The latter, I suspect. That’s certainly how forming a neutron star works in the first place, because if a star gets so dense that it can form neutronium then the neutronium (which is far more dense than the core was before) can easily keep making more.
It’s a similar story with black holes. Get past the threshold at which it forms, and the process runs away and swallows the whole star.
If a quark soup is more dense than neutronium, then it would be fairly all-or-nothing
As Universe Today explored in a previous post, it would take between 19,000 and 81,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Proxima Centauri using conventional propulsion (or those that are feasible using current technology)
Acceleration is a bitch. A manned flight would take longer as it would have to cap it’s thrust to 1-1.5G or risk long term effects. Not to mention having to cancel ALLL of that thrust starting at the halfway point.
Biology is frustrating. We’re built for everything except leaving the immediate area around the sea we crawled out of. Anything beyond that and our bones melt into cancer.
The laser array is expensive but if it’s continuous and spread out enough you could keep sending newer probes. Or if it’s not continuous you could use it for different directions!
According to Scott Manley’s video on the topic the probes would need to arrive at the correct time in order to form what is effectively a huge phased array antenna.
Only then is the combined transmission power of these tiny probes large enough to be received on earth.
A very cool idea, however the headline is misleading - NASA has not even remotely committed to running this mission. They’ve selected the swarm project as one of 13 projects in their innovation program and given it up to $175k to study feasibility. That’s roughly a postdoc for two years. This is far, far from committing the hundreds of millions or billions needed for the execution of this mission.
Salad is good for you, generally speaking, so growing fresh greens in orbit seems like a winning way for space farers to stay healthy. New research suggests that as nutritious as space salad might be, it could pose something of a risk to astronauts.
The problem is growing leafy plants like lettuce and spinach in space can come with a side dish of bacteria, according to a new study from a team at the University of Delaware. In tests on plants grown in simulated microgravity, they were shown to actually be more susceptible than normal to the Salmonella enterica pathogen.
Sounds like not a big problem at all. Seems like they'll just have to use appropriate cleaning methods. Even in the worst case scenario they would probably just have to use food irradiation.
The team’s measurements even suggest that the supernovae that virtually cleared the bubble of space in which the Milky Way resides was born in a cluster of stars within the Radcliffe Wave.
Wait, the Milky Way is inside of a bubble generated by novae which were inside a cluster which is inside the Radcliffe Wave which is… itself… inside the Milky Way?
The Radcliffe Wave formation is a bunch of gas that is apparently, wiggling, in incredibly huge time and distance scales, like a sinusoidal wave.
So, imagine very, very long ago, before the Milky Way formed, you have a particular dense gaseous region/formation.
Dense gaseous regions tend to give birth to new stars. This region did so, and then one of them supernova’d.
Next, the Milky Way ended up forming in the void created by this supernova.
Then, this dense gaseous region was basically incorporated into the Milky Way (seems like one of its spiral arms) over another absurdly long period of time.
But, for some reason, it is wiggling, in a manner that dense gaseous regions have not been observed to behave in.
Thats the best I can do here, I am not an astrophysicist, though I did take two quarters of intro level astronomy in college lol.
Probably worthwhile to note that the article says that their data ‘suggests’ not ‘shows’ or ‘proves’ the bit about the supernova clearing the Milky Way void.
To actually prove that would encompass, among many other things, running the clock backward on star orbits/trajectories over billions of years using extremely complicated models and mountains of data I am absolutely not qualified to comment on.
Im just trying to very broadly explain the chain of events here if this supernova really did cause the void the Milky Way formed in.
Anyway, other fun fact: Our Milky Way Galaxy is not actually a pure spiral Galaxy as it has so often been depicted for quite a long time.
It is actually a barred spiral galaxy. Basically, instead of just swirly arms, there are actually short, more or less straight parts to the arms as they emanate out from the center, which then begin to curve into spirally arms.
sciencealert.com
Najstarsze