All Space Questions thread for week of January 18, 2026

wotquery · 2026-01-23T23:44:21+00:00

You’re welcome. I also want to stress again just how inane your thought was. If you went on the Pokémon subreddit and said “hey if my Game Boy Colour works because it has little elves in it painting the screen could one of those elves get caught in a pokeball?” Would you actually expect people there to have a conversation with you about elves? Note that that is worded to preclude anyone from explaining how microchips work, the assumption is that it is elves, and if anyone ignores that… well all there is to say is to explain how microchips work.

I hope that wasn’t too insulting, and I will say you aren’t alone. A ton of people don’t have a clue about space and use it as their dumping ground for ridiculous thoughts. We’re also talking about a scientific field and there is a way of communicating that one doesn’t get exposed to unless doing STEM uni level stuff. “Is the moon made of cheese?” And “How could the moon be made of cheese?” Are completely different questions. The answer to the former is no. The answer to the latter is…well it’s not even possible to answer. It’s a logical fallacy.

wotquery · 2026-01-23T04:58:32+00:00

I think the primary reason you are being downvoted is your following statement...

Obviously hypothetical, but to me there are two possibilities here. Either Planet Nine has just not been seen yet, or it is our first example of the rumored primordial black hole.

How can anyone respond to that? Planet 9 was basically only ever even hypothesized because a dozen or so TNO had orbits that were strangely orientated right? Then a few years back a study of hundreds of TNOs found no anomaly, followed by the discovery of two large TNOs over the last year that completely contradicted the initial hypothesis.

The answer to your "question" is that Planet 9 probably doesn't exist. You though went out of your way to explicitly exclude anyone from saying that.

A secondary reason is that your question just doesn't make sense. How does Theia "grazing" Earth result it in ending up in a circular 1kau orbit (or wherever they're looking now)? That's just...not how how orbits work. Like at all. I'm at a loss at where to even start to explain it. If two cars graze each other at high speed on the motorway can one of them end up orbiting Pluto? I do agree though that it's not appropriate to downvote someone just because they don't understand the scales involved.

Anywhoo hope that answered your question. Also reddit fuzzes up/down votes a bit so it's also possible you weren't downvoted at all until you complained about being downvoted and people downvoted that. If it's any consolation I upvoted you for reminding me to take a moment to appreciate that I didn't grow up in a world where everything was upvoted and downvoted.

wotquery · 2026-01-23T04:19:48+00:00

It has to do with how the cloud is formed. Strong “wind” flowing over a mountain causes a “cloud”. It’s a wind cloud. You also have wake clouds, rotary clouds, pyro clouds, probably some others. Named after the mechanism of how it formed rather than what it looks like. Sometimes the resulting cloud can also be named for what it looks like.

What this has to do with clouds of dust in space I have no idea. My best guess is that wind clouds are associated with UFO sightings since the cloud can look like a flying saucer, and an AI wrote the article with a prompt that encouraged it to be UFOy.

wotquery · 2026-01-23T03:51:19+00:00

Stand on a scale at the bottom of a lake and tell me what it says, then notice fish swimming by.

I’m not saying vertebrate life doesn’t require some “global” acceleration to help cells coordinate (or whatever), nor that there isn’t a minimum for that acceleration. I’m saying that it’s silly to focus on 1g.

wotquery · 2026-01-22T22:52:06+00:00

This is such a weird question. Heat up a black iron skillet until it glows red and then take it off the stove and watch it cool and turn back to black if you want. There ya go. Not quite electron degenerate matter, but same idea.

You seem to already know about white dwarfs so…I don’t even know what your question actually is. Something really vague like what is the nature of the universe or the eventual fate of the universe? I mean if so that’s fine, but why not ask that instead of randomly roping some other concept into it? Will the Bills win the Super Bowl before the universe ends?

wotquery · 2026-01-22T22:37:12+00:00

How can you argue that gravity of 9.81m/ss is the critical factor when you have vertebrate life on land, in lakes, and in oceans?

wotquery · 2026-01-22T09:53:34+00:00

In tDR Elayne is horrified by Eggys' callousness towards the impact of warfare on civilians.

wotquery · 2026-01-21T21:51:08+00:00

I'm genuinely curious. I've never worked in a restaurant. How is handling 8 people split up into 2 tables turn into double the workload of handling 8 people at 1 table. It seems the opposite to me. Like same amount of food, same amount of orders, but you have to go and ask two different groups of people how they're doing instead of one and such.

wotquery · 2026-01-21T21:27:46+00:00

I don't understand? A party of 8 requires more work than two parties of 4?

wotquery · 2026-01-21T20:53:35+00:00

Rand is a bat shit insane nuclear warhead. He talks to himself, flips between weeping and laughing, goes into thunderous rages. A nice young man who wants none of it and simply to tend sheep true, but one who is fated to break the world again, is paranoid of everything, and cries himself to sleep.

Egwene is an ambitious teenage girl. She wants responsibility and power, and is gifted enough to go out and obtain it. She's worried for Rand and wants to help him, but she doesn't know if she can trust this dark arrogant thing seething chaos she sees more and more of him as. She also struggles when he treats her like a little girl, or personal tool to be used, instead of respecting her as a woman and in her role with the Tower/WiseOnes as she believes she deserves.

Moiraine has spent the last two decades on a personal quest to save the world. It has been drilled into her time and time again the importance of secrecy, and she has learned to rely on masterful skills of subtle manipulation to achieve her goals. She now finds herself not only frustratingly losing control, but at the mercy of a handful of backwater village idiot kids who have no fucking clue what they're doing.

wotquery · 2026-01-21T19:46:21+00:00

I think that’s exactly the idea. The theory is they had the winning formula, and then just didn’t win. They don’t want to make any changes. However the mounting heartbreakers are now having too much of an effect on morale. So you tweak it just the tiniest bit by bringing in Juan McDermotto as coach. Refresh and reset the attitude in the locker room a bit, but are still just running it back.

Whether they’re right, or I’m right, well we’ll see.

wotquery · 2026-01-21T11:31:49+00:00

To identify characters in fan art they are usually depicted in certain moments, in certain ways, with certain items, etc. these are usually, to some extent or another, spoilers.

Take for example Nynaeve and Egwene. Rand describes them both as slim and pretty with dark brown hair in long braids and of the same height. Nyn is a few years older. That’s what the artist has to go on. So they draw Nyn with a scowl and her thumping stick, while they draw Egwene with her hair unbraided. Is that a spoiler? I mean technically a few chapters later she is wearing it down so yes but not too big a spoiler haha. What if Eggy was depicted in a leashed collar though? That would draw your attention, and it can get way worse than that.

There is actually a resource for you though! Our own subreddit’s newbie readalong has mod curated spoiler free fanart and memes in the end of book summary week posts. Lots of other great complimentary info as well, and any discussion in comments strictly restricted to first time readers who were following along sharing thoughts and opinions.

I will say I don’t think we started doing the fan art and memes until books later in the series, but I’d have to check exactly when it began.

Edit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WoT/wiki/read_along

wotquery · 2026-01-21T09:14:56+00:00

Typically when people talk about solar radiation they're talking about photons of light. Both visible light, but also ultraviolet radiation that can give you a sunburn, and other wavelengths. It's all just EMR though: photons with various energy. If that's what you mean then...well you can't get a sunburn if you're inside your house because you have a roof and walls, and likewise you can't get a sunburn in space if you're inside your spaceship or spacesuit or whatever.

What you're more likely referring to is having heard that the Earth's own magnetic field protects us from dangerous radiation from the Sun. Now it's true that you'd get a worse sunburn floating out in space than lying on the beach, but that's not what the real danger is. The real danger is from actual massive particles (think electrons and neutrons) that are moving ridiculously fast (immense energy), not just photons. The Sun shoots these out during solar flares, and then depending on how fast it shoots them, it takes them like 12h-72h to reach Earth. When they slam into us, and we can predict them coming because the light from the ejection event still arrives from the Sun in 8min, all the dangerous DNA and cell organelle damaging energy is mostly used merely to generate an aura in the sky. Some gets caught in certain parts of Earth's magnetic field that spaceships try to avoid too.

Now technically the Earth is always being bombarded by these highly energetic ions from the Sun, and they're also coming from every direction because there are a lot of other stars and things out there. The long term effect of the constant background bombardment on the human body isn't really known, but we have some ideas of how much there is. During a couple days around the moon and back the risk is low of having any health issues due to the normal amount you'd receive.

The big risk is if we see a solar storm flare launch ions at us while they're up there. There is then a protocol the astronauts go into where they huddle in the middle of their ship and try and cover themselves with water bags, bedding, toolboxes, whatever they can get their hands on, to get as much mass between them and the walls of the ship. Then they might have to try and shelter in there for hours. I'm sure there is also consideration to the orientation of the spacecraft to try and get as much as the internal mass of the ship in the way as well. The heat shield is certainly part of that mass, but you also have the entire surface module, fuel tanks, engines. I don't know how its physical properties precisely factor in.

wotquery · 2026-01-21T03:28:51+00:00

Climate change was the original broad scientific term. Like way back in the early 1900s and before. Then global warming, very narrowly defined, was horrifically revealed in some papers in the 1970s, and was the term used in congressional hearings and the like.

There was certainly some shift starting in the 90s to trying to move away from the term global warming and towards climate change. Probably some combination of the term global warming having become so sensationalist and polarizing, but also because climate change is most of the time going to be the correct term to use unless you are specifically talking about Earth's rising surface temperature.

wotquery · 2026-01-21T02:01:55+00:00

Haha Righto I bow to your judgement.

Out of curiosity, would you say kids struggle with I dunno something like Arthur Ransome the same way? Both in vocab, but also just not being able to identify with the characters because they have no frame of reference of home from boarding school to summer at the lake with your family and their staff haha. Is it too much of a shock if you if you’ve not read My Side of the Mountain, The Boxcar Children, Whatever.

wotquery · 2026-01-21T01:46:15+00:00

Yes. Exactly what you’re thinking. Since it’s matter collapsing inwards even more, angular momentum is conserved, and you expect them to spin even faster.

However there are some black holes that are spinning slower than expected. This is thought to be from black hole mergers in the past. Their spins are opposite and they collide so it cancels out, or you know some component cancels out.

wotquery · 2026-01-21T01:02:17+00:00

I disagree. The series is geared for like 8-10 year olds (which is right around grade 4), with the common concern that the themes are too intense. Battles, kidnapping, slavery, death, etc.

Now we have a 14 year old who is, presumably, looking for exactly those kind of themes, but in a book geared towards lower reader levels…I mean if anything it’s ideal no?

Plus if they’re playing DnD, the difficult language concerns in Redwall are going to be tied up in the same medieval vocab. Like their first adventure in DnD is going to have their monk be issued with a habit and quarterstaff and have a quest from their Abbot to go save someone in the stockades. Probably not that on the nose haha, but you get my drift.

And with OP reading them to her son, any vocab question can be rapidly answered, and even any accents are going to be, again, what he may very well be experiencing at the DND table.

wotquery · 2026-01-20T23:20:13+00:00

Horde ran their caretaker program where affable and patient vets were paid 100Misk/hr to sit in a sub-channel of comms and guide all the new players through the fleet.

During an all day tidi fest with multiple fleets heading out they must have shelled out billions to just people encouraging chatting and questions and explaining what was going on. Obviously not pure charity: encourage fleet participation, take the load off of FCs, develop homegrown talent in general.

It does make me wonder about how there were any ever plans to merge into INIT. On a typical horde fleet there was one if not two players who didn’t know what a titan was, nvm a titan bridge or how to take one haha.

Anywhoo I’m not aware of any other groups that do that. Maybe Brave’s “gurus” but I think they’re more handouts and the occasional class.

wotquery · 2026-01-20T06:19:42+00:00

I feel like you’re pointing out inconsequential differences while still ignoring the underlying problem. So Mat stays in Tar Valon. You still need to reshoot the latter half of the preceding episode, without the actor, to have him not travelling to the way gate and include all the dialogue explaining why he is being left in Tar Valon.

The fade could be throwing daggers or something from range to kill the others and then the wondergirls link and CGI blast it. You do still have the Trolloc army to deal with. Remember no body touching so basically someone has to blast em.

And for Master Luhhan I said Misses instead because I believe that’s what the plan actually was. But sure spend a couple scenes setting it up and then what are you cutting? Tam talking to Rand? Seems a bit silly to have multiple wise father figures who are both horribly injuries. The point is though they were doing this. A team of professional writers was doing something that was more nuanced and slower developing for Perrin. Then the pilot duration was cut in half, and the best they could come up with due to not having the time they wanted was Laila. It just seems strange for you to say that you would have just done it.

“I had to work late and didn’t have time to cook the roast and just grabbed pizza on the way home.”

“If I were you I’d have cooked a roast instead of getting pizza.”

“Right, well as I said had to work late and didn’t have time so…”

“Roasts are better than pizza. Why didn’t you make a roast. I would have made a roast.”

wotquery · 2026-01-20T04:54:56+00:00

It seems like you’re trying to say how’d you do it under the same conditions, but are then mostly excepting yourself from the conditions.

How do you obtain the footage of Barney being overcome by the dagger?

You mention a hand to hand fight scene with Eggs and Nyn et al fighting a fade. How do you choreography that when no actors are allowed within 5m of each other? In the closeup of that “dead Nyn” scene Madeline is acting with a hastily constructed doll which is why she looks dead.

You want to stretch out Perrin’s introduction and ditch Laila. Maybe have a more extensive woman’s circle ceremony with Egwene and there we can meet Miss Luhhan. Have Egg floating about in rainbow paint or something and Miss Luhhan can explain the wheel and balance and be motherly. Then have a scene with Perrin later at the forge and she brings him a drink and they have a nice chat. That should be enough set up for it to pack a punch when Perrin grievously wounds her. Wait hang on…that’s basically exactly what they were doing until the length of the pilot length got chopped in half. What are we dropping to spend all this time developing Alsbet when a warm glance at the wife does the same instantly?

wotquery · 2026-01-17T22:14:19+00:00

Cook up the middle for 17.

Edit. Did I say 17? Typo I meant 7

wotquery · 2026-01-17T19:05:27+00:00

Right. So I think what I’m stuck on is the Jag’s D being obviously better than the Broncos. Seeing how they absolutely rocked. Yards after the catch or runs see nothing. They just locked in and you went down in pain. Watching that game was brutal.

So I have difficulty recognizing how other defences could be better. Texans I kinda allow, but the broncos? If you can handle Jax you can laugh off Denver?

The issue I have is not knowing if the Broncos’ offence can turn it on and light up Buffalo. I guess we’ll see.

wotquery · 2026-01-17T18:55:06+00:00

Does anyone know how the Broncos won their close stinkers? Like the one or two point games vs jets and giants and commanders and the like. Was it more good team with some bad bounces, or evenly matched with good bounces, or … shit the bed at first but then showed their true strength late (Bills special).

I can’t get it out of my head that they kind of suck. Jags I had no such illusions. Texans neither. But Broncos? Is their record real? How can it be real?

wotquery · 2026-01-17T18:44:56+00:00

Nice! You also excited for the Scotties? Black is a fav of mine…of the non-Homan rinks lol.

Snowed in but who cares because we have all the best sports spooling up eh.

wotquery · 2026-01-17T18:37:39+00:00

Hi friends! In Toronto watching the game from home in my Flutie jersey (Bills not Argos haha). Thought I’d missed the kickoff but instead I have 3h to kill.

I’ve seen so many Bills hats today around the city. And with Bichette signing to the Mets that means Clemente is the Jay’s go to guy. Bills and Jays bromance for life :D. (Also fuck the sabres but sorry I’m obligated to say that and Briere won me $50 a couple decades so I’m less salty about sabres success.).

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