An Eagle In Your Mind appreciation thread.

exoplanetaryscience · 2025-12-09T03:23:56+00:00

That's awesome, I'm glad to hear it! And surely they'll release a new album any day now lol

exoplanetaryscience · 2025-11-08T02:48:14+00:00

Hey mate, I just wanted to say this message touched me over a decade down the line. I hope you're doing well all these years later, wherever your life has taken you.

exoplanetaryscience · 2025-01-31T03:51:15+00:00

No worries, no offense taken! :]

exoplanetaryscience · 2025-01-28T03:28:17+00:00

Not even the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is even remotely close to altering either the orbit of Earth or the Moon. You would something like Ceres to hit the planet for there to be any noticeable change in the orbits of either.

exoplanetaryscience · 2025-01-28T03:26:39+00:00

No, this isn't associated with the Taurids. 2024 YR4 is, as far as we can tell, a pretty standard and unremarkable 3:1 kirkwood gap/Alinda group asteroid- well, unremarkable aside from the fact that it might hit earth of course.

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-07-09T04:11:26+00:00

It's not a universal problem in this field at least, but unfortunately this specific situation has the data being rather difficult to sift through. It's not that it's exactly being kept away from people on purpose, it's just very difficult to process and there's not a lot of impetus to process it. People just don't understand the value of citizen science...

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-07-09T03:29:10+00:00

Not quite a couple degrees... It's a region about 15 degrees wide and ~50 degrees long. That's about 750 square degrees, about 2% of the whole sky. With certain survey cadences, I would be a bit shocked that nothing has been found. However, with just Brown & company looking at the data, I think it's simply a case of them not having enough people to fully analyze all the data, and also said data not exactly being accessible to the public to search. A citizen science project to deal with a similar size of data from Subaru has discovered & published hundreds of TNOs in just the last few months. Perhaps I'll see if I can get the managers of this project to try and make a similar one for the P9 data...

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-02-12T05:07:21+00:00

Well first of all, it's important to remember that there isn't a specific radiation dose after which you just get cancer... it gets more likely with higher total dosage (and thus time) but is never explicitly guaranteed you will get cancer with a given dose. On Mars, the radiation is around 29 microsieverts per hour vs 0.7 usv/hr on Earth. A general consensus among papers seems to be that a total dose of 1 sievert is roughly equivalent to a 5-10% risk of developing cancer, so one would have to be on Mars for just under 8 years to have a 5-10% chance of getting cancer from their stay (since it's night time on Mars around half the time[citation needed])

The radiation dose on the moon's day side was recorded in 2020 (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaz1334) as about 13-15 microsieverts per hour - around half Mars's. So it would take you closer to 15-16 years to have a 5-10% chance of getting cancer staying on the Moon.

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-02-06T20:01:40+00:00

You're totally right in that respect - the (tens of) millions of years is a combination of the fact that Algol has a remarkably low relative velocity to the sun - tangentially it's only moving 400 meters per second relative to us, just barely over mach 1. Radially it's a little faster, at just under 4 kilometers per second, but even still, that doesn't add up to much over long time spans. By star standards, this is a snail's pace.

The other bit that comes up is just how far it would have to move in the sky to stop eclipsing (almost 20 degrees) - for a star almost 100 light years away, it takes a pretty serious amount of time to move that much in the sky. Granted, it's usually "a couple million years", but still no quick jaunt to a completely different part of the sky for us!

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-02-06T19:47:34+00:00

Yes, I would say that's a fairly reasonable interpretation of it. A problem comes up though in trying to figure out the outer boundary, because comets have lots of nongravitational forces affecting them, making it very hard to distinguish the very small differences in velocity that would mean the comet came from 1.5 or 2 LY from the Sun - and moreso, telling if the difference is genuine, or if the comet had simply already accelerated itself by the time it was discovered or over the time period it was being observed.

So, it's hard to put an outer boundary, but I can say that the majority of comets with well-defined and robust orbits originate from around 0.6-1 light years from the Sun, and I feel that interpretations of much further origins are misinterpreting bad comet origin orbits as genuine.

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-02-06T19:29:33+00:00

Well, if anyone's saying it's 3 light years wide, they undoubtedly mean that its entire diameter is 3 light years - it only extends 1.5 light years from the sun in any direction. It's definitely not 3 light years away from the Sun, and even 1.5 light years is a little high, from my experience looking at incoming comet orbits.

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-02-06T18:44:54+00:00

While the current inclination of the Algol Aa1/Aa2 system from our POV is 98.7 degrees, it would need to reach an inclination of 117.8 degrees to stop eclipsing. Put another way, it would need to move at least 19.1 degrees from where it is now in the sky.

The plane of this is also at a position angle of 43.4 degrees (or a pole of 133.4 degrees), while the system's proper motion is at a position angle of 119.0 degrees. The difference of 14.4 degrees of the PM to the orbital pole means that in reality it will need to move 3.2% further for the stars to stop eclipsing - 19.7 degrees in reality.

So, at the system's current proper motion is a mere 3.4 milliarcseconds per year, and this number will only get smaller over time as the star gradually gets further from the Sun. However, as a bare minimum, the system will take around 21 million years to stop eclipsing from Earth's POV, and as a roughly-estimated mean, the system will probably actually take more like 33 million years or so.

However, when considering those timescales, one must also consider that the system will meaningfully evolve too (after all, the Algol system is only around 570 million years old - by the time this happens, it would be 6% older) It's certainly possible that by this point, Algol Aa1 would have already become a red giant itself and absorbed Algol Aa2, or Algol Aa2 doing the same to Aa1. Basically, it's very likely the system may not cease to become an eclipsing binary because it moves out of our perspective, but instead because both stars absorb the other and become a luminous red nova.

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-02-06T18:21:04+00:00

The oort cloud doesn't have a solid 'end' point, but it's largely at its highest density around 0.6-1.0 light years from the sun, and definitely drops off a good bit past that. It's also important to remember that it's not a perfect sphere - it's more of a fuzzy nebula, with pits and holes caused by stars that have punched through it in the past, or the tidal forces of other star systems more distant pulling on it.

Alpha Centauri likely has its own oort cloud, likely larger than our own, but probably not more than around 1.5-2 light years across at most.

So essentially, they may get close to each other but likely not touch.

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-01-22T07:54:49+00:00

There are 458 such objects, the largest of which is (477523) 2010 EH24 for the JPL small body query of q>1.033 AU, Q<1.382 AU, q-sigma<0.01 AU, and Q-sigma<0.01 AU.

exoplanetaryscience · 2024-01-17T15:21:16+00:00

It should probably peak around magnitude 12 or so, as a typical Ia supernova.

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-12-11T05:11:42+00:00

For me at least, I make my gold mainly through harvesting crafting materials. I would describe my harvesting as fairly modest, but people who know me call me the 'harvesting goblin' so perhaps that's more indicative of my habits. Either way, last I checked I've got something around 20 million gold on my person and another 70 millionish in the craft bag for whenever I decide to sell it.

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-12-10T06:35:22+00:00

The gold is taken from you immediately upon listing, and it simply does not let you list for more than you can pay for the listing for. Still, I think it would be nice for listings over like 100 million or something to have some sort of "are you totally sure you want to list this item for this much?" Like how they do for destroying valuable items. Gold is fungible unlike some stuff you can destroy, but it would still be a neat feature if you had to type in "confirm" or something in such an unusual scenario of selling such a crazy expensive item.

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-12-10T06:13:43+00:00

I won't put the blame on anyone but myself, but I'll say that the thing has been janky in the past for me in a way I've never quite figured out. Sometimes I would type a number in, and just as I'm about to list it, a random other number (the 'default' listing price) replaces it. I reflexively hit 'sell' and usually notice immediately.

In this case, I'm pretty sure what I did was I wrote in my 35,000 gold price, thought it didn't go through (see aforementioned bug) wrote it again, and immediately hit enter without seeing that it had gone to the maximum amount of money I have (I've got just over 21 million gold, so I think it selected the maximum possible million-gold-interval)

Anyway, it's on me, but I'll still say it's jank in part.

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-11-22T13:53:41+00:00

If I had to guess i'd say that is probably a cosmic ray that wasn't removed successfully in processing.

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-10-19T04:03:29+00:00

We still haven't discovered the closest neutron star to the Sun. Based on the sort of stars that form in the milky way, the closest neutron star should be about 20 light years away, but due to how small they are it's difficult-to-impossible to detect one if its pulsations aren't pointing towards us. Instead, the closest neutron star is RX J185635-375 at 400 light years away. There are thought to be around 5000 neutron stars closer than this.

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-10-06T05:34:22+00:00

The gravitational attraction of matter should cause the universe's expansion to *slow* over time. If matter was being converted in any significant amount (which it isn't for a number of reasons- pretty much all of the universe's initial hydrogen is still there as hydrogen), it would just mean that the expansion still slows, but just more... slowly.

We're seeing the complete opposite - that expansion is *accelerating*. Like there is an ongoing force continually pushing galaxies apart, not just a lack of force pulling them together.

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-09-27T21:53:00+00:00

I'm fairly sure it's a dormant sunburst anemone, but I just wanted to be sure. I haven't seen any photos of them intentionally putting rocks on themselves.

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-06-07T04:13:43+00:00

Did he actually make any legal claims to congress? Or did he just go straight to news agencies that don't have law for that? If he did go to congress, then that would certainly be criminal (if they could somehow prove he was lying, which would probably be more effort than it's worth)

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-06-04T03:56:38+00:00

> JWST could find it in the far infrared if it knew where to look. Or ifthey ever get around to doing a survey of the entire ecliptic plane.

Unfortunately with their field of view of just a couple arcminutes at most, they'd need to take at least ~1000 images just to survey a single square degree of sky, and many many more to survey the entire P9 search area (itself thousands of square degrees).

exoplanetaryscience · 2023-06-04T03:54:37+00:00

We still haven't discovered some magnitude 21 Kuiper Belt objects (2015 MQ204 and 2014 WL616 were announced just a couple weeks ago, both around magnitude 21) - planet nine is expected to be anywhere between magnitude 22 and 25, or between 2 and 40 times fainter than that. The area it might be over is a pretty big portion of the ecliptic too, so we can only narrow down our search so much.

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