Editors work behind the scenes, but every now and then we accidentally catch a piece of spotlight. One of Robert’s recent projects is getting a little attention this week. It’s called Mysteries of Astronomy, and you can read about it here:
www. msnbc. msn. com/id/47637714/ns/technology_and_science-space/
Robert, have I told you that you’re awesome lately? You’re awesome.
Oddly, my first thought upon seeing the name of this thread was “I hope none of you guys were that face-eating cannibal in Florida.”
So cool!! And some really interesting questions! I can’t wait till we find out more about dark matter.
And that’s interesting that the setup of our solar system is weird. I didn’t know it was odd to have the rocker inner/gaseous outer planet setup. I do know our asteroid belt is supposed to be where a planet didn’t form potentially because Jupiter’s gravity threw it off
I also have this whimsical image in my mind of Jupiter catching a big chunk (the size of Mercury) and slinging it into the Earth and that was the source of the impact that created our moon 
This is based on no science and almost certainly impossible but the picture makes me giggle
I thought I’d heard somewhere that Jupiter had maybe failed to be a star or something (no idea how reliable this is, heard it recently but haven’t put much thought/stock in the idea)? Does anyone know anything about that off-hand (though I know this isn’t the right thread for it)
Jupiter failing to be a star? Hm.
Jupiter has a mass that is 0.0009546 as much as the Sun (i.e., 0.0009546 solar masses). The lower limit for hydrogen fusion is about 0.08 solar masses–that is, an object has to be at least 0.08 solar masses to sustain the fusion of hydrogen atoms into helium. Clearly Jupiter is much smaller than this limit, as evidenced by the fact that it’s not a star. There are some things that, like Jupiter, didn’t quite make it to the 0.08 solar mass limit, which we call brown dwarfs–they glow a little bit in the infrared, but they’re quite dark. However, as I understand it, most of them are pretty close to that 0.08 limit–maybe 0.07 or something like that. Jupiter doesn’t even come close.
Furthermore, the processes of star formation and planet formation are pretty different. The Sun probably formed when a big cloud of gas and dust–debris from something or other, most likely–started to collapse in on itself. In the center, where most of the matter accumulated due to gravity, we eventually got a dense pocket of stuff that at some point imploded, got really hot, and began to fuse hydrogen into helium: the Sun. The leftover debris, still spinning around the center, slowly condensed into the other bodies in the solar system. Some of the pockets of debris got big enough that they cleared their orbit (i.e., ate up all the littler debris) and became big enough to be spherical due to their own gravity–the planets and some moons. The rest of the debris has been used mainly for dinosaur extinction and bad sci-fi movies. Anyway, the point was supposed to be that Jupiter formed from the debris orbiting a star that had already formed.
That’s about how I was taught it, anyway; our knowledge of astronomy changes ridiculously quickly, so it may already be out of date.
Awesome to see you quoted in the news, especially about such a cool topic!
This is fascinating, Robert!
Ooh! Awesome!
It’s rather humbling to realise just how much we don’t know.
This. This is how I feel about everything all the time.
That’s what science is all about: realizing what you don’t know, and trying to find out.
“There are times when, at least for now, we must be content to love the questions themselves.”
Many love the questions more than the answers—or love the answers insofar as they lead to new questions.
I’ve read as much. That isn’t how I feel, though. I want to KNOW things; I can’t think of anything in the world that I would want more than the ability to press a button and immediately know everything (bearing in mind that, once I’d done that, I’d be able to get anything else I wanted and be 100% sure that getting it was the right thing to do). On the one hand, it’s wonderful that the cosmos are so incredibly complicated that my brain can’t even comprehend them fully. On the other, it’s incredibly infuriating that my brain is so incompetent that it can’t even comprehend the cosmos fully. I try to think positively about the present, hence my previous post. Still, I’m not drawn to science because I love the questions, because I “love mysteries,” as Lawrence Krauss said. I don’t “love not knowing”. I’m drawn to science because I hate being ignorant, and I see it as the only way out.
So really, what I meant by the previous post (although I don’t know if it’s what Neil DeGrasse Tyson meant) was really that we–or I–can cope with all the ignorance by reminding ourselves that what we don’t know is at least so interesting, and you need a question before you can have an answer (in science, at least–in the real world, information can come serendipitously). The alternative to not coming up with a question is, after all, not even knowing what you don’t know, and that‘s hardly better. So when the answer I receive leads to more questions, I’m not disappointed, because I didn’t lose any knowledge; I gained some, and then also some about what I still need to get. But it’s the knowledge that I love, certainly not the lack thereof.
*drools a little* The missing baryons one is so interesting.
I don’t have that much of a preference for enjoying knowing something or enjoying discovering it. If I don’t know something minor I tend to have a strong urge to find out, and when that happens it’s because I want to avoid ignorance. I’m also interested in the uses we can put this knowledge to as well as for its own sake.