Thursday Throughput: Doomsday Rock Edition
This is the largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. It took over 10 years to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, requiring over 600 Hubble overlapping snapshots that were challenging to stitch together. The galaxy is so close to us, that in angular size it is six times the apparent diameter of the full Moon, and can be seen with the unaided eye. For Hubble’s pinpoint view, that’s a lot of celestial real estate to cover. This stunning, colorful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars. That’s still a fraction of Andromeda’s population. And the stars are spread across about 2.5 billion pixels. The detailed look at the resolved stars will help astronomers piece together the galaxy’s past history that includes mergers with smaller satellite galaxies.
[ThTh1] You may have heard an asteroid is headed our way? Do we need to worry? The short answer is no. The long answer is in this week’s video:
[ThTh2] As I write this, RFK, Jr. is on his way to confirmation to head Health and Human Services despite being massively unqualified for the position. Not that it matters, but let’s keep the truth visible: he’s lying about what happened in Samoa. And he’ll lie when we have deadly outbreaks of disease under his watch. Because that’s what he does.
As I write this, we are seeing a big measles outbreak in Texas happening where vaccination rates are low. We are doubtless going to see more of this. I’ve said all I have to say about the decision to elevate his horrible person to authority. It appears that healthy children matter less to the Republican Party than obedience to Trump.
[ThTh3] We’ve discovered a new form of life. Not on Mars or in asteroids or at the bottom of the ocean. But in our own bodies.
[ThTh4] The banner image for this post is from the latest Hubble mosaic of the Andromeda Galaxy. The image I’ve posted doesn’t do the survey justice. The actual images are gigantic.
[ThTh5] Every time we look at the interior of our planet, it gets weirder.
[ThTh6] A new neutrino detector shattered the record for the most energetic neutrino detected.
[ThTh7] Where science intersects law: Thomson Reuters won their lawsuit against an AI company for, essentially, scraping their content to teach their AI models. It will be interesting to see how this all unfolds.
I asked about this on the video but I’m still confused. I’m sure you’ve seen this map of the most likely places for the asteroid to hit:
I’m confused about how there’s, apparently, a 2% chance for the asteroid to hit or miss the planet but, if it its, we’re relatively confident that Canada is safe.
If the asteroid could miss the planet entirely, it also strikes me that, if it hits the planet, it could hit pretty much anywhere. Maybe it’ll hit Australia, maybe it’ll hit Ireland, maybe it’ll hit the Caldera in Yellowstone and we’ll get one heck of a show.
“Maybe it’ll hit, maybe it won’t, but if it does, it’ll be around the equator and on this particular half of the planet” strikes me as putting all of the certainty in the wrong freakin’ place.Report
Yeah, there’s a lot of uncertainty in that. The probability distribution is not even over the surface of the Earth — you can think of the possible course of the asteroid as being a long line that slice through the Earth along the red arc. But that shows a certainty that isn’t really warranted.Report
So, if something will hit, it’s most likely to hit somewhere around the equator?
I guess Tunguska threw me off.Report
Like, this is less “we’re absolutely certain that it’ll be somewhere along the red line” and more “along the red line the probability is .02 percentage points higher than the rest of the planet”.Report
I’m more interested in the angle the rock comes in at. Does it look like it comes straight in, or is it inclined at a significant angle? If the latter, from east-to-west or west-to-east? We had a bit of this discussion on a different post fairly recently. I argued that all of the drawings of the dinosaur-killer that showed it streaking across the sky were wrong; that the evidence suggested it came from the southeast but effectively straight in. At the velocities involved, the time from when the rock starts significantly interacting with the atmosphere and striking the ground (or air burst) is measured in seconds. Eg, 300 km at 17 km/sec is 17 sec and if you’re looking the wrong way you might miss it.
I read this week that the people who worry about such things have decided the prior opinion that the big crater at the Moon’s south pole was a glancing strike is wrong, that it was basically straight in.Report
Oof, yeah, that’s a good point too. Now I’m wondering how many calderas are somewhere on that line… okay. Preliminary glance says that the red line is pretty safe when it comes to popping one of the planet’s many zits.
So if it’s coming straight on, we probably want to nudge it left a bit.
If we have enough time, maybe we can have it hit the moon and throw it out of orbit and oh my god we’re all gonna dieReport
If we have enough time, maybe we can have it hit the moon and throw it out of orbit…
Run the relative masses, the velocities, the kinetic energy, the moon’s elasticity, etc. Maybe we get some interesting meteor showers. Maybe not. Lunar escape velocity is 2.4 km/sec.Report
This sounds like it’s going to be political but it’s not intended to be.
Trump put out an executive order today: ESTABLISHING THE PRESIDENT’S MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN COMMISSION
Here’s the part that grabbed me… under Section 2 Policy:
Open source data?
Like… that’s an unequivocal good thing? Right?Report
I’m not sure how “conflicts of interest” could even exist for federally-funded research, but this is probably going to end up being “you now have to fill out and submit a form saying that no such conflict exists”, and if someone later thinks there’s a problem now they can hang that form around your neck and call you both a cheat and a liar.Report
We’ve had COI regulations in place for all of the 23 years I’ve been a fed. A scientist, for instance, can’t serve on a selection panel for a program she has been funded by in the prior 5 years. It’s already routine.Report
On its face, yes. Wait until we get some anti-vax nutjob squawking about vaccine research they know absolute nothing about except for what they saw on Facebook.Report
And the failure to get access to that research is currently holding said nutjobs back?Report
Heh. I’m more worried about what kind of influence they now have, to be honest. Believe me, I’m all for transparency.Report