Betelgeuse is a red supergiant variable star, its brightness varies…or maybe it will soon die in supernova…
Betelgeuse is ~700 light-years away from us, maybe the explosion has already occurred?
I can sometimes see the Winter Triangle when the sky is clear from my window at night with Betelgeuse, Sirius and Procyon.

Sometimes? I see it every day.

Lucky you! The sky is often very cloudy where I live but when the sky is clear, it's wonderful.

Well it's cloudy a lot here too but I think what's more important is that there are no big cities in this region so light pollution is very low. Like the gold standard (as far as I see it) for light pollution is if you can see the Milky Way on a clear day and if I step outside the streets with streetlights and into the dark it's there on a clear day.

Bringing the space thread back - because - Elon strikes again, and SpaceX is going to be flying men to the ISS

After that, human-rated and all, it's not such a far leap to the red planet, hopefully.

Me buying that 'Occupy Mars' t-shirt obviously made all the difference...

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/spacexs-crew-dragon-gets-a-launch-date-may-27th/

I believe they are also involved in getting Tom Cruise to the space station. I hate Tom Cruise, but its pretty interesting that he is going to be on the ISS recording a movie.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tom-cruise-international-space-station-movie/

I saw that article - absolutely cool as hell - Tom Cruise is the right person for that, doing all of his own stunts as he does. At least whatever he does will be fun.

Yikes. If we hopped aboard the space shuttle discovery, which can travel 5 miles a second, it would take us about 37,200 years to go one light-year. Walking? That would take us some 225 million years (that’s assuming that you managed a constant speed of 20 minutes for every mile and didn’t stop for any bathroom breaks…it would be a little trying, to say the least, especially when one considers that modern humans have only been around for about 200,000 years. Why am I bringing this up a person probably will ask? I don't know but just thought it was kind of interesting.

In a nice double-shot of good science & tech news -

After the success of the second Crew Dragon test, SpaceX will be launching again tonight - this time a new batch of Starlink satellites. https://www.spacex.com/launches/

Elon & co. have secured testing of the Starlink system with the US Army, and provisional testing in Canada, the northern US, and Germany later this year / early next year.

The aim for the Starlink system is to dominate satellite internet provision, providing a service better and more cost effective (for the consumer) than current providers can manage. The aim here is to dominate that market in the same way that Falcon 9 now has c.70% of the commercial space launch market, and use the financial gains to fund the ongoing build of the Mars-bound Starship.

Happily, the latest Starship component prototype that exploded did so because of poor ground-equipment handling, rather than anything wrong with the rocket itself.

Good time to be into space stuff !

The fastest man-made object ever, the Parker Solar Probe, can make a light year in 50 years at its current speed, which would be 200 years to Proxima Centauri. That's actually not so bad.

Solid point. I didn't think of this that way. Not real bad. Whoosh.

That probe will do 40,000mph (!) and use Venus' gravity to manage it's orbit. Amazing piece of kit.

What? It's current speed is 244,000mph.

https://www.space.com/parker-solar-prob ... flyby.html

Yep, I missed off a zero - it's maximum velocity relative to the sun will be in the region of 400,000 mph

Another solar probe has sent back pictures, showing the swirling vortex of doom that keeps us all alive, up close(r)

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/solar-orbiter-returns-first-data-snaps-closest-pictures-of-the-sun

One of the nice things about lockdown - the brain-space to get back into this stuff !

It's all pointless to keep waiting to LSST and JWST. Those two will make everything we talk about now look like amateur stuff.

A study has come to the conclusion that our sun will explode in a supernova. But it will take a very long time, "like writing the word 'trillion' a hundred times", because what it will take is that after our sun's "first death" turning into a red giant and then into a white dwarf, after that incredibly long time I just mentioned, the white dwarf will cool into a black dwarf, and a black dwarf unlike its white predecessor will be able to produce the heavy elements required for a supernova explosion.

While that is fascinating, it's rather like knowing the end of the movie - makes all of our daily efforts seem a little redundant, knowing how the story ends

At what point in the cycle of the sun dying does earth become uninhabitable ?

Does anyone here believe the Cyclic model, or infinite universe. It is my my belief and I have read a few papers and articles on the theory. I did take some Astronomy in college, but am still learning about the theory. Here is a .edu in regards to those interested in reading more about the theory. Although it goes against modern scientific beliefs, I believe it is something that is beyond our current understanding.

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1995MNRAS.275..850B/0000853.000.html

At the point where it provides the ideal environment for the evolution of bipedal mammals.

NASA captures closest asteroid flyby of Earth ever recorded

https://www.teslarati.com/nasa-captures-closest-asteroid-flyby/


Over this past weekend, an SUV-sized asteroid passed Earth in the closest flyby of its type on record. Traveling at about 8 miles per second and measuring about 10-20 feet, the tiny rock came about 1800 miles above the Indian Ocean before heading back into deep space.

Bunch of old journal and magazine articles on US spy satellites from the cold war, along with some correspondence and unpublished notes from the author (Anthony Kenden). Thought these might be of interest to some here.

https://planet4589.org/space/archive/kenden/index.html

I find them very interesting. I read through the one from 1986. Although according to the references, they are just a compilation of public historical information, very interesting.

Thanks for those ! reading about the earlier Titan era stuff is always interesting

Bringing back the space thread - tonight at 7.27 PM EST the latest manned launch from Kennedy will take place, via SpaceX's Falcon + Dragon.

Weather permitting, the live stream starts in around an hour !

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/weather-permitting-todays-the-day-crew-dragon-flies-four-people-into-space/

Even with how dark the footage was, being night, it's always cool to watch these Dragon launches. I'm pumped to see more crewed missions coming soon and they're very consistent with putting up satellites for the internet constellation. I wonder what's going on with BFR development? It's been a while since I've seen an update.

Absolutely, it's really cool to watch a night launch - get to see all of the stage separation / booster landing stuff really clearly on the long distance cameras.

BFR was renamed starship, will be a two stage fully reusable giant bastard of a thing designed to fly to Mars, land, and fly home.

Prototype 8 is current undergoing engine testing prior to a proper test flight (they've already done short flights to prove the engines with other versions)

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/for-the-first-time-a-starship-prototype-roars-to-life-with-three-engines/

What you see in the video there is the second stage - the actual Starship - the first stage will be an absolutely enormous booster to get all of that stainless steel off the ground


.

That is awesome.

As much as I hope this can become the new dirigible showcase of new tech, I really hope it doesn't go horribly wrong either:

Of course the focus is different but I also can't help but worry about the geopolitical implications as well when, rather than an ICBM, a Trojan Horse could be the next world-ender.

That's why I like thinking about outer space though. It's simpler because these rocks outside our reach haven't been totally or viably "claimed", and according to treaties on Earth, there'll be a chance that these civilizations can develop independently so long as the 'one-way-trip' stays the norm. If death is their lot to those first colonizers, that and taxes will be the lot of the next generations depending on how it all comes to being. (having fun with Franklin's notion of course):P Likely it won't stay the norm, but at least there can be that sort of unifying hope that Battlefield Earth (terrible yet terribly fun movie) may somehow chill its engines. Yet we all know how tentacles try to suffocate.

There will be plenty of situations to arise in the future about it all, but for now it all seems like hope to me, rather than death on desolation because at least that movement forward is in such initial stages and for all we know we could all look as dumb as people wearing buckles on their hats to people a few centuries from us, even for the reservations I may have about something I hope will bring a bit of hope.

Yeah, the earth side point-to-point stuff is a bit more sci fi than the Mars stuff (odd to say that) - I can't imagine any government ever being totally comfortable letting SpaceX fire rockets at their cities. Cool as it would be !

The Mars stuff is being well catered for with the rest of the SpaceX / Tesla / Boring Co projects, too; underground transportation & habitation, solar arrays, electric vehicles, satellite communications arrays. Add the massive re-usable rocket to that, and we're in space colonisation mode. It's crazy that one firm is setting itself up to be in a place to send an entire infrastructure like that to another planet.

Agreed that it's nice that space stuff is getting that old-school Star Trek feeling back, again. The Russians are 30 years behind technology-wise, and fading fast, Chinese stuff keeps blowing up, and everyone else is stuck to disposables - it's so good that the stagnation has been broken.

Agreed that it's very likely we'll end up with independent human civilizations on other planets - I don't know how into old sci fi you are, but Wernher von Braun authored a novel set in a civilisation on Mars - the leadership of those cities ? They were called Elons. Make of that what you will

Nice Battlefield Earth ref, That's a name I haven't heard that in a loooooong time - up there with Zardoz for 'movies you watch once'

not entirely on topic, but it sheds light on an interesting aspect nonetheless:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03461-4


Why is that important?

And why they choose this place in particular is explained in the article. I have been familiar with some of the things due to the reporting on the Rosetta probe, but I still though that the origin of the first cells where some deep space in the ocean. It turns out that such might not be the case.

Three days ago I saw a livestream which showed Jupiter and Saturn being aligned. This apparently happens every 796 years. The last date of this phenomenon was 1224 AD.

Starship SN10 launch today ! They're attempting to land without exploding this time, and have a new engine config to test. Should be a good one to watch live ! (below is an indy stream, SpaceX will have an official one up just before they go)

One octillion

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

An octillion is equal to 1 followed by 27 zeros. That's equal to a billion billion billions, which is impossible to even comprehend! It's a number so large that most people haven't even heard of it, and there's a completely good reason why: it's ridiculously huge. It's far far more than things most people would care to know: more than the number of gallons of water on Earth, the monetary value of the entire Earth's crust, the number of cells in your body, the diameter of the observable universe in meters, etc. So how can we get an idea of how big an octillion is? Let's use some examples:

An octillion gallons of water in a sphere would be 190,000 km wide. That's somewhere between the size of Jupiter and the sun.

A tower of an octillion people would be 180 billion light years high. That's more than the diameter of the observable universe! This clearly shows that from the next -illion onward, we can forget about even using the tower-of-people analogy because these numbers are so big!!

How would you put weight into terms of octillions? Earth weighs about 6 octillion grams. The sun weighs about 2 octillion metric tons, and it's about 1.4 octillion cubic meters.

An octillion dollars would cover the world in a layer 15 km thick. 15 km is about twice the height of Mount Everest!

An octillion carbon atoms would take up a cube 13.4 cm wide, or about 5.3 inches. That's as big as many household objects. Also, the average human body has about seven octillion atoms, which is pretty amazing.

The future is inching closer

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/spacex-successfully-lands-a-starship-test-flight/

What do you think about a huge black hole, the size of a million Suns? In my opinion, it is mega-grandiose and incredibly cool that humanity in its development has come to the study of such distant depths of the Space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsquake

weird when you think about it. So, there is supposed to be a venusquake and a mercuryquake as well ... somehow an inflationary use of *quake.

Source:
https://www.sciencemag.org/podcast/blood-tests-alzheimer-s-disease-and-what-earthquakes-mars-reveal-about-red-planet-s-core

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58885555

I just watched William Shatner aka Captain Kirk being blasted into space and landing safely afterwards. All at 90 years old. I am stunned. Congratulations to him. Well deserved.

And damn, that champagne bottle moment is going to haunt Bezos for eternity. Let's hope the aliens never see this


-> https://futurism.com/bezos-interupts-wi ... -champagne

There is a beautiful app called "Star Walk 2". I used it and was able to identify almost all known stars, plus my favorite Antares.

Antares is the proxima of the Scorpion constellation; a red giant with a diameter 300 times the sun's. You can see its red color slightly flickering with a clear sky. It is magnificent.

Empty space is full of quantum fields just like any other segment such as the earth. The only difference is the level of energy is at a lower level. Space, time and matter are just emergent properties of these quantum fields. That is what really blows my mind - the absolute immense size of empty space is still full of quantum fields. It wouldn't surprise me if one could fit all of the stars and planets of the Universe into a few solar systems given how minute they are in comparison.

The seriously awesome Webb space telescope to launch in a few days.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-sets-coverage-invites-public-to-view-webb-telescope-launch