One of the things they’re doing is calculating what it’s orbit would have to be to hit the Earth, and where it would have had to have been on its last orbit to be in that orbit
So they can look at any astronomical images of that part of the sky from then and see if it’s in the right place
If they find images of the right part of the sky at the right time and the asteroid is not in it, they know it’s not on an orbit that will hit the Earth in 2032
I science podcast I follow already warned last week that the probability would go up at first as they narrow down its trajectory.
They gave the example of a fan closing, as it gets narrow, the earth represents a bigger percentage of the remaining fan. If you keep closing the fan the Earth eventually will fall outside the fan and the percentage drop to zero.
Ok, so: you know how Earth is part of the solar system? And the solar system is part of a large collection of stars and planets called a galaxy?
Well, there’s lots of galaxies out there! And scientists for a long time have been trying to figure out how they formed - how did all the stars get close to each other? Why aren’t they just randomly drifting around?
Currently, everyone believes that there’s this magic stuff called “dark matter” that pulled the stars together to make galaxies. Kinda like how magnets pull things close to them!
And because galaxies are so big it would take a long time to pull the stars close together! Which means young galaxies would look less bright because the stars aren’t all close together yet, like they are with older galaxies.
So that’s what everyone believes.
But we’re getting pictures from a really strong telescope that’s showing us that young galaxies are brighter than we expected! Which is weird and exciting because it means that young galaxies might have been pulled together faster than we used to think! And our old theories about galaxy creation might be wrong!
There’s a theory that explains how galaxies could come together quickly, without dark matter, but it doesn’t really fit with many other theories we have about how the world works, so lots of people are thinking really hard to figure out how they might fit together.
And that’s what science is all about! Finding out new information that shows you that you were wrong in the past, and using that information to figure out new ways to act and think in the future!
Nope. No. Nuh-uh. Stop fucking up this planet, then we can talk. I’m drawing a line in the sand, I’m going to become an eco-terrorist if I see a fucking Coca-Cola ad when I look into the night sky.
All I think of is the movie, The Time Machine. Spoiler, the main character goes forward in time and sees the moon breaking apart, causing a collapse of civilisation.
There's a big difference between "touched up" as in, fix the contrast and adjust the color balance, versus "touched up" as in let's make a nebula look like a bat. The first, me and Ricky are in agreement that they're doing. The second, me and Snopes feel strongly that they're not doing.
everything about these two spacecraft is just amazing. It’s going to be quite a sad day when they transmit their last byte of data to our little planet. Reading about all the things we’ve done to keep talking to them. The redundancies that they’re running on etc… Fascinating stuff
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
Scientists estimate that 2024 YR4 is between 130 to 300 feet (40 and 90 meters) wide, large enough to cause localized devastation near the impact site. The asteroid responsible for the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia, was probably about the same size.
Idk about you but if it levels 1287 km² of forest, I don’t think that would exactly be good news for a populated area. On the upper range, it could be equivalent to a 40 megatonne bomb.
astronomy
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