Pulaski

So has anyone succeeded in seeing the planet cluster, including Mercury? It has been too cloudy near me most days recently, and in any case there are too many trees in the immediate vicinity of Pulaski manor to get a good view of the horizon.

SultanOfSwing

Not me. It's been clear but I haven't been out much at night, except yesterday when I was shoveling the drive at 10-ish. Wasn't paying much attention to the sky at that point, though.

MsElui

I stayed on the US Lexington with the Boy Scouts recently and as part of the trip they showed us an IMAX movie about the space station and future exploration/travel to Mars. The next generation of interplanetary vehicles look awesome and it was super interesting.

Pulaski

An exciting development in the area of applied astro-physics.

Shard

Good BBC videos. It seems to be a massive breakthrough in science. I also find it amazing that Einstein, living almost a century ago in relative technological pre-history, was able to accurately theorise so much of this stuff.

SultanOfSwing

It's a remarkable discovery. The vindication of Einsteins work is fantastic.

Pulaski

Now that they've found these gravity waves, I wonder what they can do with them. I don't see any obvious way to focus them to make any sort of image.

SultanOfSwing

The potential applications aren't immediately clear, as it is such a new discovery, but apparently they can be used to measure the rate of expansion of the universe, and to measure how much dark matter there is with quite a degree of accuracy. The farther reaching applications will likely become apparent as more binary black hole systems are discovered.

Pulaski

Here's and odd story, apparently "something" hit Jupiter.

SultanOfSwing

That was a hell of a catch getting that on film though.

Not quite Schumaker-Levy 9, but yeah Jupiter most likely gets hit with debris and asteroids quite often due to its enormous gravitational field. Really, the fact that we aren't getting hit by large objects more often is most likely because Jupiter deals with them before they reach the inner solar system.

We're very lucky Jupiter is there in the first place

Pulaski

And Saturn and Neptune, they're all doing the same job to protect us.

SultanOfSwing

Yes. And apparently Uranus takes quite a pounding, too ...

But yeah, the gas giants are the silent protectors of the inner solar system.

Pulaski

Why did I forget about Uranus?

There was also likely a fifth gas giant. I first heard about it a couple of years ago, but it is an interesting theory, that some where "out there", there is a fifth gas giant planet that was flung out of the solar system. I seem to recall seeing an estimate of how far it could have reached after four billion years at a speed markedly slower than the speed of light.

SultanOfSwing

It's the smallest of the giant planets, also it's a bit weird because it's tilted 90 degrees on its axis as well. Plus it has a dirty name. Tends to get swept under the carpet, does Uranus.

That's probably very likely. Rogue planets are already known about, there's no reason why one couldn't have originated in our solar system. With two planets the size of Jupiter and Saturn already, squeezing in a 5th one with Neptune and Uranus in the vicinity would have produced more than a little bit of gravitational instability.

steveq

Maybe we/intelligent life, can't evolve without a big-ass junk collecting planet in the system, which makes the discovery of super-Jupiters in other star systems very encouraging.

Also, continuing my M42 fixation
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/imag/1603/...jedor_2263.jpg
OK, its a stackup of many frames, but its gorgeous.