I have not heard a car for a few hours. Not even the rumble of traffic in the distance and I can see the night sky without light pollution. It is a very privileged experience in some ways and while it has its advantages we are measurably disadvantaged in most human development metrics: health, education, income etc compared to people living in urban areas of our own country. The disadvantage is real and pops up everywhere from cancer survivability to suicide rates. Equitable internet access is more important than many people appreciate. If we can improve services to everyone AND protect radio astronomy that is a worthy goal.
How does fiber being cheap help them if no ISP is willing to dig miles and miles of trenches to lay it and connect to their home? I live in the middle of suburbia and don’t have access to fiber.
Your comment about subsidizing their lifestyle doesn’t really make sense. What are you subsidizing exactly? This tech is also useful in poorer countries that don’t have the infrastructure at all.
The number of satellites in orbit around Earth is rapidly increasing, with some 100,000 expected to be in place by 2030. And as their numbers grow, so does the difficulty of observing the universe from Earth.
Starlink’s satellites are bright enough that astronomers have decried them as an existential threat for as long as SpaceX has been launching them into orbit. While the company has taken some measures to mitigate how shiny they appear from Earth, their increased number and the many other satellites being launched means that their light pollution is “threatening the entirety of ground-based astronomy in every wavelength and in different ways,” astronomers told the BBC. There is a fear that soon, space observation might begin to look like a “windshield of bugs,” and become unfeasible, a researcher at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile told The New York Times.
So basically, at least during the rest of this decade, our billion dollar telescopes, radio and optical, are blind on different frequencies or are only able to obtain diffuse resolution.
As technology advances, our ability to observe the universe from space far surpasses ground-based telescopes. While I appreciate amateur astronomy, let’s acknowledge that satellites like those in low Earth orbit can occasionally interfere with surface observations. Instead of criticizing their presence, perhaps we could focus on working together to minimize disruptions and support continued space exploration – after all, observatories like JWST are pushing the boundaries of our understanding.
This is an insane take. “While I appreciate amateur astronomy” - my dude, it’s not amateurs being affected here. You want to let a small number of tools become the only way humanity has to make these kinds of observations? You think the tools up there can somehow be made to equal the capacity and accommodate the man hours required to do the science we do?
Don’t forget important discoveries are also made by or with the help of amateurs, who permanently observe the night sky and measure the coordinates, i.e. the relative positions, of luminating objects. This allows others, mostly professionals, to calculate their motions and obtain information about the (hidden) masses, i.e. luminating and non luminating objects, inducing and influencing them. By this means, black holes, ‘dark’ masses, or asteroids, ‘fast’ moving illuminated objects, have been and are beeing discovered.
Discoveries about and observations of comets, supernovae, even exoplanet transits are regularly being enriched or even driven in some cases by “amateur” astronomers.
This guy’s legit out of his mind or he’s been huffing Elon’s musk.
Considering their instance, I’d assume they’re more out of their mind than huffing Elmo.
Another important part in this argumentation is that each type of telescope has its use case:
Extraterrestrial telescopes, as they are not objected by atmospheric blur can obtain much better ‘images’ from the cosmos even of weak, low brightness signals, which makes them best for observing the ‘far’ cosmos until the boundaries of recognition.
Yet, they are and always will be much more expensive and more difficult to maintain than terrestrial telescopes. Thus, using them for observing our cosmic front yard, the milky way, is like shooting with canons at sparrows.
Due to their cost, extraterrestrial telescopes also will always be ‘few’, too few to effectively keep track of the objects around us. Thus, ‘cheap’ terrestrial telescopes, large professional ones and small ones run by amateurs, will always be needed to observe the objects ‘closely’ around us, i.e. in our galaxis.
Suggesting that we move towards space-based astronomy doesn’t mean he’s out of his mind. He might not be a professional astronomer or astrophysicist, but that hardly indicates insanity.
They had an opinion and expressed it. You can then reply and explain why you disagree. No need to call them insane for expressing their thoughts.
The tools “up there” could be made to rival the capacity and accommodate the man hours required to more science than we do now. The problem is it’s hard and expensive and nobody wants to try because of that fact. It’s becoming easier with cheaper launch vehicles and better communications infrastructure. Now we need folks to start identifying the best locations to send new observation satellites and then start building and launching them.
Your take is very conservative and counter to technological progress and I don’t appreciate the personal attack. We can have a meaningful conversation without that crap.
I can imagine it but it certainly won’t be practical to implement in our lifetimes. There are certainly some observatories that benefit from being based in space (optical and infrared) and even gravitational detectors such as laser interferometers. However aside from the wide capture area radio telescopes need large amounts of compute to separate the signal from the noise. The amount of data that needs to be processed makes space based radio observatories very hard to implement.
Maybe the dark side of the moon will make a decent observatory one day but we haven’t set foot on the place for decades, let alone built anything so complex.
As someone that uses Starlink due to nothing else being in my area, I hate everything about this. Sure the convenience of having internet wherever I want is nice, but this still sucks. Especially since I’m a huge space nerd so this shit just hurts my soul.
My favorite part is that bout 5 miles down the highway they have fibre optic. They’ve been “installing” it for about 4 or 5 years now. They’ve had the spool just sitting outside for half that time.
It’s not the only problem with them, and potentially not the biggest either - there is no plan to remove or maintain them when they die other than de-orbiting them into the upper atmosphere. A recent study suggests that this will critically harm the ozone layer, and that adding metallic particles in the quantities implied by the number of starlink satellites that Elmo plans to launch could do far more damage to the ozone layer than our previous attempts to screw it up!
But people are still shilling for starlink. I was always downvoted for mentioning the kessler syndrome or light pollution. All for progress, I guess we really need that fast internet in the middle of the atlantic.
People down voting you for bringing up Kessler syndrome were correct to do so. It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.
Light pollution is a more reasonable objection, and the effects on the upper atmosphere of all those satellites burning up would be as well, but not Kessler syndrome
It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.
Yeah. The mass and altitude are too low.
The thing with Kessler Syndrome is that collisions create debris, which cascades with more collisions, until there’s too much debris. But each collision actually results in the loss of kinetic energy or gravitational potential energy overall, so that the subsequent pieces are less energetic and/or less massive. Start with enough mass and enough altitude, and you’ve got a real problem where it can cascade many, many times. But with smaller objects at low altitude, and there’s just not enough energy to cause a runaway reaction.
Fellow dark sky supporter. Between all the led billboards, sprawl, and all the attempts at education failing… I doubt our children will have any view of the stars at all.
Unless there’s a hurricane that’s wipes out power… Stargazing was excellent for a few nights then.
Mathematically, it’s possible, but scientists are still skeptical about whether or not they are real. They’re called white holes and you can actually create a model of one in your kitchen sink. If you let the water just hit the bottom and spread out evenly in all directions, you can kind of visualize the way it’s supposed to work. Action Lab on YouTube actually has a pretty good video about it which I suggest watching if you’re interested. youtu.be/p3P4iKb24Ng?si=b3_RHuj0J3F_7DC1
Tangent, but you don’t need to include the question mark or anything after in most urls. Definitely not YouTube links. It’s just YouTube telling itself who shared the info (you) and they use that to track shit. But the link works just as well without it, and you’re not voluntary spying on yourself.
Mathematically, it’s possible, but scientists are still skeptical about whether or not they are real. They’re called white holes and you can actually create a model of one in your kitchen sink. If you let the water just hit the bottom and spread out evenly in all directions, you can kind of visualize the way it’s supposed to work. Action Lab on YouTube actually has a pretty good video about it which I suggest watching if you’re interested. youtu.be/p3P4iKb24Ng?si=b3_RHuj0J3F_7DC1
If it can be infinitely dense inside a black hole, doesn’t that mean the scale doesn’t matter and that the ‘inside’ is pretty much it’s own whole universe with different physics rules?
Would a regular asteroid be able to wobble the earth as described in this article? Or is it just black holes that should do so?
I seem to remember reading that primordial black holes weren’t yet a proven phenomenon and I have trouble imagining them myself. Wouldn’t they have hawking radiation too which we would be able to detect?
If dark matter is fully explained by such black holes, their most likely mass, according to some theories, would range from 10^17^ to 10^23^ grams—or about that of a large asteroid.
In case this doesn’t tell you a lot, 10^17^g is half the weight of Mount Everest, and 10^23^g is 4x the weight of the Antarctic ice shield.
The earth is estimated to “weigh” 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds. (That is weird when you think about it. The weight of the earth being based on what something weighs on earth, I mean.)
Mt. Everest is only about 357,000,000,000,000 pounds and is just a tiny fraction of the mass of the earth.
So. My point is that we need a better way to portray scale of things in the universe. AUs work to a point but then we have to quickly move to parsecs. Parsecs quickly give way to light years. (Or vice-versa, depending on how you visualize things better.) Light years kinda work, but only for between 14-26 billion years. Even after all of that, I can hardly still fathom the size of Mt. Everest. (This was a rant, but not an angry rant.)
Weight in pounds isn’t the right unit here. Weight varies depending on the strength of the gravitational field you’re in, whereas mass does not. A kilogram here on earth weighs 2.2lbs but on the moon it only weighs 0.36lbs.
In the English Engineering System, the unit of mass is 1 pound mass (lbm), and is equivalent to the amount of matter that weighs 1lb at 1G. I won’t argue that EES is a good system, but it does at least have a kludged unit for mass. It has an equally kludged unit for force, too, called pounds force (lbf).
I cannot fathom the size of anything on an astronomical scale. I have seen the videos that zoom out and show Earth at scale with the Sun and then the Sun at scale with other stars. No matter how many times I view the facts it will be incomprehensibly large.
astronomy
Najstarsze
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.