NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1M Miles per Hour

https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizen-science/nasa-citizen-scientists-spot-object-moving-1-million-miles-per-hour/

by mywacaday • 2 years ago

94 39 2 years ago

science.nasa.gov

srvmshr• 2 years ago

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...

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

the nuclear manhole cover

Manholes can weigh over 250 lbs (113 kg) [1]. Accelerating that mass to 25k mph takes about 7 GJ.

Brown dwarfs are around 10 ^ 27 kg. That takes sabout 10 ^ 11 GJ to get to 1mm mph.

To put that into perspective, the scale of the energy difference between these phenomena is so vast that were each GJ a second the interval it would define would span 32bn years, or roughly twice the age of the universe.

[1] https://theapecgroup.com/how-much-does-a-manhole-cover-weigh...

schiffern• 2 years ago

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 ʻOumuamua in relation to the Solar system, it exceeds the escape velocity and will never return to the Milky Way.

vivzkestrel• 2 years ago

imagine if we had an object moving at 1 million miles per second breaking the laws of known physics. Now that would be one hell of an HN post

ahaucnx• 2 years ago

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.

b1125• 2 years ago

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.

HeatrayEnjoyer• 2 years ago

It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex.

What innovation is expected to make this possible? The minimum amounts of fuel and oxygen necessary to leave the atmosphere are fixed, short of a chemistry breakthrough.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

Hmm. I doubt so many people are that interested in science and also capable of making something.

Maybe as an off the shelf satellite as a hobby just like everyone bought drones for a while until all the laws came in. It'll be a cool gadget for a while and then everyone but the real enthusiasts will lose interest.

And is this really a good idea? Space cluttering is already a problem for astronomers. After Starlink, Project Kuiper and others launching 10.000s of says, do we really need the general population to go and mass-pollute space? Sure it will be short lived LEO stuff for sure but still..

ianburrell3• 2 years ago

What would be the point? Where would we send them? What would they do when they get there?

They can't be more effective telescopes than Hubble since they would be tiny, and it would be impossible to combine the images. Another problem is that they are too tiny to send radio back to the Earth.

How would we launch them? SpaceX gets them to Earth orbit. It would be expensive to get them to rest of Solar System. Sending out like Voyager probes would be harder that takes forever to get anywhere useful. Getting them up to speed of this object is beyond our technology.

teruakohatu• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

“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• 2 years ago

"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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Apparently no longer in pre-print:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607

vidanay• 2 years ago

Headed out to where the down boys go

adamredwoods• 2 years ago

Backyard World website, where you can help search for the elusive "planet 9": https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-wor...

_justinfunk2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

It would be as accurate and make as much sense as saying the 100m finish line traveled to Usian Bolt in 9.6 seconds.

_justinfunk2• 2 years ago

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?

yumraj• 2 years ago

A spaceship?

mrinfinitiesx• 2 years ago

The aliens sent Elon's car he launched in space hurling back at us.

JumpCrisscross2• 2 years ago

“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

pavel_lishin3• 2 years ago

Maybe it wasn't a brown dwarf when it started accelerating!

justinclift• 2 years ago

Maybe they've spotted the reaction mass heading in the opposite direction. :)

MrGuts• 2 years ago

"Where are you...?"

"Not far now."

"Good, good, good..."

NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1M Miles per Hour

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