Recent content by Ratman

What is bugging me is that this Nobel prize isn't really for first exoplanet discovery. It has been given for first exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star. This distinction completely ignores that the first confirmed exoplanetary system was discovered three years earlier, in 1992, by Alex...

It is hard to put stuff in stable orbits if you haven't done the math, and the Gods prefer throwing rocks to calculus. Minor planets usually move with too high relative velocities, nearly nothing can slow them down and simultaneously put them on right trajectory. They usually just fly by the...

HST is 13 m long, X-37B is 9 m long. Payload bay is just 2 m long. Can't be done without lossy compression.

Weird thing about L4 and L5 libration points is that they are stable equilibria, despite the fact they are the maxima of effective potential. So it is not that they attract any object like a gravity well. The stability (in a rotating frame) comes from the fact that while any perturbation...

Hang on, there's a SMBH delivery scheduled from the Andromeda Galaxy. Just several bilion years ahead. And together we will shine.

...from a certain point of view. I guess Michaela's recollection stems from a simplified press note about the first Earth Trojan. It is not that coorbital objects stay in any given point – more than 7000 known Jupiter Trojans couldn't fit into two Lagrange points on the planet's orbit. They...

Check the blog, they posted just after the shutdown was suspended.

Don't forget what poor old Spirit rover found in situ: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13554 What it says is that Mars had some hydrothermal activity in the past. This is not unexpected on planet with a history of volcanic activity and violent impact heating – both endo- and exogenic...

Phase space is the right place to look for clusters, as some interlopers may be crossing the same region of space. Stars born out of one molecular cloud should have low velocity dispersion (except for some runaway stars, which were gravitationally scattered or have watched supernova from the...

Evaporation of hot Jupiter atmospheres has been confirmed with observations of first transiting planet of the kind, HD 209458 b. With a mass slightly higher than Jupiter and orbit eight times tighter than Mercury's around star a bit hottter than Sun, it is surrounded by giant cloud of escaping...

I can add that the sensitivity limits have moved significantly with all the effort put in this topic in last decades. I remember the chart from 2004, showing prospects for planetary detection in the coming years (now in the past). That one...

I think OP is referring to the situation as it was in the 1990s. With just one planetary system as a reference, and way lower computing power, scientists had much simpler planet formation models than nowadays. Inner planets were expected to be small and rocky, outer – massive and gassy. It was...

The updates should be here: https://blogs.nasa.gov/parkersolarprobe/ but they aren't. Probably the team is processing the data.

Interesting to see the actual radio data, it could be interesting to compare it with Gaia's star map. But what causes the "shadow" in the direction of Galactic anticenter? Orion molecular cloud complex?

I can agree if the asteroid in question is pulverized and it happens far enough from the Earth – it would be less harmful than fallout from nuclear tests. But would you say the same if Bennu-sized object was converted to several thousand Chelyabinsk-sized "dirty bombs"? We know very little about...