Couch Command | There Are Four Hosts | Johnny Caps Flashback | Forum | News | KDrama
Register
Login

Astronomy

Couch Command Podcast – Three Body Problem Trilogy (Featuring, Angus Stewart of the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast)

Couch Command Podcast – Three Body Problem Trilogy (Featuring, Angus Stewart of the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast)

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 0

Art Source:  https://v.qq.com/x/page/s3017y1kkes.html   powered by Sounder “How the destruction of Star Wars made me a fan of Chinese Science Fiction.”  <3 So… there’s this Chinese Science Fiction book series called, Remembrance of Earth’s Past and it absolutely took my breath away. It was one of those fictional experiences that can change how you see everything around you and transform you as a person. At least that’s how it went for me.  ^__^; My friend Angus and I actually recorded this months ago, but I really wanted to share it with the Couch Command listeners. If what we’re taking about makes no sense to you, that’s kinda normal when talking about Three Body Problem and not having read the books. I recommend you find them, give them a read and maaaaybe come back to our discussion at some other date. You can find them all on Amazon riiight over here. A friend of mine has already touched upon the world of Three Body with her PopGeeks article regarding the fan

Eight New Planets That May Support Liquid Water Found

Eight New Planets That May Support Liquid Water Found

, , , 0

Astronomers have found eight new planets orbiting in the “Goldilocks Zone,” around their stars, that area where conditions are “just right” to support liquid water and maybe life. Two of the planets found are the most Earth-like ever discovered. “Most of these planets have a good chance of being rocky, like Earth,” said study lead author Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The most earth-like planets, Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b, both orbit red dwarf stars that are smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler-438b, 470 light-years from Earth, is just 12 percent bigger than the Earth and has a 70 percent chance of being rocky. It orbits its star every 35 days. It gets about 40 percent more sunlight than the earth, which gives it a 70 percent chance of being in the habitable zone around its star, according to the study. Kepler-442b, 1,100 light-years from Earth, is about a third larger than the earth and has a 60 percent chance of being rocky. It makes an orbit

What’s Hidden Inside One of Saturn’s Moons?

What’s Hidden Inside One of Saturn’s Moons?

, , , , 0

One of Saturn’s moons has a secret, and scientists are trying to figure out what it is. A Cornell University astronomer has been studying measurements of the wobble of Saturn’s small, icy moon Mimas taken by the Cassini spacecraft, and he and his team have determined that under all that ice there must be either an irregular “rugby-ball-shaped” rocky core or an underground ocean sloshing about. “After carefully examining Mimas, we found it librates — that is, it subtly wobbles — around the moon’s polar axis,” Radwan Tajeddine, Cornell research associate in astronomy and lead author of the article. “In physical terms, the back-and-forth wobble should produce about 3 kilometers of surface displacement. Instead we observed an unexpected 6 kilometers of surface displacement,” he said. “We’re very excited about this measurement because it may indicate much about the satellite’s insides. Nature is essentially allowing us to do the same thing that a child does when she shakes a wrapped gift in hopes of figuring out what’s hidden inside,” Tajeddine said.

The Man in the Moon Was Probably Made By a Magma Plume

The Man in the Moon Was Probably Made By a Magma Plume

, , , 0

It’s a trick you learned as kid. Look at the moon until your brain tricks you into seeing a combination of moon features as a face, the “Man in the Moon.” You probably never thought about why it was there, but the prevailing theory has been that it’s the result of a an asteroid strike. But scientists have recently discovered that the “Man in the Moon,” actually an area known as Procellarum region that’s 1,800 miles wide, was probably not created by an impact, but instead by a huge plume of magma that erupted from inside the moon itself. Resarchers with MIT, the Colorado School of Mines and others have used data from NASA’s GRAIL twin moon probe mission to study the thickness of the moon’s crust and to find gravity anomalies that mark the edge of the region. A high resolution map of the Procellarum made from these findings show its contours aren’t circular, like an asteroid strike would be, but have sharp angles more consistent with giant tension

New Planet Found Forming 335 Light Years Away

New Planet Found Forming 335 Light Years Away

, , , 0

We may be witnessing the birth of a new world. An international team of scientists recently published a paper about an amazing find. While investigating a “proto-planetary disk,” a disk of gas and dust swirling around a new star that has the potential to become planets, they stumbled upon what appears to be a planet in the process of forming from this cosmic soup. The researchers are observing the disk using a technique called spectro-astronomy, which involves plotting the changes in moving gas. They noticed an anomaly in the disk that seem to be providing an extra source of carbon monoxide molecules, an anomaly that after years of observation they were able to confirm is orbiting the star at about the distance from Saturn to our sun. Although the researchers haven’t observed the planet directly, they suspect the anomaly they are seeing is a disk of hot gas orbiting a new planet three times the size of Jupiter it forms. It’s theorized that the material from the large disk around the star feeds into the smaller disk around the planet, which

Mysterious Radio Bursts Coming From Deep Space

Mysterious Radio Bursts Coming From Deep Space

, , 0

Scientists working to unravel the mystery of unusual radio bursts have made a breakthrough in the case. The “fast radio bursts” had been detected by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, but because the bursts couldn’t be found by others there was speculation they were coming from on Earth, or at least near it. Recently, however, the bursts were found by scientists using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, according to study published in The Astrophysical Journal. “Our result is important because it eliminates any doubt that these radio bursts are truly of cosmic origin,” said Victoria Kaspi, an astrophysics professor at McGill University in Montreal and Principal Investigator for the pulsar-survey project that detected this fast radio burst. “The radio waves show every sign of having come from far outside our galaxy – a really exciting prospect.” So we know its not from earth, but what is it? That’s the deeper mystery. The burst could be coming from “evaporating black holes, mergers

White Dwarf ‘Diamond’ as Big as the Earth Found

White Dwarf ‘Diamond’ as Big as the Earth Found

, , , 0

Can  you imagine how colossally you’d have to screw up in a relationship to need to buy your way out of it with an earth-sized diamond? Maybe Tiger Woods could do it. The ‘diamond’ is actually what might be the coldest, faintest white dwarf star ever discovered. It’s so cool that its carbon has crystalized, making it in effect a big diamond. David Kaplan, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and colleagues found the white dwarf using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO) Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). If that sounds like a lot of telescopes, keep in mind that because it gives off so little energy the object was very difficult to find. Kaplan speculates that there should be many more of these cool white dwarfs, but they just aren’t being detected because they are so dim. White dwarfs represent the end stage of a star, when the material that’s left within them, mostly carbon and oxygen, collapses to a super-dense state. The faint

New Resarch Ups the Age of the Earth and Moon 60 Million Years

New Resarch Ups the Age of the Earth and Moon 60 Million Years

, , , , , 0

  New findings show the Earth, and the moon, are about 60 million years older than previously believed. Guillaume Avice and Bernard Marty, geochemists from the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France, discovered the cosmic birth certificate error. You can’t just do normal geology when you’re trying to study things that happened before that geology formed, so the team had to do a bit of scientific detective work. One way to discover the age of things is to compare current ratios of gases to ratios in ancient materials. These “isotopic ratios” change over time in a way that can be used to determine how much time has passed. The pair had very, very old  and well-preserved materials to work with, samples of roughly three-billion-year-old quartz with xenon sealed inside found in South Africa and Australia. They analyzed this “time capsule” and compared its isotopic ratios of xenon current ones.  This allowed them to make a better calculation of the moment when another planet-sized body slammed into the Earth, creating the Earth and moon we see

Potentially Habitable Planet ‘Just’ 13 Million Light Years Away

Potentially Habitable Planet ‘Just’ 13 Million Light Years Away

, , , 0

Everyone hopes that humanity will one day get its stuff together and start taking care of the only Earth we have, but, honestly, have you seen us? Most of us can barely make a decision on what to watch on Netflix. It’s understandable that there’s an impulse to keep our options open, often expressed in science fiction about colonizing and terraforming other planets. Or at least to know that there might be somebody else out there so it doesn’t feel so final if we screw it up. So put Kapteyn b down in the “Plan B” column. This recently discovered exoplanet orbits its red dwarf star Kapteyn every 48 days, is more than twice the age of the earth at 11.5 billion years old, and is five times the mass of the Earth. It’s got just the right size and orbit to support liquid water on its surface and, being double the age of our world, has had plenty of time to evolve life if that’s what it’s going to

Newly Discovered ‘Mega-Earth’ is ‘The Godzilla of Earths’

Newly Discovered ‘Mega-Earth’ is ‘The Godzilla of Earths’

, , , , 0

Forget “super-Earths.” Those giant rocky planets are old and busted. Today astronomers announced they had discovered a much bigger “mega-Earth,” a rocky planet 17 times heavier than our earth. The mega-Earth Kepler-10c  is so big that astronomers previously thought such a planet was impossible, because it was theorized something with that much mass would have drawn hydrogen gas to itself in its creation and became a gas giant. But there it is, 560 light-years away in the constellation Draco. “This is the Godzilla of Earths!” said Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) researcher Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative. “But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life.” The discovery of Kepler-10c will require scientist to recalculate the odds for finding life in the universe. Because only hydrogen and helium existed in the early universe, heavier elements needed to make rocky planets had to be formed within stars and scattered as those stars exploded, a lengthy process. But Kepler-10c is in a system that’s 11 billion

This is Your Best Look Yet at an Exoplanet

This is Your Best Look Yet at an Exoplanet

, , 0

Does this photo look weird and a bit blurry? Consider that it shows Beta Pictoris b, a planet orbiting Beta Pictoris 63 million light-years away. Under those circumstances it’s an amazing shot that would do any shutterbug proud. The photo was taken by an international team using the The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) at the at the Gemini South Telescope in Chile, is claimed by the team to be the best image yet of an exoplanet, a planet outside our solar system. “We’ve been working on the Gemini Planet Imager for 10 years,” said Bruce Macintosh, a Stanford professor of physics and the principal investigator on the international planet-hunting project. “We finally got it operational on the telescope last November and it worked beautifully right out of the box.” The planet is the white dot in the picture. It’s sun is the large object at the center, hidden behind a mask to make it easier to image the planet. Researchers say they should be able to use the technology to discover details about the

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Now Not as Great

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Now Not as Great

, , , 0

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still pretty great, but Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is the smallest scientists have ever seen it. According to the most recent Hubble Space Telescope observations, the colossal storm that makes up the spot is no “only” 10, 250 miles across. You could still plop the entire Earth in that badboy, easy, but it’s a far cry from its glory days. The spot was 14,500 miles across in 1979 and was estimated to be 25,500 miles in the 1800s. The spot is estimated to have been recently shrinking 580 miles a year. No one knows why for sure. “In our new observations it is apparent that very small eddies are feeding into the storm,” said Amy Simon of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We hypothesized that these may be responsible for the sudden change by altering the internal dynamics and energy of the Great Red Spot.” Simon plans a study to test that hypothesis. In the meantime, I guess we might as well

Load More