JoeSchmuckatelli

Well - now we're quibbling on the term 'quasi' over the term 'dwarf'. 'Dwarf' at least implies that its bearded and nasty with an axe. 'Quasi' suggests it hasn't yet figured out what it wants to be.

Law school is indeed awesome. Practicing law, however... Not so much.

grin

"Playable" 3D Model of the Galaxy? A lot of years ago (when Plait's Bad Astronomy was new) I stumbled upon a 'playable', 3d mapped representation of the Galaxy. You could scroll out from the Sun, see the planetary orbits and keep scrolling to see where the sun was relative to local stars. You could also zoom to a star and look back towards the sun to see what the sky would look like from that angle (or look at everything else for that matter). It was cool to see how a "simple" 40ly jump would eliminate or warp the constellations. In other words - a really cool app, that I think was web based, and gave users an easy, relatable way to picture where we are and what is in the neighborhood. Fast forward to today - and with Gaia's sky survey and numerous more recent studies trying to pinpoint the distance and location of stars... I'm wondering if something similar to what I enjoyed back then exists? Ideas?

LOL! Derogatory term used intentionally by a Marine who spent plenty of time on US Navy ships. ;D And that said - I wasn't aware that the other flattops did not have catapults. Thanks for that tidbit. Those pilots must be insane.

@mikegarrison Can you talk to the Corsair vs Mustang debate? I know both were fantastic and designed for different roles, with Corsair being quite a bit heavier. Iconic wing shape of Corsair being largely dictated by the space needs of a carrier - what impact do the different wing shapes have on flight characteristics? Bonus question: while the Lightning was a clearly capable aircraft - why did it's design not last? Is there anything inherently better about the Mustang design over the Lighting?

IIRC - WWII aircraft were launched (with the ship full steam into the wind) under their own power back in the day. AFAIK, no modern military fixed wing (other than VTOL) can do that. Hence the catapults and wires. Carrier aircraft these days also have to be specifically designed for the stresses of regular launch by catapult and landing by tripwire, which makes for a pretty tough aircraft. Something that often strikes me is the difference between modern US carriers and other nations' "flattops". US carriers have longer, angled and flat flight decks, while some (RU, CN et.al.) have in line decks with 'ramps' at the end. I suspect this is because they're shorter boats, but catapult tech could be an issue as well. Clearly they need some additional oomph (the ramp) to get the planes airborne and kept dry after launch - and while I don't know for sure, I suspect US carrier planes can be heavier at launch (with all that implies about strength, avionics and payload) than competitors. Perhaps @mikegarrisonknows - does building a carrier aircraft require adjustment to the wing shapes and dimensions compared to similar land based craft?

NEXT UP: Argument over distinguishing between a Chonky Gaseous Planemo and a Slender Brown Dwarf. Is temperature everything when you're cold as hell? Does size really matter? And what is all of this about wind speed and unladen Swallows?

It would not be a moon - because L2 is a solar orbit - not a planetary orbit (as I read the question posed) Took me a while to get this through my thick skull. Because planets clear their orbits, there are very few places in a given planet's orbit that anything can be relatively stable in co-orbiting the sun. The Lagrange points are these - but for planet X to reside for any time in one it must be significantly smaller than Y Thus when they eventually launch Webb, and presuming successful insertion - it won't orbit Earth like Hubble - it will orbit the sun with Earth.

Absurdism? (or am I missing something; inside joke?)

Side note - in case you missed it; this is cool Black hole seen eating a star - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/black-hole-star-death-spaghettification The authors' paper is linked at the end of the article

All excellent answers - and all in line with the prevailing wisdom. I won't quibble - nah, I'm going to anyway because it's fun! I recently read this article https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-map-of-the-milky-way/ ...where the authors point out that our sun lies in a 212 million year orbit of the galactic center, and that the last time the Earth and Sun were in this part of the orbit, dinosaurs roamed the land. Like magnemoe wrote, I've often read speculation about passing stars as potential sources of disturbed KB or Oort cloud bodies that become comets or asteroids. But I wonder if we really would see significantly different chemistry in a ʻOumuamua- like visitor to be able to distinguish between it and a local impactor. My understanding is that a SN created the dust cloud from which the Sun, planets etc formed. I think we can presume that, aside from some local clumping, the star forming region enjoyed a grossly uniform distribution of chemistry. After some shock, the heavier elements and rocks clumped together into protoplanets and the proto star. All planets likely have heavy metal cores - but when the Sun lit off and started producing a wind, the lighter parts of the cloud (gasses, etc) were pushed out, allowing the gas giants to collect far more of the lighter elements - and because of this adjustment in the distribution of the 'stuff' in the stellar/planetary nursery we can chemically distinguish between an asteroid belt object and a KBO. - - But if this process is correct, must we assume that bodies like ʻOumuamua would be sufficiently distinct to know from an impact that it was extrastellar? Is it possible that all we could say is that it came from a region around a star that was more metal rich or ice rich, and possibly attribute a foreign KBO type impactor with a domestic KBO? I'll agree with kerbiloid that passing directly through another stellar nursery would be a disaster - but just as comet trails have rocks and dust trails at enormous distance from the comet that create our annual meteor showers - I wonder if during the 212 million years of orbit if the sun can drag us through 'regularly scheduled' clouds of junk. I think the answer to this isn't likely to be known, given that with the timescales involved terrestrial craters weather and slide under tectonic plates. But I read another article (can't find it) that suggests that we've been seeing a multi-million year 'dip' in the number of impactors as determined by the estimated ages Lunar and Martian craters... And if that is the case - then could it not be that if we are in a 'clean' region of the sun's orbit, that we might again at some point be in a 'dirty' region that causes more impactors? {this assumes that the authors of the paper I read that suggests the 'dip' in the frequency of impacts is correct. I'll try to find it. Note: they did not suggest what I've suggested here. AFAIK they are presuming the impactors are 'domestic'}

Seeing as meteor showers are often caused by (or attributed to) the earth passing through comet trails... what are the possibilities of bombardment periods or 'Dinosaur Killer' asteroids being caused by the sun (and hence the planets) passing through a 'star forming region' or heavy 'dust' cloud during its orbit of the galactic center? (I know that the presumption is that 'bombardment' periods were only during the remnants of the planet forming period of the vestiges of the dust cloud that formed the sun and planets... but isn't there a possibility of us being dragged through a heavy dust cloud left over from another star forming region as the sun orbits?)

Yeah - trying to picture this stuff is fun. I remember when I realized that the curvature of the lit portion of the moon points to where the sun is, even when we can't see it.

Okay - excuse my ignorance please - but clearly there are tiles applied to the body - but when I reenter in KSP, the stuff sticking out from the body seems to get hotter than the main body (and blow off) - so why do we not see (or apparently need) tiles on the control surfaces?

Generally speaking - not 'illegal' as in you can go to jail or be fined... But commands reserve the right to approve or disapprove art on government owned aircraft. Very common, actually, to have unit marks on vehicles that help commanders identify individual vehicles (think of the differently oriented chevrons on tanks) and unit markings on aircraft. https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-22/us-marines-battle-for-control-of-nasiriyah-in-2003-1/10916888?nw=0&pfmredir=sm This one tells me that this is a tank from 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company 8th Tanks. Rarely, usually only during combat deployment, individuals can apply small personal touches to a vehicle, such as kill tallies, or maybe something like the Memphis Belle - but these need to be relatively small: certainly not to the extent of repainting the whole vehicle. Each service has their own traditions, of course. The Marines seem to allow the least peace time modification - but we were pretty lax about it in 2003, at least on the ground side once the bullets started flying. My tank had my personal mark - my handprint - along with the Unit's tiger motif designed by one of my SSgts. So the 14 tanks of our company all had the unique (to us) tiger and my tank had the unique (to the tank) red handprint in addition. Other tanks had their own distinctive marks as well

Question: who enjoys droll humor and sarcasm more, the Brits or the Ruskies? (FWIW - I think I heard some Yanks getting ready to cancel this thread due to insensitivity - b/c sarcasm isn't well understood in the States)

It seems that launch was not scrubbed for weather.

I knew I wasn't the first to think about this - but every time I have tried to broach the subject, my beer drinking buds' eyes glaze over so hard and fast that I wonder if I'm about to be charged with involuntarily manslaughter.

Did any of those WW 2 fighters get close to the sound barrier and survive? Or did the wing shapes produce so much drag that they couldn't get close?

In which direction?

Okay - but the capture assist planet could be now part of the star or millions of years away @whatever speed it took on to fling the planet into a captured orbit - right?

Every time I see this topic pop up... I get excited. But then I look at the date of the OP.

Perhaps if you were at the correct latitude and strapped into a chair that restricted head movement for 10 years... Maybe... But given that you are constantly reorienting throughout the day... Nah. That's one of those 'when you hear hoofbeats think horses not zebras things' (iow - there are much more plausible causes - like the same process that drives fingerprints)

Personification of Loki in that series. Now for something completely different. Spaaaaace Toilet: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5f764f76c5b6dd94f1e8090f Now new and improved