First possible interstellar object detected in our solar system
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
Having said that, I've been fairly unmotivated to read anything recently due to working long hours and recently having rescued a dog.
Let Ne know how you go with it.
I also consider the Dark Tower movie a somewhat okeyish trailer for the series. I just finished the second Dark Tower book, and in the books the man in black always speaks like McConaughey.
However, I understand your feel. I can't read Harry Potter, it's just not interesting enough, even after the movies.
(In general, I find reading after watching a much more pleasant experience - if I read a book first, I form my own image of the characters, which then usually clashes with what's in the movie. If I do it the other way, I just cast the characters I saw in the movie into the book.)
That said, do continue reading - the novels only get better with time, and there's plenty of awesome waiting that the show is nowhere near reaching.
The struggle of a fledgling technological species against the plight of interstellar space is a majestic backdrop for many of the best novels I've ever read. Especially with Clark, Niven, Pournelle etc. that have done some excellent mathematical investigation into the feasibility of the concepts discussed.
This is an unpopular opinion, because I've seen here how people like to hate on Gravity and stuff, but I feel like we're seeing a new trend in sci-fi movies/shows - Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and now The Expanse, despite their various levels of science/plot tradeoffs, all are much more faithful to physics than what came before (with a honourable exception of Space Odyssey), and they do a great job at showing you can have a great sci-fi appealing to general population that sticks to how real space travel works.
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That saids, The Expanse novels are 11/10 Even Better Than On TV, and I highly recommend them. Can't wait for the next one coming out soon(ish).
Space ship design is the other thing that regularly annoys me, it's all metal and not at all foam-padded on the inside. They're designed to look cool and futuristic, not utilitarian. They're also much too spacious, which makes it easier to get nice shots, of course, but is also a little ridiculous.
That said, it's amazingly fun and I've watched it twice and read all of the books. I think we can all agree that if the two points above are what's wrong with the series, it's pretty damn good. Highly recommended!
>Hundreds of years in the future, things are different than what we are used to after humans have colonized the solar system and Mars has become an independent military power. Rising tensions between Earth and Mars have put them on the brink of war. Against this backdrop, a hardened detective and a rogue ship's captain come together to investigate the case of a missing young woman.
SOLD. I know what I'm watching this weekend, thank you!
Classic Niven, fantasy ideas treated as logical science-fiction, in film noir style.
Yes, totally made up but in theory it would be possible.
> pavlov: At 44 km/s, the object is travelling slightly faster than Pioneer 10. Seems too slow for an interstellar probe?
> QAPereo: A probe should show signs of acceleration, not freefall... unless you anted the probe to be stealthy. That is a disturbing thought.
Of course it has FTL, but they want to observe us for an extended period in our natural state, not riled up by an FTL object moving through our system and parking in orbit.
They also wanted to see how long it would take us to detect it. I'm not sure how well we did.
Well it's already leaving again after it completed its maneuver around our sun, and we haven't even a proper telescope pointed at it yet...
I found it interesting that the first such object observed passed inside the orbit of Mercury. Is there some physics based reason that would be likely or was it a fluke?
And that you are far away from Sol to not burn on it
It's an interesting concept to think about
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/mpml/conversations/messa...
> AscendingNode's tweet is in error: It's using the basic find_orb fit (which tries to fit the object's observations to a parabolic orbit) without taking into account the fact that it COULD be interstellar.
> You'll notice quite clearly, that in the follow-up tweets they make, that they give residuals in the orbit on the order of 6-9 whole arcseconds. It's quite bothersome that everyone I've been talking to has been re-quoting the tweet all day.
So where are the stars in our night sky? Are they even further away than Uranus, Neptune.., but so bright we see them anyway?
EDIT: Thanks, all! Makes sense.
Yes.
Every star you see in the night sky with the naked eye is part of our galaxy.
>for instance a galaxy with two stars would be called a Binary System.
A galaxy usually has billions or trillion of stars. Our solar system has one star, which is our sun ( a sun is a star with planets around it). Our solar system is inside of a galaxy, which is made up of billions and billions of stars.
>So where are the stars in our night sky? Are they even further away than Uranus, Neptune.., but so bright we see them anyway?
All stars are outside of our solar system by definition. They are light-years away ( the time it takes to get there at the speed of light is years), but most planets are light-minutes away.
Yes, they are outside of our solar system. They are ridiculously far away.
Take a peek here: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/features/cosmic/farthest_info....
There's Earth, it's a planet orbiting our star, Sol AKA the Sun, in our solar system. A star has plenty of bodies orbiting around it, dust, asteroids, planets, so the whole group is called a solar system.
There's other stars "next" to us, which in turn have dust, asteroids and planets orbiting around them. So they also are solar systems, since all stars have stuff orbiting around them.
Stars (/solar systems) tend to cluster together in a galaxy. A galaxy is composed of billions of stars.
Earth/our Solar system is in the Milky Way galaxy, so most of the stuff we see in the sky are stars that are not very far from us and/or part of the Milky Way galaxy.
The closest galaxy from ours is Andromeda, which is in turn composed of billions of stars, and countless planets.
So, the order is planet (Earth) -> star (Sun) -> (grouped into a) solar system -> galaxy (Milky Way)
Binary systems are solar systems which do not have a single star, but they have TWO! and these stars orbit each other. A galaxy has millions of binary systems (not sure how rare they are)
Uranus, Neptune, etc. are part of our solar system, so yeah, the stars you see are farther beyond.
EDIT: apparently I'm a bit confused as well, as star/planet groups are called planetary systems, and only ours is called the Solar System (from Sol/the Sun). The more you know.
Does this help and answer your question?
You can see some other galaxies with the naked eye, but not make out any of the stars within them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_galaxies#Naked-eye_gal...
Note that the Magellanic Clouds are basically orbiting our galaxy, and that the next closest independent galaxy is Andromeda, 2 and a half million light years away.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Earth%27...
View full screen and at 100% to be able to read the text.
We don't see the individual stars from other galaxies. We barely can even see other galaxies with the naked eye. But once technology shows us that the sky is filled with galaxies, invisible to the unassisted eye, it blows the mind away. Every galaxy has it's own unique "starry night".
Astonishingly, some have projected that there are more galaxies in the universe than stars in our Milky Way galaxy. ~d
The two obvious extra-galactic objects you can see are (1) Andromeda, which appears as a small smudge but is actually huge: https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-4Z_aNPDvDVU/UtvEsVBCzSI/AAAAAAAAD... and (2) the large magellanic clouds which are a bit more obvious.
Andromeda is the nearest big galaxy to us, but the LMC still has its own stars.
To answer your last question - yes, this is the concept of apparent magnitude. Stars are so incredibly bright that you can see them despite the fact they're very distant. We can see the planets even though the only light we're getting is from reflection. Look at how bright Jupiter or Saturn are, for example, and then think what a miserable fraction of the Sun's light they actually reflect, and how much of that we receive on Earth. It's a very small percentage - the Sun is just really bright.
This is an important point though - you cannot measure the size of most stars directly. We've been able to do it with very large stars, but mostly all you know is (a) That star is this bright and (b) it's this colour. From that astronomers can derive models to figure out how large it is. Even if you know the distance, it's not trivial: is it a really tiny, but stupidly bright object or is it a massive, but really dim object? Beyond a certain distance you have to use models and make educated guesses.
Have fun destroying Earth!
That said, this was literally my first thought when I saw the headline on HN - that I can't wait until we have a space presence good enough that, the next time this happens, we'll be able to quickly send a probe to such an object.
If we'd known it was coming, we could in principle have gotten something out to its point of closest Earth approach, but the object's velocity means even that would've been a flyby with no possibility of rendezvous outside possibly an impactor.
As the matter stands today, anything we'd send after it would have to overcome a velocity disadvantage of something like 40 kilometers per second - in other words, traversing the diameter of our planet three or four times every second - on a vector pointed near as nevermind to straight away from us. That's not something our propulsion technology is so far even close to being able to do.
Edit: Oh never mind, you meant the velocity needed to catch up with it.
But, yes, the velocity difference is a killer. The closest we've ever come was the Apollo-Saturn stack, and even that only had ~9km/s left over after reaching escape velocity.
Sooooo cool! I wonder if the system of origin will eventually be determined?
So we have an origin. However they don't give the error margin so is probably not possible to pin point the exact origin without further calculations.
For example, it's very energy intensive to go visit Mercury.
It's unlikely that an object would be pulled right into the sun though, just redirected by its close encounter so it flies off again in another direction.