So, we can detect - see, dammit - something perhaps only 300km across at twice the distance to Pluto, and by reflected light alone.
Every now and again, my intuition breaks utterly down.
Every now and again, my intuition breaks utterly down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2n6zo0/comment/...
I would usually expect 2^3 to mean 8, and 2^^3 to mean 16
Perhaps too much time reading people talk about 3^^^^3 dust specs
I'm duty-bound to point out that this is only true in a philosophical, interpretive sense based on the aesthetics of explanations. Scientifically it's completely understood.
Science is just a way of compressing what we perceive with our senses into compact descriptions that our easy to memorize and understand by human beings. That is all. In the words of Neil Bohr, "Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience.".
I don't think this is true. The axioms can be testable, in which case you can do a little better than faith and say that "well, this is how it seems to work." For example I could have a theory that when I press the gas pedal my car moves forwards. Later on I could discover another theory that explains why that theory is true, but in the meantime I'm better than faith but worse than complete fundamental knowledge. That's where physics is - if we had complete fundamental knowledge many of us would go home, having nothing left to do.
But I'm pretty sure even in rational numbers probability would be exactly zero, because that's how probability there is defined (as a limit of a sequence, and limit is zero).
P (X | X) = 1.
And it's a really sorry state of affairs for photons that their vacations pass instantaneously.
(IOW: I was poking fun at the OPs statements of the photon travelling "possibly weeks", not making a statement of fact. I thought the "beaches of Neptune" bit gave it away, but I guess not)
The authors had this to say about it:
Surprisingly, like 2012 VP113, 2015 TG387 is relatively bright compared to the limiting magnitude of most of the survey fields. The Subaru observations generally go deeper than 25.5 mags, making 2015 TG387 about 1.5 mags brighter than the limiting magnitude of the disocovery survey fields it was found in.
It always struck me as a really nice response to anyone being silly about fake landings.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.htm...
Given the etymology of that word, that's a deliciously ironic sentence :)
"Fuck you beliefs" are a personal theory of mine. People sometimes assume ridiculous and deliberately provocative "beliefs" as a means of explicit rejection of a social order. The canonical example would be Satanism as a rejection of Christian culture/society. Believing Apollo is a hoax or that the Earth is flat is an explicit rejection of the industrial/scientific/corporate/university complex and its culture. The absurdity of these beliefs adds to their value as acts of protest. The phenomenon can also take the form of refusal to believe something taught by the hated authority. If the belief being refused is actually true and demonstrably so, it becomes a more potent act of protest.
Talk to the people that hold beliefs like the Apollo hoax and scratch the surface and you'll usually find someone who is under-employed in a dead-end job with no future and too much student loan debt. They are adopting an absurdist epistemology in protest of a society that they see as having failed them.
When I see conspiracy theories becoming popular I see a metaphysical and epistemological version of people throwing Molotov cocktails in the street at cops in riot gear under clouds of tear gas. Maybe this is what mass protests and "riots in the street" look like in the Information Age.
Maybe they should do actual protests and "riots in the street" then, instead of trying their best to be tagged as loonies :^).
NOTE: these were taken from lunar orbit, not earth-based telescopes.
(shadow) https://www.space.com/6997-photos-reveal-apollo-11-moon-land...
(large-ish, descent stage, rover tracks) https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/584392main_M...
It's really hard to estimate how long the hardware might last. Obviously there's no air or water, but there will be damage from radiation, temperature cycling, and micrometeorite abrasion.
A wild guess would be a similar timescale - max 100 million years, at which point there will be small anomalous piles of metal dust left, but no visible structure.
(But that's just a guess, and could be way out.)
Special cases like the infrared spectrum (JWT) exist. But the delays show how extremely difficult space based observation is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_optics
[Edit: wrong link]