Voyager 1 and 2 still alive!!!! 38,000 mph!

Today, after the Iowa game, we visited the home of James T. Kirk - Riverside, Iowa.

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SpaceX launched a Starship today, and successfully caught th booster on the first attempt to do so! Pretty spectacular to watch.

 
SpaceX launched a Starship today, and successfully caught th booster on the first attempt to do so! Pretty spectacular to watch.


Never seen anything like this before.

in the video, these folks "caught" the booster section by the "chopsticks" on very same launch tower it took off from five minutes earlier.

ill be damned.

presumably, they will rehab/reuse it

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Voyager news for any space nerds among us.

source: We've been wrong about Uranus for nearly 40 years, new analysis of Voyager 2 data reveals

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Voyager 2, in 1986, did a Uranus fly-by and discovered many new things about it. There were some anomalous things though about it, namely what they called a "bizarre" magnetic field.

40 years later, the space kids think they figured it out. Billions of miles, years of space travel to get there ... at the exact time of an unusual solar wind event that affected the planet.

A few days earlier, or later, there would have been nothing to see in that regard. The effect would not have been there yet/passed by.

Again, egg-headed stuff, but the link above explains. Even if they are wrong, its still amazing what we know/dont know about space.
 
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It is looking increasing likely that we've also been wrong about "dark matter". The Physics community has been assuring us for the last 3 decades at least that identification of the elusive dark matter particle is just around the corner. There have been several competing theories, the most prominent of them MOND that have predictions that better align with observations but they have been cancelled and denigrated by the established physics community. Now it seems the evidence from the J Webb telescope which apparently has been ignored by the science press for the last 2 years may be putting the final nail in the coffin of dark matter.
 
i like sabine hossenfelder. read this one... twice. still soaking it in, but if one likes the stuff, without all the blowhard, egg-head scientists' math, this is a good one.

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i disagree with her that theres no such thing as "free will" ... but i aint nearly smart enough to understand her beef with the concept.

anyway, MOND and not some invisible stuff we cant find but know its there. a revision of Newton ... that would be something.

Einstein did it to Newton with relativity, the Copenhagen "mafia" did it to Einstein with quantum physics. Not that Einstein or Newton were wrong ... just some new ideas came up.

That's called progress. Smart prople being born every day.

MOND is fascinating. I had to listen to my smart, little Sabine a couple times, but still dont quite get what she's saying.

This helped me a bit: James Webb Space Telescope Finds Stunning Evidence for Alternate Theory of Gravity

We'll see if they (theoretical physicists) design experiments to confirm it --- in whats left of my lifetime I hope.

Jimbo potentially changing human history, let alone scientific explanation on how all this stuff, including us, got here.

:thumbsup:
 
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Alleged (seems true) SpaceX can build a Raptor rocket engine every 24 hours.

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Like most everything outta this company, a lotta talk about a person.

The parts about the guy is less interesting to me than the incredible achievements of brilliant technical people who dreamed this up and are executing it everyday.

Seems like the future --- if society wants to continue -- of commercial/exploratory rocketry.

12 minutes if you have time.

MSN
 
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Sorry. Nerd Alert.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2024/news-2024-116

Webb coming on three years out at L2. It has performed brilliantly. The "Wow, look at that" - visuals that dazzle - seem to be less regular now.

But, one risks bring lulled into complacency. The remarkable stuff is happening everyday. Jimbo can see almost to the beginning of the Universe.

Trouble is ya gotta be on the nerdy end of the spectrum, I think, to slog though the details. Here's one of the latest Webb visuals:

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Cool colors and smudges. Heck is this?? Veg out at the link. Basically, this is a gravitationally-lensed photo nearly 13 billion years ago. Of a really small "patch of sky".

Recall gravitational lensing is light waves "bent" around something massive (so massive its warping space-time) between the observer (Webb) and a " thing". The thing in this case is a 600 million year old "baby galaxy".

Yes. It's "behind" something massive, so the thing is "further" away from us, therefore "older" than the massive thing that is bending its light.

But wait..there's more. The space kids can "untangle" (estimate what is really there vs. what is duplicated) in lensed images.

Below, is the "thing". The right side "inset (white box)".
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The so called "Firefly Sparkle Galaxy". A "string" of 10 different star-forming regions, in a gravitational dance (spinning, merging) with themselves and two "companions" (themselves ancient galaxies too), that after a few billion years may look like our Milky Way does today. A spiral galaxy, 100,000 light years in diameter.

We see Firefly Sparkle when the Universe was less than 1% of it's current estimated age. Again, the link will be much clearer I am sure.

It's way more fascinating and scientifically deep than my "Dick & Jane" summary in this post. And there's trillions of light dots/smudges" yet to analyze.. on top of the thousands we just got started on that we already imaged the past couple years with Jimbo.

It is a great to time to be alive and able to do this .. IMHO that is. Big questions. Stunning answers. Remarkable machines.

"How" did all this stuff get here is coming into better view. Some of their guesses may/will yet be prove wrong. Other parts are strictly mind- blowing .. even now.

"Why" are we here? Dunno if "science/math" can ever answer that one ... depends on what one believes I guess.

:thumbsup:
 
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