chawkins99

This was posted by my cousin a few weeks ago. The Milky Way and Andromeda.

He lives in Birmingham so doubly impressive he could find somewhere dark enough.

SultanOfSwing

This is pretty interesting:

Wandering star shook up the prehistoric solar system | Astronomy.com

Pulaski

So was anyone following the excitement about Ultima-Thule? I find it incredible that (i) we are able to get close up images from an object that is an area that we thought was a mostly empty area until quite recently, and (ii) that we can find something that is less than 20 miles long and take it's picture, and yet we still can't find Planet X, which is hypothetically the size of Neptune! I can only hope that there are provisional plans being prepared to send a probe to investigate it as soon as possible after its existence is confirmed and its location and orbit mapped. Honestly I am much more interested in that than the weird obsession with sending men on a suicide mission to Mars, and I hope that we might have the technology to send a probe that will get there within a few years and which can be slowed enough to be put into orbit around it.

SultanOfSwing

New Horizon has been a great mission, starting with those pictures of Pluto, the Ultima-Thule pictures were a hell of a bonus as well.

Planet X will be a bit more tricky to locate, because it's likely so far out it will be almost impossible to detect.

steveq

Obligatory Douglas Adams quote:

steveq

Seen this weekend in Pittsburgh.



Apollo 11 Pittsburgh

Hotscot

To Boldly Go...

https://kotaku.com/one-thousand-game...axy-1677603818

SultanOfSwing

Now that's cool. A long way away from the original Elite I had on the Amiga way back when.

Pulaski

I can't argue with that, but when we have found thousands of planets around other stars at least as far as hundreds of light years away from us, and imaged stars billions of light years away, it is still hard to believe that it is so hard to find something that is thought to be within 80 light hours of the sun.

SultanOfSwing

I have to imagine one of the reasons is that it isn't very reflective, and that in order to discover it, we'll have to pick up an infra-red signature. In order to do that, a telescope will have to happen to be looking at the right part of the sky at the right time.

Pulaski

Agreed. We are looking for a cold rock in a very big, and very cold, area, And I doubt there is much infra red to look for either, anymore than there is much light to look for, which is why mostly what we know about Planet X relates to its gravitational effects.

SultanOfSwing

There's going to be a lot of guesswork, and then some very fortunate telescope positioning, but it'll be found eventually. Hopefully in our lifetime.

Or maybe Betelgeuse will go supernova (or will have gone 600-odd years ago) and eclipse any other discovery so far this century, pun not intended.

Pulaski

That makes me sad, to think that Betelgeuse might have already gone supernova, but I won't live long enough for the light to reach earth.

SultanOfSwing

I'm torn - on one hand it could be probably the most spectacular astronomical event I will see in my lifetime unless I get to see an eclipse before I die, but on the other hand Orion is my favorite constellation and I don't want it to change.

Hotscot

We might get lucky and develop a Tachyon Telescope tm