I WENT AND LOOKED INTO THIS AND DEADASS PLANET NINE HAS BEEN PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE SINCE 2016 AND WE HAVE ESTIMATES ABOUT WHERE IT IS BUT WE HAVE NO. CLUE.
IT’S 10 TIMES LARGER THAN EARTH.
WE THINK WE FOUND ONE OF PLANET NINE’S MOONS.
WE HAVE NO IDEA WHERE IT IS.
WHAT THE FUCK
*jaws theme*
Bitcg it’s real
Space is big guys. Like really really mindbogglingly big, even if we’re only talking about the space in our solar system.
That tiny green circle labeled “orbit of Neptune”? That circle has a radius of four and a half billion kilometers (2.3 billion miles). It’s 30 times as far away from the sun as the Earth is; light takes 8 minutes to get to Earth, yes? It takes 4 hours for light to get to Neptune. It is ridiculously far away, going by the standards we’re used to on Earth.
And look at how small is it compared to the predicted orbit of Planet Nine. The estimates for the semi-major axis range from 400 to 1000 times as far from the Sun as Earth is.
Notice that the orbit is an ellipse? Statistically, it’s likely that this planet is currently closer to the far end of the ellipse (the aphelion, or to be generic, apoapsis), because orbiting objects move slower at the aphelion so they spend more time there. Pluto orbits the Sun once every 247 years – anything further out is going to take longer still, so we can’t wait around for it to get closer and expect to see anything anytime soon.
There’s also viewing difficulties. The wikipedia article says that if it’s relatively close, it might show up on pictures from stellar databases, but if it’s further away (more likely) it’ll be too faint and require a stronger telescope. Also, in the part of the expected orbit that goes in front of the galactic plane, it would look like any back ground star and be harder to pick out.
That is how you lose a planet. More specifically, that’s how you have trouble finding a planet that you don’t know for sure exists yet, that might be invisible to all but the biggest telescopes, and that’s exact position isn’t exactly known.
David A Kessler, author of The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,
is a doctor and lawyer, med school dean and former FDA commissioner.
He’s also someone whose weight has yo-yoed back and forth all his life,
someone who is plagued with insatiable junk-food cravings. His new book
– grounded in research that included dumpster-diving chain restaurants
to read the ingredient labels on the foods whose makeup they wouldn’t
discuss, tries to answer the neurological question of why we crave
shitty junk food:
The labels showed the foods were bathed in salt, fat and sugars, beyond
what a diner might expect by reading the menu, Kessler said. The
ingredient list for Southwestern Eggrolls mentioned salt eight different
times; sugars showed up five times. The “egg rolls,” which are
deep-fried in fat, contain chicken that has been chopped up like
meatloaf to give it a “melt in the mouth” quality that also makes it
faster to eat. By the time a diner has finished this appetizer, she has
consumed 910 calories, 57 grams of fat and 1,960 milligrams of sodium.
Instead of satisfying hunger, the salt-fat-sugar combination will
stimulate that diner’s brain to crave more, Kessler said. For many, the
come-on offered by Lay’s Potato Chips – “Betcha can’t eat just one” –
is scientifically accurate. And the food industry manipulates this
neurological response, designing foods to induce people to eat more than
they should or even want, Kessler found…
“The food the industry is selling is much more powerful than we
realized,” he said. “I used to think I ate to feel full. Now I know, we
have the science that shows, we’re eating to stimulate ourselves. And so
the question is what are we going to do about it?”
We have a civilization run entirely on tiny plates of rock inscribed with runes that channel energy to do our work, manage our money, make writing and music and imagery appear at the gesture of a finger. If that’s not magic to you, you’re wrong. Just because we understand a thing does not make it less wonderous.
The substance the teacher uses in the video is liquid methane. But methane has a really low boiling point. Like, about −160 °C low. So once it touches the comparatively hot floor, the Leidenfrost effect comes into play, and it slides across the floor. The issue is though, methane is colorless, so you can’t normally see it. Thankfully (in this demonstration), methane is also very flammable, so he sets it on fire before dumping it onto the floor so you can see it as it moves.
Definitely a cooler demonstration of the Leidenfrost effect than dropping a little water in a hot pan.
Or hotter, if you like puns.
THANKS FOR EXPLANATION SCIENTIFIC SIDE OF TUMBLR
My mama said I can’t be in yo class no more
how the heck did he get past health and safety to do this
the American public school system has no concept of health or safety
The mystery of the glorious fireball emitted by microwaved grapes (featured in my novel Little Brother) has been resolved, thanks to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
in which Trent University researchers Hamza Khattak and Aaron Slepkov
explain how they destroyed a dozen microwaves before figuring out that
the grapes were just the right size and had enough humidity to set up
standing waves that amplify the microwaves – and anything roughly
grape-sized will do the same.
The paper is offline at both PNAS and Sci-Hub, which is weird, but there’s good coverage of it at Ars and Wired.
Brent Seales called them Fat Bastard and Banana Boy. They were two charred, highly fragile relics that had survived the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption of 79 CE, which doused residents of Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum in a searing blast of destructive gas and volcanic matter. Herculaneum was buried under 80 feet of ash that eventually became solid rock.
Incredibly, the library of Herculaneum (known as the Villa dei Papiri) was still filled with over 1800 scrolls, solidified into dark husks. The words inside—religious text, scientific observation, poetry—could provide unprecedented insight into human history. Yet unraveling them has proved difficult. The papyri are so damaged and rigid from lack of moisture that they suffer from a kind of archaeological rigor mortis. And unlike the paralysis that seizes the body upon death, this condition is permanent. Delicate attempts to open the scrolls by hand have been destructive. For a long time, it seemed as if the secrets of the texts would remain locked away for good.
But as Seales stared at the two hardened masses in front of him in 2009, he didn’t share that pessimism. A professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, he believed that the manual unwrapping that had long failed could be replaced by virtual unwrapping—the digital opening of the texts using computer tomography (CT) scanning and software to penetrate inside the rolled-up scrolls, revealing layers once thought invisible to the eye.
Okay, so, Labradorite. Labradorite is complicated and sciencey, as all good rocks are. I’ll see if I can explain it in a way that makes any sense! (Once again, I’m not a scientist! Correct me if I’m wrong!)
Most minerals, when they’re bright and pretty and colorful, look like that because while they were forming some impurities got mixed into them – usually metals like iron, copper, or titanium. Without any impurities, these rocks would naturally be colorless. We call these guys allochromatic (other-colored).
Other gemstones are certain colors because those elements are an important part of how they formed. They’re not impurities that got mixed in, they’re actually part of the gemstone. Their natural color IS the color you’re seeing. We call them idiochromatic (inherently colored).
But labradorite doesn’t get its color from either of those things. Labradorite is special. It’s part of a third group: psudochromatic (false colored). These rocks aren’t colorful at all, but they LOOK that way when light passes through them.
See, labradorite is actually just… grey. From most angles, it looks like this:
You have to look at labradorite from a pretty specific angle to get those flashy colors, so when we cut it into cabochons for jewelry, or just polish up big pieces of it, we’re careful to do so at the most flattering angle, the angle that shows the most schiller, or “those cool glowy colors.”
Why just the one angle? It’s all about labradorite’s crystal structure, and how it’s formed.
Labradorite is a rock that cooled down really slowly. Because of that, it’s made of lots of very very thin layers of crystal, stacked on top of each other and all pretty much aligned in the same direction. These are alternating layers of albite (mostly sodium), and orthoclase (mostly potassium), which solidify at very slightly different temperatures. Labradorite is a rock that cooled in just the right way for a thin layer of albite to form, then a thin layer of orthoclase, then another thin layer of albite, and so on.
When light hits labradorite at the perfect angle to pass through a bunch of these layers, you get the schiller effect. Basically, a little bit of the light gets bounced off the first layer and back to your eyes. The rest of the light passes through to the second layer, and a little bit gets bounced back to your eyes again, and so on. Every time more light gets sent back to you, it’s a little out of sync, and this makes it look like a different color.
(This is a very simplified way of explaining this.)
If these layers were all perfectly the same size, you’d get a uniform color, like the blue in moonstone. But in labradorite, these layers might be different widths in different places, so different parts of the stone will reflect back wildly different colors! We call this effect labradorescence to differentiate it from the uniform colored adularescence found in moonstone and some opals.
Depending on where it’s found in the world, labradorite can reflect all sorts of different colors!
But whatever color it is, Labradorite will always be the Best and Coolest Rock.
Shiny rock science!
I’ve actually started collecting labradorite specimens.
