Recent content by AboveAndBeyond

> What we see as "green" another might experience as "red". Not so. People with normal color vision all agree on color matches throughout 3-D color space. That's why it's possible to construct a standard observer. There's no reason to suppose it's all some uniquely "personal" experience. What...

> What would they look like if we could see them with our own eyes, instead of through a telescope? > "The quickest answer is, we don't know," said Alyssa Pagan This is just plain wrong. You can plug the visual wavelength spectrum of any light source into the CIE Standard Observer (which dates...

That's great. I wonder how long before it'll be available to us regular people, since it sounds like a vacuum is required. Right now the best thing is carbon black from a smokey candal, but it's a mess to apply and has no wearability; but it's way blacker than the flat black paint you get at...

There's a close-up photo of Corona Borealis with the location of the star marked at: https://visns.neocities.org/TMITHOA/TM_May.htm . Look under Discoveries/May 12th. It says there the 80 year "period" is only approximate, being based on two known eruptions, and since the last one was in 1946...

Civilization, especially under democracy, tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes. - H.L. Mencken (1922) You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that AI is just one of several currently popular crazes. One thing I always liked about SETI was at least it was clear (if...

> "It is a very, very exciting time to be an astrophysicist right now." Because basically you can just make stuff up like axions or dark (invisible) matter, get funded/employed, and no one's calling BS on you.

By "mathematically perfect" I suppose they mean resonant orbits, not perfectly circular ones, or something else. An elaboration of exactly what's considered perfect would have been nice.

Even an entry level job should pay $25/hour for any STEM degree worth anything. With time-and-a-half for overtime, you come up with a number around $125k per year, minus whatever NASA wants for the room and board they're providing. I doubt it pays that kind of $$'s. Of course your money's no...

I think you mean the era of recombination, not the "era of reionization".

This is almost too clever by half. Why would anyone message us this way? Are we messaging anyone this way?

So long as everyone is heading to the moon, it's curious that no one is considering putting an optical/IR interferometer there. With baslines of 100 meters or more, angular resolutions of 0.001 arc-second are possible at visible wavelengths, and by throwing one arm of the interferometer out of...

Glad to hear Vakoch's book is finally out. It was scheduled to be out on Oxford Univ. Press way back some four years ago, but then the entire COVID thing erupted and the book was delayed and/or evidently shelved. I highly recommend Daniel Oberhaus's 2019 book on MIT Press, "Extraterrestrial...

Earth's radiated power at radio wavelengths is dominated by military anti-ballistic missile radars and TV broadcast anttenae, both of which were insignificant before about 1950, rising rapidly from that time until about a decade or two later. So I'd shorten your distance to ~60 light years, or...

Thanks. My intuition would have supposed the turbulent and convective motions in the star's photosphere (such as granulation) would have prevented anyone from making a measurement at a small enough velocity to detect the mutual orbital motion around the barycenter reflected in the star.

How do they know this planet's density, which requires knowledge of its mass as well as its radius; without a moon orbiting it how could anyone get a mass?