeah, those do cover the same wavelength range. The atmosphere of the Earth absorbs a lot of the light and has a strong thermal background though. The sensitivity of JWST is orders of magnitude better than ground/airborne observator
38.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
We currently have the 80 cm Spitzer telescope in space that covers the same wavelength range, and the 3.5 m Herschel telescope also recently finished its mission at slightly longer wavelengths. So really to make breakthroughs in science to
39.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
I believe NASA is considering this, but the technology won't be possible in the next few years.
40.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
I believe the initial estimates for the budget were extremely optimistic. I believe after Congress almost cut funding on it, they came up with a very realistic budget and schedule and have been following it very closely since. I know people
41.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
This is probably unlikely as JWST is designed to fly in L2 and not in a geosynchronous orbit. Additionally, at the wavelengths it is operating at (mid-infrared), if it pointed towards Earth, it'd just see the heat of the Earth's a
42.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
Actually, us astronomers will never have to script anything with JS. They'll give us a GUI which will limit what we can do to strictly valid commands: e.g. point the telescope at this position in the sky and observe using this instrume
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by semaphoreP 10y ago
Not an expert in this, but you would need a lot of eigenfaces to capture the variance (i.e. a lot of upfront cost storing all the eigenimages). It might be good for something that is very standardized (e.g passport photos where everyone is
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by semaphoreP 10y ago
Here is the pre-print version of the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06291
45.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
Basically, dark matter is something that has gravitational pull, but shows no other evidence of its existence. We have seen evidence for dark matter in galaxy rotation curves, galaxy cluster interactions, and the cosmic microwave background
46.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
This. It important to note that there are SO many factors that we don't know that can prevent habitability (for Earth definitions of habitability). We will need detailed study of its atmosphere to really understand habitability, and ev
47.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
NASA actually did do a feasibility study on the Terrestrial Planet Finder ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Planet_Finder ) as a space-based telescope to find terrestial planets orbiting other stars, and one of
48.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
To add on to this, adaptive optics systems can be used to correct for atmospheric turbulence. The latest adaptive optics instruments have been able to achieve diffraction-limited imaging (i.e. comparable to if the telescope was in space) wi
49.
by semaphoreP 10y ago
The most promising technique at this point is to use optical interferometry to resolve the surface of the planet. In this case, you will need two telescopes (likely in space) separated by a baseline distance, "d". The two telescop
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by semaphoreP 10y ago
I actually just manually check arxiv every morning for the new submissions in my field. It's like getting in the habit of browsing reddit except with a lot less cute animal pictures (maybe because I'm not in biology).
51.
by semaphoreP 11y ago
I think that's a consequence of spherical symmetry. I'm not sure I have the entire logic worked out, but because it's isotropic, then the distributions need to be uniform I think.
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by semaphoreP 12y ago
In astronomy, we have the Astrophysics Source Code Library[1] at least for the code part. [1] http://ascl.net/
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by semaphoreP 12y ago
I'm involved in some astronomy outreach/teaching activities and this looks like it'd be really useful for that, as it's hard to come up with hands-on activities about star formation and stellar evolution.
54.
by semaphoreP 12y ago
Not quite, I think. The supernova is more used to study the dark matter lens, which cannot be seen directly. Seeing the supernova being lensed by different parts of the galaxy cluster will allow them to map the dark matter profile of the ga
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by semaphoreP 12y ago
Actually, you can use this unit system (called Geometrized units [1]) for anything, but it is especially convenient for describing black holes and general relativity in general. As a rule of thumb, in the geometrized units, 1 solar mass = ~
56.
by semaphoreP 12y ago
Technically, the radius of a black hole is uniquely determined by its mass, so one can construct a unit system where mass and radius use the same unit of measure...
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by semaphoreP 12y ago
Aren't many of those planets gas giants though? Which won't be able to harbor life.
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by semaphoreP 12y ago
This should only apply to refracting telescopes, and not reflecting telescopes I think.
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by semaphoreP 12y ago
I think these images help them figure out what's interesting to study as the probe gets closer. It's going to zoom by, so they need to know beforehand what to look at.
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by semaphoreP 12y ago
I wonder if this result that there was no singularity true for all theories of inflation or just a subset of them.

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