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Neil deGrasse Tyson Pinpoints Superman's Home Star System
kmoser writes "Everybody's favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, makes an appearance in upcoming Superman #14, in which Superman visits the Hayden Planetarium to view his original planet. Meanwhile, back in reality, DC Comics explains that NdGT has used his 'astronomical' powers to select the red dwarf LHS 2520 as the most likely real-life red star to fit with Superman's back story."
More science stars please.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What's with the trend of these guys spending time calculating fictional things? Wasn't there a mathematician last week who tried calculating some Cthulhu/wormhole fantasy? Waste...of...reputation.
What's with the newscientist link? I thought this was the badastronomy discussion board.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
they used a real scientist to lie about a fake planet?
Be seeing you...
The summary is slightly wrong. The comic in question is not Superman #14. It is the other Superman comic, ACTION COMICS #14. In stores tomorrow, by the way.
If you look at the actual comic, they are trying to help Superman determine if his planet of origin, Krypton, is still intact or detectable.
What they forget is that any light from Krypton's system is so many light years away that we would effectively be seeing Superman's homeworld *before* it was destroyed. NDGT didn't think of this?
The Badass Tronomer's blog hints that that time delay plays a role in the plot.
What I don't get is, if just a handful of kryptonite brings Superman to his knees, how did his parents survive on a whole planet of the stuff?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
the NGDT of that reality (in the comic) doesn't have a fucking superman comic to refer to because SM is real.. and I doubt he has his bio (although he is superman. I'm sure he has a wiki page or something....)
I seem to recall reading a superman comic a number of years ago where one of the premises of the story involved the earth entering the time-space cone that contained Krypton's explosion, so it was finally "visible" (I use the term loosely) from Earth.
As I recall, Braniac was the villain.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Perhaps not....
Superman was an infant when his "escape pod" was jettisoned from krypton. He was a toddler when it landed on earth, so about a year and a half flight time. Then, on earth, he aged at least another 20 years before becoming superman.
Then you have any story and plot arcs that have happened between his becoming superman, and deciding to visit the planetarium.
This likely nets us a cozy 30-ish years or so since krypton exploded. Since superman arrived in an FTL capable pod, he can now watch through the telescope as his planet breaks up, from his vantage point on earth, close to 30 LY away. (The starsystem in question is about 27LY from earth.)
This makes it an intriguing prospect.
Superman's ship didn't travel faster than light. Otherwise, the Kryptonite would have taken a LOT longer to get here than him.
He was probably in a very long cyrosleep, traveling at some fraction of the speed of light. Either that or he was just a fictional character and some dumbass writers made the whole thing up. One of those.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What I don't get is, if just a handful of kryptonite brings Superman to his knees, how did his parents survive on a whole planet of the stuff?
I am not at all a comic-book-guy; however I was under the impression that kryptonite was radioactive chunks of his home planet created in the destruction of the planet.
So there wasn't kryptonite on krypton while people lived on it.
But I'm sure some comic-book-guy can give you half a dozen arguments about 'canon' and likely as it applies to various timelines or whatever given that they've retconned and rebooted the franchise plenty over the years.
Me? I saw the first 3 movies with Reeves, the new one with Kevin Spacey as Lex, and read the comics casually for a couple years 20 years ago...
That I can actually answer. It is only harmful to Kryptonians when they have powers from a yellow sun. Without that, it is just a normal rock to them.
At subluminal velocities, it would take him thousands of years to reach the earth.
I seem to recall that his pod contained educational materials, and was not a chryopod. (If it was, he would have crash landed as a fishstick, and not as a toddler.)
For the narrative to be believable, the pod must have been traveling at approx 30x the speed of light.
Superman’s ship traveled faster than light to get to Earth.
The explanation of all the kryptonite getting to Earth was that the ship created a wormhole to get from Krtyton to Earth and a fair amount of debris got sucked in and followed. Now, mind you, this was 90s comic books science. I don’t know what the start of the art is today.
... Krypton demoted to "dwarf planet"
Fiction -> Science
What I want to know is why kalael sent him to sol, an not another red dwarf. Class M stars are copiously abundant in our local star cluster, and sending his baby boy to a G type star would be like our scientists deciding to send somebody to a blue star. Unless they are a dark skinned baby, they would have a hard time there. (G type stars like ours have considerably higher percentages of UV light compared to M type stars, like "krypton's". This may explain why spuderman is fair complected.)
If you look at the actual comic, they are trying to help Superman determine if his planet of origin, Krypton, is still intact or detectable. What they forget is that any light from Krypton's system is so many light years away that we would effectively be seeing Superman's homeworld *before* it was destroyed. NDGT didn't think of this?
That will surely be the whole point of the story.
Superman is 27 years old. Krypton is 27 light years away.
So, what will he see?
Tyson is not my favourite because he was the man behind Pluto's reclassification. But rather than suggest he be demoted to being classified a dwarf astronomer I'd like to point out that astronomers missed a marvellous opportunity.
There are clearly three main types of natural orbiting object (that we know about) - big round gassy planets, smaller round rocky planets, and smaller again not round objects. The boundary between first two is the natural line between giant planets and dwarf planets.
By concentrating on what planets do and what they orbit rather than their inherent nature is equivalent to botanists agreeing to call bumblebees, hummingbirds, and microbats by the same name because they are all a similar size and they all eat nectar.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a discredited astronomer in my view not because he was behind Pluto's "demotion" but rather because he has shown that doesn't understand that taxonomy is not about what things do, but rather it is about what things are.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
Himself popping out his mothers vagina?
In some versions of the story, Jor-El knows that his child will have vast powers under a yellow Sun, and selects a yellow Sun for that reason. (This begs the question of how Jor-El knows that.)
Not long before the "52" reboot, there was a storyline with a bunch of aliens (who turned out to be police of sorts for an alien 'war crimes' tribunal) looking for a Kryptonian (who turned out not to be Kal-El). Seems that the Kryptonians had actually gotten out of their solar system at one point (not just to another planet in the same system), and they proceeded to do nasty, brutish, colonization and exploitation of worlds in yellow star systems. Then, for whatever curltural reason (xenophobia, like the Daxamites would also have?), they retreated to their own solar system, where they stayed (despite their space travel technology) until The End. Except for a few random ex-soldiers, mercernaries, etc. who had stayed on some of the colonized worlds, but who were MUCH-hated and hunted down like dogs whenever the locals had the opportunity...
Jor-El, as a brilliant scientist, knew that the yellow sun would give his child super powers.
Look, Superman been around for almost 75 years. During that time a lot of above average people have had these types of questions and the writers have answered them. Sometimes with poor science, sometimes they contradict themselves.
On the flip side, there is some good stuff out there.
James Kakalios is my favorite example. Physicist (PhD., Professor.) and lover of comic books. He has done some cool stuff.
http://www.physicsofsuperheroes.com/intro-physics-book.php
http://www.physicsofsuperheroes.com/videos.php
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3DfwFZZXDQ
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
But I'm sure some comic-book-guy can give you half a dozen arguments about 'canon' and likely as it applies to various timelines or whatever given that they've retconned and rebooted the franchise plenty over the years.
And once we've worked out the answer to this, we can get back on whether balrogs have wings.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Jewel's in that video and I only had eyes for her. I think Jewel Staite is one of the sexiest women on the planet - much sexier than Morena Baccarin for example.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
TV does that, you know !! Makes people stupid !! On both ends !!
Ah, that explains why my feet feel dumber by the day... (of course it started with the head end, long ago!... otherwise why would I bother to reply on /. ?)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
At subluminal velocities, it would take him thousands of years to reach the earth.
Only if his star system is thousands of light years away.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
How would being from another universe change anything? Maybe in his universe humanoids can fly just because doing so is cool, but those laws of physics would obviously not apply in this universe.
Face it. Superman is just not scientific in any way. Only the super-strength might be explainable if his species evolved on a super-earth with much greater mass than our planet. The whole flying thing is just ridiculous.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
There are quite a few red dwarfs within a 30 ly radius of earth. What's so special about LHS2520? Maybe it was just chosen randomly.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Well, Gandalf and Saruman and Sauron and the Balrog are all the same kind of being: Maiar. The Maiar are supposed to be shape-shifters or at least wear the forms mere mortals perceive them as like a kind of disguise, so the Balrog may be able to have wings some of the time and not have wings the rest of the time (and be man-sized or gigantic as required). Sauron was described as being able to directly shape-shift, for example. That was before he put some of his power into the One Ring and lost it, however, so that doesn't say whether all of the Maiar can do it. There is some evidence that the form they took was handed out when they entered the world and that they therefore might not be able to change it without leaving the world and coming back in, which would be pretty hard for the Balrog to do with Morgoth banished... So, still inconclusive.
Anyway, is that more like it? :)
In case you forgot, Dru-Zod is also hails from Krypton... so I wouldn't attract any attention, or else us Terrans will "kneel before Zod".
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
No. Period.
Subluminal travel runs headfirst into special relativity. The energy costs to accelerate a massive body to a nice fraction of lightspeed follows a log curve (approaching infinity on the far end.)
Then you have all the sticky issues with specific impulse, like mass loss, and the constraints about the size of the vessel he was shipped out in.
Basically, baby superman would have split the earth into ball of high energy plasma, if his pod had been doing even half lightspeed when it "landed". Due to the size, it wouldnt have had sufficient reactant to slow down when it neared Sol. In order for the vessel to not obliterate the earth, it would have to have been traveling SIGNIFICANTLY slower than lightspeed. Ergo, thousands of years.
And Stephen Hawking, a real physicist with impeccable credentials, is used to become part of the fictional worlds of "The Big Bang Theory", Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Simpsons, and Futurama. So that's another case where they use a real scientist to lie about a fake fictional world. It's part of entertainment; and the fact that someone like Hawking can become part of the mass culture and reach to people who may have to ask people like "us" who that person is. Seriously, Hawking on "Big Bang Theory" is pretty cool beans.
Next up: Kolob found
Table-ized A.I.
(This begs the question of how Jor-El knows that.)
*grind grind grind*
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
What they forget is that any light from Krypton's system is so many light years away that we would effectively be seeing Superman's homeworld *before* it was destroyed. NDGT didn't think of this?
Simultaneity is relative - if the light we're reveiving is from before Krypton's destruction, then there is a reference frame (albeit one we're unlikely to get ourselves in) in which an observer would perceive that those events are happening at the same time as our present on Earth.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Everybody's favorite astrophysicist
Hey, speak for yourself, buddy. For me, it's E. Margaret Burbidge or nothing.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In the 1978 movie, Jor El also says that by the time he reaches Earth, Krypton will be dead for many thousands of years. And in Superman Returns, he goes there and back in 5 years. If he travelled at relativistic speeds, he would return to Earth perhaps thousands of years after he departed. I don't know of a way to rectify these two scenes in the movies.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Wat? Kal El didn't travel to Earth FTL. Relativistic speeds, sure, but there is no problem with light observation. Well, Brainiac might hack the Hubble and feed false results...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Dang it. I really need to read the Simirillion. I thought the Balrog was a a part of a whole race of creatures that looked similarly, now I feel like I am missing out on a big chunk of the story. Thanks for nothing! Jerk! I hope you know that someone out there is going to have a blast because you forced them to read a fantastic book just to get the whole picture! Grrr!
Oohh, and if they have good enough resolution (They do not in real life, but hey, comics!) they could see the escape pod travel toward the planet/away from the planet and meet up with itself as it reaches FTL speeds. My brain hurts from the relativity of that sentence, but I think I got it right.
Well, the Balrogs were at least an order of Maiar with an affinity for darkness and fire. How much their appearance was a matter of choice or of base nature is unclear. In any case, Morgoth also had demons who served under the Balrogs as servants. The Balrogs were also referred to as demons themselves.
The big problem with the question of wings is Tolkein's poetic use of language. If he said that a character was flying, you needed context to tell if he meant literally or just that the character was travelling with speed. Given that he described the form of the Balrog in terms of shadow and mystery, it seems pretty hard to make any definitive statement on the subject. It is fun to argue about it with just a few sentences worth of description to go by though :)
What if the flying is explained by properly timed superfarts?
Superman can do anything, so full control of his sphincter isn't beyond the realm of possibilities.
It would also explain why the cape always flutters while he is "floating" in midair.
This is the sig that says NI (again)