Throughput: Worlds Collide Edition

[ThTh1] In the last couple of weeks, two of the remaining Apollo astronauts — Ken Mattingly and Frank Borman, have passed away. The Apollo astronauts have been unusually long-lived but even they can’t live forever. The number of people who have walked on the surface of the moon or even orbited it is slowly diminishing. And if Artemis doesn’t get a move on, we will soon get to the point where no living human has walked on the moon.

It’s important to remember that the Apollo missions weren’t just a space race. They actually did some amazing science. In fact, the lunar ranging system they set up on the moon is still doing science. Probably the most important thing they did was bring back samples of the lunar surface. And it was thanks to that that we now know how the moon formed.

Until Apollo, the leading theory of how the moon formed was that it was a minor planet that was captured by the Earth’s gravity. In my review of the appallingly bad Kill the Moon, I mentioned the pre-Apollo Doctor Who series The Silurians and noted that while the idea that the Earth captured the moon was now known to be incorrect, it was the leading hypothesis at the time the series was made.

But the Apollo samples showed that the surface of the moon was very similar to that of the Earth, which is extremely unlikely if the two bodies formed in different parts of the Solar System. This threw the weight of evidence behind the collision hypothesis: that the early Earth collided with a Mars-sized object (now called Theia) and the debris thrown up into space eventually coalesced into the Moon.

This week, we got a big hint that this theory is right. Studies of the Earth’s mantle have shown that it has massive lumps in it that are slightly different than the rest of the mantle. And new computer simulations show that this is exactly what we would expect if the Earth-Theia collision did happen. What we are seeing is the remnants of a 4.5-billion year-old catastrophe.

These breakthroughs in understanding the nearest parts of the universe would have been seriously hobbled had not 24 outstanding men spearheaded the greatest adventure in human history. And only eight of those men are still with us, with an average age of 91.

[ThTh2] When it comes to telescopes, there is generally a trade-off. You can get images of large parts of the sky at low resolution. Or tiny parts of the sky at high resolution.

Or, you can build a detector with 600 million pixels and do both, which is what the Euclid spacecraft is doing. This week, it released its first images and … wow. Click through to their site to behind the true magnificence of the images. They are literally too big to post on this blog.

Euclid image of the Perseus galaxies. This is 1/16th the actual images size.

[ThTh3] When did humans start talking? The answer turns out to be a lot more complicated than you think in this podcast from John McWhorter.

[ThTh4] And sticking to long form video/audio, here’s a deep dive into the engineering behind the F-16 Fighting Falcon, which revolutionized air warfare.

[ThTh5] One thing scientists have long been interested in is why people in certain areas tend to live very long lives. It turns out the answer may be: fraud.

[ThTh6] What’s that you say? Pretty pictures from Euclid aren’t enough? How about a ghostly X-ray hand in space?

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./R. Romani et al. (Chandra); NASA/MSFC (IXPE); Infared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DECaPS; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt)

[ThTH7] My mind is bent.

Alaska's glacial ponds can be so small, and at the same time so deep and clear that really look like a portal to another dimension.

[📹 John Derting]pic.twitter.com/qTwdq8sa9z

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 30, 2023

[ThTh8] We’re slowly learning more about long COVID. It is interesting that long COVID rates have been dropping since the initial outbreak.

[ThTh9] The mystery of FRB’s just got deeper.