The Space Thread

Scientists get first glimpse of black hole eating star, ejecting high-speed flare: "An international team of astrophysicists has for the first time witnessed a star being swallowed by a black hole and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light."

What stars and/or constellations could be said to be associated with the Moon?

Lepus is associated with the Moon rabbit, but that's about all I could find.

Event Horizon Telescope reveals magnetic fields at Milky Way's central black hole: "For the first time, astronomers have detected magnetic fields just outside the event horizon of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy."

Faintest galaxy from the early universe, 400 million years after the big bang: "Astronomers have detected a very compact and faint early galaxy that was forming 400 million years after the big bang."

The cosmic web: Seeing what makes up the universe: "Matter known as ordinary, which makes up everything we know, corresponds to only 5% of the Universe. Approximately half of this percentage still eluded detection. Numerical simulations made it possible to predict that the rest of this ordinary matter should be located in the large-scale structures that form the "cosmic web" at temperatures between 100,000 and 10 million degrees. A team led by a researcher observed this phenomenon directly. The research shows that the majority of the missing ordinary matter is found in the form of a very hot gas associated with intergalactic filaments."

Team finds detailed record of mysterious fast radio burst: "Fast Radio Bursts (FR Bs), brief yet brilliant eruptions of cosmic radio waves, have baffled astronomers since they were first reported nearly a decade ago. Though they appear to come from the distant Universe, none of these enigmatic events has revealed more than the slimmest details about how and where it formed, until now.

By poring over 650 hours of archival data from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Green Bank Telescope (GBT), a team of astronomers uncovered the most detailed record ever of an FRB. Their research indicates that the burst originated inside a highly magnetized region of space, possibly linking it to a recent supernova or the interior of an active star-forming nebula."

New Horizons returns first of the best images of Pluto: "NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby — and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades."

VLA yields new insights on solar flares: "Observations with the upgraded VLA radio telescope provide strong support for a proposed mechanism by which solar flares accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light."

So in the event we do eventually find life on Titan, Europa or anywhere else in the Solar System we happen to be looking, and assuming studying it or a means of being able to are possible, any ideas of how that would go down?

I get being sterile and not interfering things are a big part of searches now because we haven't found anything but what happens when we eventually do? And I'm not evening going with an if here, it's a when.

Well, it seems like you are inviting repetition of about three quarters of all the science fiction ever written, but the discovery, in the places you suggest, would allow us to expand the possible number of life-supporting worlds we can posit. Which would make the Fermi Paradox even more paradoxical—or possibly be kinda bad news for us Earthlings.

I just mentioned those places because they seemed to come up most here. But I was going more for microbes than intelligent life.

There actually might be more complex organisms around the neighborhood. The under-ice salty ocean of Enceladus, for example, seems like the sort of place where critters like our tube worms would do pretty well.

As for your Q... Hopefully we'll be smart enough to keep foreign bio at arm's length until we know how it cohabits with our bio. Either bio could be fatal to the other. So, other than excitement of the confirmation that life is present elsewhere, and having some cool stuff to study for good old knowledge-expansion, there wouldn't be much impact.

Unless the organisms did something cool like excrete high-test gasoline or H3 or heroin or anything else that would make lots o' money.

I didn't say anything about complex life, I mentioned intelligent life. Different things.

But I guess that answers is as good as any. Thank You.

edited 11th Dec '15 10:39:52 AM by LSBK

"Our bodies excrete clean gasoline! We use it to fuel our cars and we run a self sufficient society"

"Oh man, that is awesome! We would LOVE to strike a deal with you guys"

"Certainly! What do YOU excrete?"

"Just poop"

"..."

and this is why earth is blown up by aliens.

JAXA's Akatsuki probe enters orbit around Venus on its second attempt. On the first try, it failed to fire thrusters long enough and ended up in stellar orbit. It took five years for the second go-round, but now we're going to get some nice, high-res imaging of Venus's atmosphere and surface. We hope. If the time spent around the Sun hasn't burned out its instruments.

You mean high quality organic fertiliser. Clearly Azsur will not be heading up the negotiation team for working out the trade agreement. It's all about how you position things.

Yeah poop is good fertiliser, it's also why the old trick of pooing on someone's property to get at them doesn't work against a farmer.

In H. B. Fyfe's short story "In Value Deceived," an alien exploration starship is searching for a way to alleviate the famine on their homeworld. They make first contact with a human starship on some barren little world. On a tour of the humans' ship, they are thunderstruck when they see the hydroponic installations. It's the key to salvation for their people!

But of course they feign disinterest. They ask for one as a souvenir. They don't notice the similar disinterest with which the humans ask for an alien heating unit. The one that produces all those pesky by-products, like uranium and gold nuggets.

Both aliens and humans are surprised when both parties make quick good-byes after the trade and take off before the trade is regretted. They both think, "Gee, the other guys act like they cheated us."

Hey, Jupiter. We missed ya, big guy. See you on July 4th!

All this talk of feeling tiny reminded me of this thing. http://tinyurl.com/p9n2sg2 For the wary, the tinyurl links to an NPR article which references an embedded youtube video about some guys making a scale model of the solar system out in the desert. In the words of Archer: "SUCH MIND-SHATTERING AWESOMNESS!"

edited 15th Dec '15 8:04:32 PM by Artificius

Nasa is about to get it's biggest budget in a long while. Whopeeee.

Mystery lurking in Curiositys latest drillhole

We're going back to the Moon - with or without NASA.

Bah. We need experience building centrifuge space stations, with moving asteroids, and with harvesting materials from asteroids too massive to move economically. Anything not working toward those objectives is wasted effort.

We already know how to crawl around at the bottom of a gravity well wishing we could get out.

Are you talking about the Moon being a gravity well? Because while it is, it's much easier to escape. Turning the Moon into a staging area for deeper space exploration would be economically feasible. Maybe a stepping stone to the large orbitals and other space stations you mentioned.

Also the moons surface gravity needs to be tested for how lower gravity affects humans long term. We know how the human body reacts to 1g and microgravity but extended periods at other settings is untested territory.

I also wonder if the microgravity problems can be fixed by ways other than by centrifuge. I can think of a few compelling reasons for keeping microgravity in spaceships (namely, entertainment, avoiding fall injuries - important for spaceships with unnecessarily large rooms and walls - and preserving one's joints) but one would need to compensate for the harmful medical effects.

edited 19th Dec '15 1:44:35 AM by SeptimusHeap

Yes, I'm thinking of Luna's gravity well as an impediment. Ditto Mars. The point has already been raised that there is no evidence 17% (Luna G) of Earth's gravity is any better than 1%, heath-wise. Intuition is that it would be, but there is no data in hand to support that assumption. It is also a good guess, though, that 17% is not as good as 100%.

Yes, Luna's escape velocity (~5400 mph) is lower than Earth's (~11,200 mph). Call it about 53%. Over half. The cost of that velocity would be about 20% of the cost of that V on Earth. When you consider that fuel on Earth is essentially free, when compared to the rarity (thus cost) of fuel on the Moon, there isn't a huge economic gain. ^note  Solar-powered linear accelerator would even the fuel difference some, but linear accelerators and solar panels do not grow on trees. Especially in space. There is a sunk cost there, as well. And why wrestle with gravity to build one, anyway? The fuel for one Lunar launch would probably make for as many as 5 launches of equal mass to an equal velocity via sling or linear accelerator from a micro-G location.

In other words, don't compare the Lunar lift costs to Earth's. Compare them against ... essentially zero.

So, why build on the Moon so that you can build large low-G structures when you can more cheaply just start building the low-G structures?

The easy availability of low-G manufacturing (and the other values of Low-G, like fun) is a big plus. Low-G is just an elevator ride away.

edited 19th Dec '15 6:18:47 AM by eyebones