Friday was amazing, tonight was a bust (but just looking at stars on their own was pretty cool, so no regrets)… Fingers crossed for tomorrow and Monday!
Where abouts?
Where I’m at - northern Baja - of course there had to be a persistent nighttime marine layer, which only starts to clear once the sun is up.
Agreed. I’m not looking forward to it either. I’ll be at work, most people are probably going to call in, and there will be hours of traffic when get off.
Best chance I’ll ever have personally. Live in the path, work from home, good time. Plan is to just step outside for a bit, look at it (with protection) then back to work.
I'm glad the article mentions that in this case, it really doesn't matter; like, there seems to be nothing to 'pollute' on Mars (also 7 tonnes is not much at all). Bit of a strange headline to me.
You’re not wrong with your sentiment but i think it’s pretty safe to say that if we find life on Mars it’s gonna be trapped in ice somehow or deep below the surface. Besides having next to no atmosphere, it also has no magnetosphere which means it takes the full blast from solar radiation. Nothing living on Earth could survive outside on the surface of Mars.
we have quite a bit of life that thrives just under the surface… within nooks and crannies of dust particles… inside Chernobyl… in ocean volcanic vents…
i think mycelia are the only thing that can live off of just raw rock though (the vanguards of life)
but, spores are pretty small and everywhere…
personally i think we should get over looking for life on mars and seed it with whatever has the best chances…
a deep valley has a thicker atmosphere and more shade from the sun, btw…
I suppose so, but I believe they always make sure not a single trace of Earth life is left on the equipement they sent to Mars, for obvious reasons. So they already control for that.
Besides looking pretty messy, I'm not sure this does any harm.
nasa sure puts a lot of effort into it… can’t say i feel confident about other countries that crash into it…
on top of that, nasa has recently found that they’ve been breeding bacteria that lives off of their disinfectant, and so no they don’t already control for that.
Sad news for the tardigrades that were on board Israel’s Beresheet mission, which crash-landed on the Moon in 2019. Researchers have learnt that the microscopic animals, which can survive the vacuum of space and heavy-duty doses of radiation, wouldn’t have lived through the crash.
Wrong country and wrong outcome, I really nailed it. Given how hardy they are, I can’t say I’m convinced they’re all dead. Not that they’d actually be active without air and water
There are five confirmed dwarf planets in the solar system: Ceres, Haumea, Eris, Makemake and the ex-planet Pluto. All of these planetary pretenders, apart from Ceres, are located in or around the Kuiper Belt, a disk of comets and other small objects beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Pluto is so far from the sun and still has never seen such shade.
Na du push xidawang kaka felota shukumi ere milowda, mi beratna (o’ sésata), na! Milowda ge da kaka end fo da shetéxeting na materi keting fong da tumang, amash ye. 😱🙅🏽
I drove 2200 miles for this solar eclipse. I booked a place here in Dallas last year, and now it seems like it’s going to be cloudy with rain and thunder. :-/
I convinced my dad to fly over and join the road trip.
At least we got to see some incredible stuff on the way! Maybe there will be a break in the clouds…
I was in the same boat, 2000+ mile drive. NE Texas isn’t looking too bad right now! But if you’re up to it, drive up to Arkansas. I did that today from Austin-ish. Clouds up here are looking much more optimistic!
I’ve heard that it’s still a surreal experience even when overcast. Though, that’s what I had to believe to actually book the hotel room and days off work as somene living on the north-atlantic coast.
I was able to see the one back in 2017 smack dab in the middle of the path of totality and it was such a surreal otherworldly experience. No amount of trying to explain it to other people helped them really understand. Things look a weird way and there’s a very unique feel to it all.
My advice, get things set up, get your shots, start your recordings, but don’t forget to take 30seconds or so and just soak it in and be in the moment!
The abundance of back-to-back solar events has led scientists to think the sun may have entered its explosive era of peak activity, known as solar maximum — which seems to be starting a year earlier than previous forecasts predicted. However, researchers will have to wait until the sun “calms down” to know for sure.
What we do know is that X-class flares are most common during solar maximum, which is part of the sun’s 11-year solar cycle. So far in 2024, seven X-class flares, including the latest one, have burst from the sun, which is already half the number that reached Earth in 2023, Live Science previously reported.
On a long enough timescale, we’re gonna be hit by a big one.
I remember like a decade ago they were saying it hits a developed area, it’ll blow out all the transformers, and on that scale no country could replace them all for a very long time.
I agree. There were articles and documentaries about 20 years ago that I remember featuring these sort of events. The continent affected would take 20-30 years to rebuild its electricity grid.
I’ll just never get over how “we” (science I guess) know that stuff like this isn’t a question of if, but when.
And we just don’t seem to get ready for it.
Like, Y2K we saw coming and everyone handled it in time. But if there’s no firm date on something, everyone with the power to do anything just ignores it.
As a society it just feels like we’re living paycheck to paycheck. Can’t worry about next year cuz rents due in two weeks shit.
In general, people are appallingly bad at weighing up long-term vs short-term stuff, both in terms of risks and benefits. It's even worse when, as you say, there's no definite deadline or it doesn't directly affect those who can do something about it.
What you didn’t see was the guy who made the problem in the 60s warn everyone about it from the 70s onward until his retirement in the 90s, then everyone say oh shit, he is right.
The Carrington event was a big one. It is estimated to have been an X40 flare. This article is about an X1.1 flare. Telegraph poles caught fire. The auroras were so bright people woke up and started making breakfast even though it was the middle of the night. They were visible as far south as central Mexico! If we got hit by a Carrington scale flare today we would be repairing the power grid for the next half century.
I believe it’s possible to avoid if the proper protocols are in place. Namely, the grid has to be turned off completely before the flare hits and then things will mostly be fine. Just wonder how well we can predict these events.
My understanding is that we actually don't have much of a warning (under an hour), since a CME has to reach the satellite at the Lagrange point between Earth and the Sun for us to know it's about to hit Earth. According to the article below, this includes power companies, but I remain skeptical that there's enough organisation in place to shut down the North American, European or Asian grids in 15 minutes.
“Either extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) are incredibly rare (or non-existent), or they are deliberately avoiding contact with us (aka. the “Zoo Hypothesis“).”
There is a 3rd possibility - it may not be deliberate.
Our position in the Milky Way is really out on the ass-end of it. We are nowhere near galactic central. If our current understanding of slower than light travel is correct, it just may not be possible for other civilizations to reach us.
When it comes to communications, and our radio sweeps of the galaxy turning up nothing, well, we’re assuming any advanced civilization is still using radio transmissions.
Look at our recent experiment with laser based communication:
100 or so years after radio communication was widespread, we have the technology to eliminate it. There may be other methods orders of magnitude beyond that. We could be awash in alien communication streams we just can’t percieve because ours are too primitive.
There are also hundreds of other theories that can potentially explain it. Like, 100 years really isn’t a long time on cosmic scales. Maybe we’re late to the party and intelligent life wiped itself out already. Maybe we’re early, and we will wipe ourselves out before a new intelligence even figures out where the copy paper is.
We don’t want to be near the galactic center, there’s too much radiation. A quiet spot out on one of the arms away from supernovae and active objects is a much better place for life to evolve.
At this point our own radio is even too advanced for an alien civilization to detect. An interesting thing about radio is that aside from a few lingering powerful analog signals (AM/FM radio, active radar) our modern spread-spectrum radio is hard to distinguish from background noise. It’s an interesting consequence of information theory, as bandwidth and noise tolerance grow, if you aren’t looking for a signal it becomes almost invisible. We also do a lot with very little power now due to these amazing encoding methods, when I was a kid and the analog cell phone was novel we would have outright said that a phone could never communicate directly with satellites. Not enough power or antenna in your pocket. Yet here we are.
So any civilization that develops radio is only likely to send out a short burst of detectable radio before disappearing within 100 years, even without switching to an alternate technology. This makes radio an almost impossible thing to search for in a vast galaxy where time can separate us even more than space.
astronomy
Ważne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.