The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
This is the dwarf planet Ceres. It’s the largest object in the asteroid belt. We’ve got a probe headed toward it right now, that ought to be in orbit around it on March 6th. This picture was taken on February 19th.
What in the hell are those?
Further detail here.
The new hotness for the boy lately has been Teen Titans Go!, which works for me because as it turns out I enjoy the program quite a lot. It’s of that genre of cartoon where at the end of every episode the slate is wiped clean for the next episode, so literally anything can happen and the next episode they just pick up and move on.
To wit: there is an episode where one character blows up the moon. And they do not all immediately die. In fact, the blowing up of the moon is more or less passed over a few minutes later once the “YOU BLEW UP THE MOON?!?” moment is over.
“Would that really kill us all?” my wife muses. “The moon’s awfully far away.”
“I think it would,” I say. And then I start trying to figure out exactly how bad that might be.
Feel free to correct my math or my thinking if I’ve made a mistake. HOWEVER:
Most of those numbers came from Google one way or another and were copy-pasted into Excel or figured out with online calculators. The mass of the moon, in particular, seems to have a fairly wide range of accepted values. I can imagine a universe where I ended up off by a factor of ten somewhere but something tells me it doesn’t make a difference.
I’m still trying to figure out if anyone has estimated the mass of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, or if I have an easy way to kludge that (I actually can think of one way) but I suspect the following is true:
EDIT!
The generally accepted diameter of the Chicxulub asteroid is six miles. This means that, assuming a perfect sphere (which isn’t true, I know), it was composed of 113.1 cubic miles of (assuming, assuming, assuming) iron. That’s 16,648,088,371,200 cubic feet of iron.
A cubic foot of iron weighs 491.09 pounds.
Multiplying, we get an asteroid that weighs 8,175,709,718,212,610 pounds. Divide that by 2000, and we get an estimate of 4,087,854,859,106 tons for the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The amount of moon hitting Earth would be 141,676% of that amount.
So yeah. We’re fucked.
Doesn’t this article look timely and appropriate?
As always, the caveat that this is preliminary as hell and is basically just a color test– my artist and I exchanged half-a-dozen emails last night about various aspects of this, including one thing I griped about (the sky’s too pink.) But I’m still too excited not to share it.
Basically at this point there are helmets and logo work to do (I approved a helmet design yesterday) and then refining the colors until gorgeousness happens. This is what Casey and Jamie’s final work looks like so I have no doubt that the final colors on this will be spectacular.
I’m going to restrain myself from posting any further updates until you get the final image. Hopefully in a couple of weeks; finalizing the colors will take a bit.
I have been at work before 7:15 AM every day this week.
Last night, I was up well past midnight monitoring events in Ferguson, MO on Twitter and trying not to let the grief and rage make me lose my goddamn mind.
I have things to say about this. I’m going to try to not say them here.
The night before, I deliberately woke myself up at 3:00 in the morning so that I could go outside and watch for meteors. I saw a few, but not really enough to make up at 3 AM a bright idea.
I have not written a word of fiction in weeks and have not been in bed at a reasonable hour in… well, a while.
I am fixing both of those things tonight if it kills me.
And if it kills me, at least I’ll get some sleep.
…that Skylights has a page on Goodreads now.
It’s real! Er!
(In other news, this was my 750th post.)
Europa Report was awesome, dudes. Go check it out.
This is Europa. Europa is the most interesting of Jupiter’s 67 moons. Io is the second coolest, if you happen to be wondering, and S/2003 J 2, which has a dumb name and is only two kilometers wide, is the least interesting.
Europa has at some point (and that point may be now) harbored life. Yes, I’m phrasing it that definitively. I don’t care. I’m a rebel, dammit! Plus I’m right. Do I mean, like, little green dudes who might eat us? No; probably bacteria of some sort, although something more complicated is certainly possible. But Europa is basically a giant ball of ice with a water ocean underneath it. The surface features, you see, change on a fairly regular basis, and Europa is the flattest object in the solar system– it doesn’t really appear to have a lot of craters.
That no craters thing is a huge key to the existence of the ocean, see; the idea is that that frozen surface is continually cracking (being as close to Jupiter as it is means that the planet’s gravity is wreaking havoc with Europa’s surface) and the liquid water underneath is coming up and re-freezing the surface. Which, as you know if you’ve ever seen ice, tends to create a pretty flat surface.
Our experiences on Earth have taught us just how hardy life is. Basically, anywhere there’s water, there’s life. Hell, even in places where there’s barely any water, there’s still life. I have a lot of trouble imagining that this moon has literally a planetary-sized ocean (the estimate, if you didn’t read the Wikipedia article, is twice the volume of Earth’s oceans) with absolutely nothing living in it. Granted that “I have trouble imagining” isn’t the greatest example of scientific reasoning in the history of time, but whatever, my nonexistent reputation as a scientist will survive.
(Also: one of the greatest things about being an amateur astronomer is just how fast the field changes. When I was a kid, the thought of extraterrestrial planets was considered vaguely ludicrous, as we hadn’t found any yet. Now that I’m old we’re finding twenty Goldilocks planets a month and there are at least half-a-dozen moons in our solar system alone that we think could potentially harbor or have harbored some sort of life. The possibility of life outside Earth has gone from a massive improbability to something that seems virtually certain. All these planets, all these moons, and life nowhere but here? Bullshit.)
Anyway, here’s the reason I’m even talking about this: A movie that I’ve been excited about for a while, Europa Report, comes out today, and it’s doing so in an interesting way: it’s in theaters in limited release but you can also stream it through iTunes. The film’s creators appear to have put a lot of effort into making the film scientifically plausible, at least up to a point, and I’m super excited about watching it– probably not tonight, as I’ve got plans to eat massive amounts of sushi after work and will want to come home and die– but this weekend.
I like living in the future.