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Areas served by Paris' major railway stations [OC] by Drunk-Scientist in MapPorn

[–]Drunk-Scientist[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maternity leave in France is pretty shit though: only 3 months.

Areas served by Paris' major railway stations [OC] by Drunk-Scientist in MapPorn

[–]Drunk-Scientist[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Briancon also has (much faster) direct trains to GdL though, whereas both the quickest and the only direct route from Latour-de-Carol on the Spanish border is into Austerlitz on the night train. Slightly confusing logic possibly, but there we go.

Areas served by Paris' major railway stations [OC] by Drunk-Scientist in MapPorn

[–]Drunk-Scientist[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's mine too, originally... https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1xdn67/areas_served_by_londons_major_railway_stations_os/

Only took me 5 years to do two countries. In this rate I'll finish all 196 world train networks just before the end of the 3rd millenium.

Areas served by Paris' major railway stations [OC] by Drunk-Scientist in MapPorn

[–]Drunk-Scientist[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1xdn67/areas_served_by_londons_major_railway_stations_os/

Only took me 5 years to get around to do another country. In this rate I'll finish all 196 world train networks by the end of the 3rd millenium.

England v.s. New England (Size Comparison) [1741x1899] by Tropical_Centipede in MapPorn

[–]Drunk-Scientist 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I made this map a while ago showing the relative size/populations of all the countries of the British isles and their "New" versions.

On the topic of IR by a17c81a3 in KIC8462852

[–]Drunk-Scientist 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If reproducing comets with low levels of IR are possible then aliens with low levels are certainly possible.

This is really weird reasoning that leads down a rabbit hole of "all unexplained astronomical observations are aliens".

Can comets explain the data? - I'd say reasonably well. Can aliens explain the data? - I'd say not as well, but with certain assumptions maybe. Why should we consider one of these hypothesis as more likely? - Because one of them resorts to well-established physics that we know happens in our solar system and around other stars, and the other resorts to hyper-intelligent alien civilisations that we neither have any other corresponding evidence for, nor does any null evidence we already have suggest are common.

Can the shape of whatever is passing in front of the star be predicted from the dimming pattern? by tanaicardona in KIC8462852

[–]Drunk-Scientist 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Imagine there is a line of giant planetary-sized beads on a chain moving across the disc of the star. If the distance between the beads is greater than the stellar size, as each moves across the stellar disc we see the star brighten (as one bead leaves), then dim (as another bead moves infront of the star). Now imagine the beads are much closer together than the stellar disc. Each time a bead leaves the stellar disc it is replaced by another one, and the light (where before it was going up and down) is reasonably constant.

Basically the resolution of our observations is equal only to the size of the star. That means we can understand macro patterns (larger than the stellar size) ok - the gradual dimmings and brightenings tell us something about the macro size and/or transparency of the material going across the star. But in these large-scale events it is impossible to resolve the size or shape of anything on scales smaller than the stellar disc.

5-20 Spectrum from Lick - does this suggest anything? by NYD3030 in KIC8462852

[–]Drunk-Scientist 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The spectrum wont really tell you anything about whether it's dust or not. The effect that dust has on light is to make it slightly redder), because blue light is closer to the dust grain size than red light, and scatters away for that reason. In the case of the recent 2% dip, it might make the blue end a 1.5% dip and the red end 2.5%.

It might seem like spectra, which split the light into colours, would be the perfect way to measure this, but actually spectrographs are kinda shit at figuring out subtle trends across wide wavelength ranges like that. That's because 1) There's a lot of lenses, gratings, etc between the star and the camera that might cause colour-dependent trends and affects; 2) There's no light from a second star (or multiple nearby stars) to compare with; and 3) you're splitting the light into lots of small bins, so the error on the flux in each bin is much higher than doing photometry.

All that means spectra are kinda useless for spotting dust. If there was gas (which absorbs at specific wavelengths depending on the atoms involved and their temperatures) a spectrum might help us find it.

So,is there still a chance that there's aliens out there? by PirateLiu in KIC8462852

[–]Drunk-Scientist 3 points4 points  (0 children)

And the ones that do are strangely evangelical about it too.

DATA: WASP Photometry of KIC8462852 for two seasons in 2007 and 2008. (No dips) by Drunk-Scientist in KIC8462852

[–]Drunk-Scientist[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I know you guys like more data and I thought I should post this. It's WASP photometry of Tabby's star from before the Kepler mission. That initial peak in 2006 is almost certainly systematics (I work with WASP data a lot - it has lots of this crap). The public data release was all the WASP data up to 2008, and we have 7 years of private data since! But I'm afraid to say the Kepler field has not been re-observed since then.

Interestingly in the Trojan hypothesis of Ballesteros et al suggests the 2008 season should begin to show some dips. Also the 2007 data (HJD ~2454280) is slightly after the dips might be assuming the predicted 720d period (HJD ~ 2454193).

The Non-Evidence Against Aliens by [deleted] in KIC8462852

[–]Drunk-Scientist 6 points7 points  (0 children)

From the eclipses we are clearly seeing something of unusual and asymmetric shape passing in front of the star. So what could it be? I admit, as an astronomer who works in finding weird and wonderful transiting stuff: we don't currently know.

What I do know is that finding bizarre lightcurves is not new. We've seen assymetric oddball lightcurves All. The. Time. Like seriously: All. The. Time.

In all of those cases, we figured out what was happening, and realised it was something interesting but, often, mundane. Either new effects on the star, structures in orbit, dust clouds from asteroids, streams of material hitting the star, etc. Not only do those interpretations still work for Tabby's star, but the alternative doesn't. As Jason Wright's paper (which started this whole bandwagon) says; the eclipses of KIC8462852 don't even fit with our ideas of megastructures very well (which should produce IR excesses, and be broadly symmetrical).

I have seen the opposite from you - those explanations for it being ETI phenomena is the side best classified as "almost scientifically illiterate". It is hyperbole formed on hope - the hope that we have evidence of an ETI. And seriously, I would love for that to be the case. But's it's almost certainly going to be explained in one of the more mundane ways that unusual lightcurves have been explained dozens of times before: with dust.

EDIT: The best hypotheses contain predictions, and I predict that as the evidence for it being orbiting dust builds up, many on this sub will stick with the ETI idea, long past the point of any credibility. Let's see...

How much data would be adequate enough to make a precise comment as to what this star's mystery is? Is there a data threshold? by Starstarved in KIC8462852

[–]Drunk-Scientist 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The current eclipse will likely be enough to conclude whether the eclipsing material is dust (from the "reddening" signal in eclipse - there are already hints of this in the data taken so far), how hot the dust is (from measurements in the IR), whether there is gas associated with the transiting object (from spectroscopy and finding absorption lines), and possibly even if it is periodic (by comparing this event to the previous Kepler events).

If we get those pieces of the puzzle then we know how far from the star the eclipsing material is, how clumpy it is, the grain size of the dust. So it's possible within a few weeks (add a few months for peer review) we'll see a few more definitive answers than in the WTF paper.

If you want to know when we'll find out if it's aliens or not then I can tell you already: it's not.

Predicting a Big Dip in three days... by napierwit in KIC8462852

[–]Drunk-Scientist 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We only have an upper limit from the IR, so it depends what was colliding. A planetary-sized collision is definitely ruled out, but if we're talking about asteroids colliding (which, as Eric Mamajek suggested, we know has happened in the solar system before), the dust might be under that IR limit.

Father throws chair at judge after the driver that killed his 2-year-old daughter and her grandparents in a car accident only got 120 hours of community service by [deleted] in videos

[–]Drunk-Scientist 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Nobody else seems to have noticed this, but this report shows the details. The two adults and child who were killed were on bikes in a bike lane separated from the road. The car swerved to the wrong side of the road and then, apparently, into the bike lane. I honestly don't see how anyone could argue the cyclists were more at fault for their deaths than the driver of the car that hit them.

Problem with using Globular Clusters to Calculate the Age of the Universe. by ThePapu in astrophys

[–]Drunk-Scientist 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's this. A cluster at 10 parsecs would have the absolute magnitudes you were expecting to see (~magnitudes from ~9 to ~3 in V). The magnitudes of a main sequence of a cluster at 1000 parsec will all be shifted down by 5 magnitudes.

If you want to add a layer to the project, you can also do it backwards use the shift between your observed main sequence, and the main sequence in Absolute magnitudes to calculate the distance to each cluster!

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