Its a nice bit of tech. 73M in construction costs. The focal plane instrumentation alone weighs 10 tonnes. It includes 5,000 small computer controlled fiber positioners. The entire focal plane can be reconfigured for the next exposure in less than two minutes while the telescope slews to the next field. The DESI instrument is capable of taking 5,000 simultaneous spectra of different Galaxies
I wonder what the final nail in the coffin will be for MOND. It seems like there’s new observations every few months supporting Lambda-CDM (even if it’s obviously not complete) over MOND. At some point, MOND is just a clever idea that was worth exploring and didn’t pan out.
Conspiracy theorists: “scientists know it’s all wrong but they’re preventing the truth from coming out to protect their precious ‘theories’”
Actual scientists: “crap, our theories were dead on yet again, damn it, will someone please finally blow even a tiny hole in this thing so we can move forward”
That is a quite weak statement, I presume it implies that this result has not excluded a cosmological constant by a long shot, bacause that would have been huge.
The worst that could happen in our lifetimes, I would say, is be a total waste of money and resources since no other reachable bodies have atmospheres suitable for Earth-based life. Beyond our lifetimes, and possibly beyond humanity’s existence, that life may be able to survive somewhere but any kind of evolution likely takes millions of years and long-term survivability may not let it see that day
Odds are we already have: Mars, Venus both have had landers, and given that the protections from bringing bacteria are similar or worse than this lander, the only reason bacteria would not have survived is due to heating of the landers in atmosphere. IANARocketScientist.
Fortunately, we found this out now, before we drop a red hot lander through the ocean surface of one of the moons of (I can’t remember) which they suspect could have life
I mean sulfur is an important component of life and extremeophiles can handle many conditions. When I heard things about possible life at venus it was generally the idea of microorganisms floating in the atmosphere.
Earth was very inhospitable for life for quite some time. In the future, it could become barren again. What’s to say that Venus wasn’t once harboring life? We don’t know anywhere near enough of its geology to even guess that.
Earth-like is a very broad term. If an organism has something similar to DNA or shared any kind of chemical processes it could be “earth-like”.
As an odd hypothetical example, there is a theory that fungi could potentially spread from planet to planet. Even with a billion or so years of independent evolution, fungi on Venus and fungi on Earth could still share some of the same traits.
astronomy
Najstarsze
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