The Astronomy Thread
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meStevo
I think your wife's a bigfoot gus.
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Not sure it's public, but that kind of stuff is being worked on. One of the New Horizons guys I follow tweeted that it was something he was working on a month or two ago IIRC. I'm sure you can expect things like this to bump up in importance, and I think at the presser there was some expectations that observations would make it into 'cycle 1' of JWST.
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Burnem Wizfyre
Log Wizard
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I'm envious of any intelligent species that gets to experience life in that solar system.
That's crazy all those planets are habitable and their orbit fits within the orbit of our sun and Mercury.
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Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Burnem Wizfyre
Log Wizard
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Trappist-1 is just begging for someone to base an entire science fiction series around.
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Palum
what Suineg set it to
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Technically it doesn't qualify because I don't see where the toast comes out.
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Melvin
Blackwing Lair Raider
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Scientists have observed/measured/studied tidal forces on (much smaller) moons in our own Solar system, so if the math works out for the Trappist system then it's a pretty safe bet that it's legit.
Tectonic plates only happen if the planets' compositions allow them, and I don't know that they've made observations in enough detail to be anywhere near as confident about that yet. I could be wrong about that though. Wikipedia says "the densities of the planets range from ~0.60 to ~1.17 times that of Earth," which might be enough combined with the star's spectrum to make educated (if rough) guesses about the individual planets' compositions? Not by me of course, but by someone, maybe?
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Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Time to repost this awesome video:
[
note: when it shows 1 light day... the 2 voyagers aren't there yet, as they remind us
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Uber Uberest
rdr^2
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Aaron
Goonsquad Officer
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Kiroy
Marine Biologist
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I'd love to live long enough to see us go pick it up with our future tech, bring it back, and put it in a museum.
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Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Someone said it's like having a bunch of planets visible the size of Earth's moon. If you had multiple planets reflecting all that sunlight, your view of the stars would be pretty damn poor. Imagine multiple moons in the night sky and how much light it would produce. You'd struggle to have truly dark skies, especially if your planet has significant atmosphere.
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ShakyJake
<Donor>
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What's interesting is if these planets are tidally locked then it's possible their night-side might not be so night-ish. Several planets reflecting light might create a pseudo day/night cycle.
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Aaron
Goonsquad Officer
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This is basically the entire premise of Isaac Asimov's short story Nightfall. If you haven't read it, then find it and read it. Seriously!
Synopsis in spoiler:
Basically a civilisations forms on a planet in a mluti-solar solar-system. Due to the orbital mechanics, they know no night time, and therefore, no stars other than their local suns. But due to a quirk of orbital mechanics the suns have total eclipses once every few thousand years. Just as an astronomer figures this out and tries to warn everybody Nightfall happens and drives everyone insane. A side part of the story is that archaeologists have discovered that civilisation seems to reset itself on this planet every few thousand years due to civilisation going mad and burning everything down.
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