They found evidence that contradicts the roche limit, which I only today learned about. I also didn’t know there were so many dwarf planets or that they were so small.
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Everybody always says “Pluto’s still a planet!” but where are all my Ceres and Vesta homies?
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I find that as silly as people that complain about common core. The celestial object hasn’t changed, just the way we classify them, especially in light of all the other exoplanets and stuff we’ve learned in the last 20 years about planets in general. stuff changes in science in light of new evidence.
mostly though I’m very surprised such a (relatively) small body can have enough mass to keep something like a moon in orbit.
That’s what I mean. Space is huge. So why is this happening? I’m not arguing that it is not happening, I just don’t understand why.
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Space is big, but also there’s a very specific height you need to be at for a geosynchronous orbit. (not all space stuff is in geosynchronous orbit)
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I get that, but the surface of the earth is all one height too (basically, for the purpose of this argument), and i don’t think random shit driving across the surface of the earth would be particularly likely to crash into other random stuff, and space is multiples bigger (even if it is all at a certain specific height). The surface area of the sphere that makes up that height around the earth is necessarily much much bigger than the surface of the earth so I’m still clearly missing something else here.
I think the answer is that there’s just a whole lot of space debris going very fast and even a collision with a loose screw could wreck a satellite.
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Airplanes crash in midair sometimes, and take action to avoid crashing frequently. There’s probably a lot more junk in space than there are airplanes in the sky.
I get what you’re saying but commercial planes fly at 36k feet and things orbit 2000 miles to 22000 miles. That’s a lot more space…
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It’s far less extra space than you’d think though because airplanes are traveling through the entirety of the surface area above the populated earth and satellites are confined to pretty tight lateral tracks if they want to be useful. So you’re not increasing by an r^2 factor and it’s probably even less than an r^1 factor. Add in the fact that airplanes don’t leave behind hundreds of pieces of debris that remain hazards for years and I assume it’s tougher for a satellite to see and avoid smaller but still catastrophic hazards.
That picture is massively misleading as those dots are not to scale. Space debris is an issue and you wouldn’t want two big objects colliding with each other adding even more debris but LEO is still really big and collisions are rare. Worse thing is that more than a third of almost collisions and actual collisions come from the two anti satellite tests Russia and China performed. The space station has to avoid pieces of those tests a couple of times a year.
This caused me to look up more info about Jupiter’s less famous moons, and I think we need to declare a total ban on moons until we figure out what the hell is going on:
Sort by “diameter”. Fully half of them are just 1-2km across! Only like 16 are more than 10km across. They’ll call any old space rock a moon!
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How in fuck have we not figured out all the moons around Jupiter yet? Literally detecting exoplanets but we’re missing stuff in our own backyard? We need a complete shutdown until we can figure it out, I agree.
One of the most fun courses I ever took was an astronomy 101 course with a lab at night. We had good views of jupiter during the semester, and using a fairly powerful and large telescope we were able to make it out + its major moons. I was startled at how tiny it appeared, and its large moons looked like barely perceptible blips. I imagine detecting something just a few kilometers wide from that distance is extraordinarily difficult.
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This seems like it may be a significant development
Cliffs are: can make solar panels from moon dust
Haven’t read yet but feel like my natural response anytime I see “unlimited” and “power” in a headline is
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The previous simulation didn’t full clean up after itself before this run started.
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