[HN Gopher] NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1M Miles ...
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NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1M Miles per Hour
Author : mywacaday
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-08-18 13:58 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (science.nasa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (science.nasa.gov)
| srvmshr wrote:
| If galactic location details weren't provided, I would have
| jokingly concluded that we finally spotted the nuclear manhole
| cover :)
|
| https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-o...
| schiffern wrote:
| > 1M Miles per Hour
|
| That's ~450 km/s, or 0.15% _c_.
|
| Importantly it's also the first object discovered by this project
| that's unbounded to the Milky Way. Like `Oumuamua in relation to
| the Solar system, it exceeds the escape velocity and will never
| return to the Milky Way.
| ahaucnx wrote:
| With more affordable sensor technology, citizen science has a
| huge potential to become a strong force just by being able to
| deploy a large number of people in a short time span.
|
| However some of the problems is that it's not really recognized
| (yet) by academia and governments and thus also not adequately
| funded.
|
| It would be great if there is a more systematic approach to
| citizen science but only in astronomy but also global challenges
| like climate change and biodiversity.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Yes, but with the cost of lift dropping to dollars per kg, we
| could easily launch thousands upon thousands of short life,
| disposable sensor platforms away from Earth yearly, just in the
| spare space for some launches.
|
| Such platforms need only cost hundreds of dollars each, and
| could even use crowd source designs. We could iterate fast, tey
| different designs, discovering what cheap build method works.
| They could be tiny, with nuclear batteries, or very small solar
| panels. Something along these lines would be far, far, far more
| effective than ground sensors, or Hubble, as they could be
| networked and would be effectively millions of km apart.
|
| If even 90% of them died due to cheap design, who cares. If
| they only last a year, or even weeks who cares.
|
| People spent billions on things like hubble, because it used to
| cost enormously to launch. It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to
| orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex.
|
| So our design and deploy methods should change too.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| And would still take ~29 million years [1] to exit the galaxy (if
| it had started from the center). Space is large.
|
| [1]
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+Milky+Wa...
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-
| bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way
| down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to
| space."
| jancsika wrote:
| "If you could put the universe into a tube, you'd end up with
| a very long tube, probably extending twice the size of the
| universe. Because when you _collapse_ the universe, it
| expands. And it would be-- you wouldn 't want to put it into
| a tube."
|
| https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?t=74
| NKosmatos wrote:
| I've posted it many times, given the opportunity, and I think
| it also fits nicely here:
| https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Total_Perspective_Vortex
| arbuge wrote:
| Not sure about this one... according to this study the escape
| velocity of the Milky Way is around 550 km/s.
|
| https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A%26A...649A.136K/abst...
|
| The authors of that study cited above are pretty confident it's
| above 497 +/- 8 km/s, at least in the solar neighborhood.
|
| 1M Miles per hour works out to 446 km/s. Granted these are all
| rough numbers, and it depends exactly where you are in the Milky
| Way, but it looks like it may be a bit short of actually
| escaping.
| uncivilized wrote:
| If you actually read the research paper linked in the article,
| it says the speed _may_ exceed that of the escape velocity of
| the Milky Way, suggesting that it is not proven as fact yet.
| _moof wrote:
| Escape velocity varies with distance from the center of mass.
| Is the distance in that paper comparable to the distance of the
| discovered object?
| huppeldepup wrote:
| Apparently no longer in pre-print:
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607
| vidanay wrote:
| Headed out to where the down boys go
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Backyard World website, where you can help search for the elusive
| "planet 9":
| https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-wor...
| _justinfunk wrote:
| All motion in space is relative. Wouldn't it also be equally
| accurate to say this object is motionless and everything else is
| passing it by at 1M mph?
| Djdjur7373bb wrote:
| It would be as accurate and make as much sense as saying the
| 100m finish line traveled to Usian Bolt in 9.6 seconds.
| _justinfunk wrote:
| I'm not being snotty. What is the fixed point from which they
| are measuring the speed? Is the object moving 1M mph relative
| to earth? The black hole at the center of Milky Way?
| gambiting wrote:
| >> What is the fixed point from which they are measuring
| the speed?
|
| Rest of the milky way galaxy, presumably, given that it
| talks about escape velocity from it.
| ianburrell wrote:
| The paper says the Galactic rest frame.
| yumraj wrote:
| A spaceship?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| "Stellar engines are a class of hypothetical megastructures which
| use the resources of a star to generate available work," for
| example, to "produce thrust [to] accelerate a star and anything
| orbiting it in a given direction" [1].
|
| (I don't think it works with a brown dwarf.)
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
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