Two New Missions To Explore The Early Solar System

A photon checks into a hotel and is asked if he needs any help with his luggage. He says, “No, I’m traveling light.”

Why not just buid a solar panel around the sun to solve all energy problemss?

Behold the Dyson Sphere

Dyson sphere is a hypothetical mega-structure that completely encompasses a star and captures most or all of its power output.

Over the years many variants have been explored:

The simplest such arrangement is the Dyson ring, in which all ‘energy harvesting structures’ share the same orbit.

Add multiple Dyson ring structures and you will get a Dyson swarm.

Now what if you didn’t like a consistent orbit for your structures, you could employ a solar sail to continuously modify its orbit( called a statite ).

Such an arrangement would be known as a Dyson Bubble

Then there is the fictionally popular version - The Dyson Shell, where a uniform solid shell of matter just encapsulates the entire star.

And many many more. But you get the gist.

Could there be Dyson Spheres out there?

When scientists were monitoring the brightness from some stars, they found that it fluctuated in some odd ways like so:

                          Brightness v/s time for KIC 8462852

It is common for such dips to occur since when a planet eclipses a star, there would a drop in the brightness observed from the star.

                       Brightness v/s time for a binary star system

But what was baffling was the duration and period of occurrence of these dips.

Although the main line of rationale remains as asteroid impact remnants or interstellar collisions causing these aberrations in data.

But to say that these could the signs of an alien civilization does remain to be the more entertaining interpretation.

Great Question. Thanks for asking !

** For more information. check out this TED talk

Artists impression of ‘Hot Jupiter’ exoplanets.

Credit: NASA, ESA, D Sing

Why the fuck would you taste it?!

According to NASA, a neighboring star has 7 Earth-like planets in its orbit

Seven Earth-like planets have been found orbiting a sun not too far — in space terms, at least — from our own.

NASA announced Wednesday that the planets resemble Earth in composition and spacing from their star, which means their conditions might be favorable to liquid water and life, Time reported.

“The planets form a very compact system,” Michaël Gillon of Belgium’s University of Liège, said in a teleconference, according to Time. “They are very close to their star and are reminiscent of the system of moons that orbit Jupiter. They could have liquid water and life.”

Astronomers studied the star, Trappist-1 — which, at 39 light years away from Earth, is considered a relative neighbor — for six years, using telescopes located all over the world, plus the Spitzer Space Telescope. Read more (2/22/17 2:04 PM)

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The total area of solar panels it would take to power the world, Europe, and Germany

Giant squids might be even bigger than we realized

According to research from Charles Paxton, fisheries ecologist and statistician at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, published in the Journal of Zoology this month, the giant squid could grow to reach as much as 65 feet. But even that is a “conservative analysis,” as size could protect against their #1 predator.

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Spectacular collision of stars will create new star in night sky in 2022

1800 years ago two stars were coming together in a huge cataclysmic explosion. The light from that collision will finally arrive on Earth creating a new star in the night sky - dubbed the ‘Boom Star’ - in an incredibly rare event which is usually only spotted through telescopes. Before their meeting the two stars were too dim to be seen by the naked eye, but in 2022, the newly formed Red Nova will burn so brightly in the constellation Cygnus that everyone will be able to to see it. For around six months the Boom Star will be one of the brightest in the sky before gradually dimming, returning to its normal brightness after around two to three years.  Read more