That analysis was done here: http://norskmeteornettverk.no/... (it's not in English, but google translate does a decent job). He makes a distance estimate based on speed, which itself is based on the assumption it's a falling rock at terminal velocity. But the distance, speed, and time it takes to cross the FOV are related, and if you make a stab at speed you can get distance and vice versa.
Yes, the apparent speed is the biggest argument against it being something packed in the 'chute, I'd think. If the skydiver were still decelerating hard after the parachute opened, the rock could appear to move rapidly, but even then it appears to come from farther away than the parachute.
I'm still looking into this, and will have my own thoughts posted tomorrow on my blog.
The headline as submitted isn't really correct. The planet is not the biggest found; there are several whose mass may be larger, like the exoplanets announced just last week (and this planet has 11 times the mass of Jupiter; we don't know its actual size). The real issue with HD 106906 b is that it is so far out from its parent star, much farther out than planets with that ass should form. Either it formed farther in and got tossed out (which is unlikely) or it formed where it was, which current theories say is difficult; usually objects forming that far out have much higher mass.
I explain all this in my own blog post about it.
Folks-
Please note a couple of math errors in the article (and in the headline I submitted here at/.).
1) The chance of it missing is 99.998%, and not 99.99998%. I misplaced a parenthesis when I did the math and wound up essentially getting 100 - 1/63000 instead of 1 - 1/63000. D'oh.
2) Also, the original circle I drew in the article was too big. This one makes me smile wryly: I first drew up the analogy as the circular cross-sectional area of a target region in space versus the cross-section of the Earth. Both are circles. However, a pixel is square! So my circle was too wide by a factor of the square root of pi, since the radius of the circle is the sqrt(area/pi). Put in 63,000 pixels for the area and the radius is 141.
I corrected the article, sent a note to TPTB at Slashdot, and beg the forgiveness of math pedants everywhere.:)
"National pride"? He's Canadian, you know. Which nation do you mean?
Do you also know they don't work 24 hours per day? And on their off time, ISS astronauts still breathe?
Of course, he did use up a lot of electrons saving the files and transmitting them to Earth, so I'll make sure NASA or the CSA reimburses you per Coulomb.
I've received some nice pictures of the galaxy+SN which I just posted to the blog as well. Looks like this is a Type II, the explosion of a massive star at the end of its short life.
The reason I use quotation marks for "amateur" is that a lot of people think amateur means beginner, or not very good at what they're doing. In astronomy the meaning is harder to pin down; a lot of amateurs are doing amazing work. David Levy (of Shoemaker Levy 9) is sometimes referred to as an amateur, meaning not professional. But even then, what does it mean? Unpaid? He gets paid. Untrained? That's silly; he's a great astronomer.
So I put the word in quotation marks as a way to poke gentle fun at the way people perceive the word.
So I'm reading that quotation about modeling the atmosphere, thinking, "That sounds familiar". When I get halfway through I realize, hey! I said that!
That's when I finally look at the source and realize it's NPR, the interview I did on Science Friday. That made me LOL.
I'll be blunt: I'm not buying it.
I give details on my blog, but I think there are too many holes in the idea. For one thing, comets aren't that small; passing within a few thousand klicks of one would put us inside the debris field. We'd have seen vast numbers of meteors. For another, no one else saw it? At all? Comets can be visible during broad daylight - I've seen one myself - yet there's not a single other observation of a comet that close from any other person on Earth.
So I am very, very, very skeptical.
Dagnabbit. I should've logged in first.:) That's my post, and I meant to say it is an anaglyph of the amazing re-entry plume image seen from the space station.
Oh for Pete's sake. Obama did NOT cancel the Shuttle program, George W Bush did! Obama canceled Constellation, the rocket program to followup on the Shuttle, but he did so because it was overbudget and behind schedule.
I have a long-ish article about this in the New York Post today. NASA has some serious problems right now, mostly due to lack of a strong vision and the ridiculous turf wars between the White House and Congress. Most of these problems aren't hard to solve in theory, but in practice, with the rabid partisonship going on right now? Hmph.
Yup. Hubble captures picture of asteroid collision!:) I think the news here is that the scientists have now had time to look into this more and have confirmed it. HOWEVER, I'm not sure of that. I'm thinking Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society Blog will have something on this...
Except that it's been shown time and again that Mann has been working above board all along. Even when Cuccinelli was trying again and again to persecute -- I'm sorry, prosecute -- Mann, it was already clear Mann had been cleared of wrongdoing.
Well, it's not insulting. I've written for both magazines!:)
However, my source was the news release from Gemini, as well as a few previous articles I had written on this topic as well as this particular object.
Well, the link first posted by/., to an article on space.com, called this the first ever direct image of an exoplanet. That is factually incorrect, so it's not really the tabloids or Fox.
OK folks, this submission is pretty misleading about a lot of stuff. Here's the real poop (get the details on my blog):
In 2005, a planet was directly imaged orbiting a brown dwarf. That's not a sun-like star, but it was the first direct image of an exoplanet.
In 2008, it was announced that Hubble spotted a planet orbiting Fomalhaut. That's a star hotter and more massive than the Sun, but still sun-like. The images were taken in 2004 and 2006 and it took a while to make sure they were right.
However, those were taken from space. Also in 2008 images were taken of planets orbiting the sun-like star HR8799 using the ground-based Gemini telescope in Hawaii.
With me so far? The news today is from observations also taken in 2008, also taken by the Gemini 'scope (and a few months before the ones I just mentioned of HR8799). At the time, the planet was not confirmed. New observations indicate it is, in fact, a planet.
So to be completely accurate: the image from 2008 of a now-confirmed planet was the first direct image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star taken using a ground-based telescope. This is still very cool, but has been reported inaccurately (the space.com headline, for example, is wrong or at best incomplete).
Also, going back to the submitted text here to slashdot, planets have been found by three methods: the gravitation tug-of-war Doppler method, the transit method, and by gravitational lensing. I'll leave it up to you to look all that up; I'm exhausted.:)
FWIW, mass isn't the story here; we know of hundreds of planets in that mass range. I would say the story is that two images taken a few years apart show the planet's motion, and that Beta Pic, the parent star, was the first to have a disk seen around it back in the 1980s. This planet explains the warp and other features in the disk, too, that have been known for years! I wrote about this on my Bad Astronomy blog.
I should add that the article does state: "'It is reasonably close to being a perfect display, but Steve pushed it a little too far,' Soneira said."
That's a reasonable statement. But just wait until the Apple haters and fanbois get into this. Yikes.
The PC mag article linked is confusing and poorly worded. I also think it's not quite correct.
Basically, the human eye at 12 inches, according to their expert, can resolve 477 pixels per inch. Anything higher than that won't make the picture any clearer, but anything lower will look fuzzier (or pixellated). Since the iPhone 4 has a pixel density of 326 per inch, the expert says the claims of retinal resolution are false.
However, he assumes the human eye has a resolution of 0.6 arcminutes (there are 60 arcminutes to a degree). I doubt most people have that good of eyesight; the number I always hear is about 1 arcminute for the eye. At 12 inches, that corresponds to a display of 286 pixels per inch to get retinal resolution, which the iPhone surpasses.
So sure, if someone with extremely good vision uses this new iPhone, it'll be ever so slightly blurry. But c'mon, we're geeks here, and all wear glasses anyway, right? And either way, I don't think this means the claims by Jobs are *false*. At worst they're are very slightly misleading.
FWIW, I have a substantial blog post with details, including a rant against the ABC story.:) This was definitely the Falcon 9 second stage, despite the UFO guy's protestations: the timing, position, and appearance all match.
Slashdot Mirror
That analysis was done here: http://norskmeteornettverk.no/... (it's not in English, but google translate does a decent job). He makes a distance estimate based on speed, which itself is based on the assumption it's a falling rock at terminal velocity. But the distance, speed, and time it takes to cross the FOV are related, and if you make a stab at speed you can get distance and vice versa.
Yes, the apparent speed is the biggest argument against it being something packed in the 'chute, I'd think. If the skydiver were still decelerating hard after the parachute opened, the rock could appear to move rapidly, but even then it appears to come from farther away than the parachute. I'm still looking into this, and will have my own thoughts posted tomorrow on my blog.
The headline as submitted isn't really correct. The planet is not the biggest found; there are several whose mass may be larger, like the exoplanets announced just last week (and this planet has 11 times the mass of Jupiter; we don't know its actual size). The real issue with HD 106906 b is that it is so far out from its parent star, much farther out than planets with that ass should form. Either it formed farther in and got tossed out (which is unlikely) or it formed where it was, which current theories say is difficult; usually objects forming that far out have much higher mass. I explain all this in my own blog post about it.
Folks- Please note a couple of math errors in the article (and in the headline I submitted here at /.).
1) The chance of it missing is 99.998%, and not 99.99998%. I misplaced a parenthesis when I did the math and wound up essentially getting 100 - 1/63000 instead of 1 - 1/63000. D'oh.
2) Also, the original circle I drew in the article was too big. This one makes me smile wryly: I first drew up the analogy as the circular cross-sectional area of a target region in space versus the cross-section of the Earth. Both are circles. However, a pixel is square! So my circle was too wide by a factor of the square root of pi, since the radius of the circle is the sqrt(area/pi). Put in 63,000 pixels for the area and the radius is 141.
I corrected the article, sent a note to TPTB at Slashdot, and beg the forgiveness of math pedants everywhere. :)
"National pride"? He's Canadian, you know. Which nation do you mean? Do you also know they don't work 24 hours per day? And on their off time, ISS astronauts still breathe? Of course, he did use up a lot of electrons saving the files and transmitting them to Earth, so I'll make sure NASA or the CSA reimburses you per Coulomb.
FWIW, folks, I wrote this up on my blog with a little love sent /. way.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/11/29/hoax_site_says_nasa_s_curiosity_rover_found_plastic_beads_on_mars.html
I've received some nice pictures of the galaxy+SN which I just posted to the blog as well. Looks like this is a Type II, the explosion of a massive star at the end of its short life.
The reason I use quotation marks for "amateur" is that a lot of people think amateur means beginner, or not very good at what they're doing. In astronomy the meaning is harder to pin down; a lot of amateurs are doing amazing work. David Levy (of Shoemaker Levy 9) is sometimes referred to as an amateur, meaning not professional. But even then, what does it mean? Unpaid? He gets paid. Untrained? That's silly; he's a great astronomer. So I put the word in quotation marks as a way to poke gentle fun at the way people perceive the word.
So I'm reading that quotation about modeling the atmosphere, thinking, "That sounds familiar". When I get halfway through I realize, hey! I said that! That's when I finally look at the source and realize it's NPR, the interview I did on Science Friday. That made me LOL.
I'll be blunt: I'm not buying it. I give details on my blog, but I think there are too many holes in the idea. For one thing, comets aren't that small; passing within a few thousand klicks of one would put us inside the debris field. We'd have seen vast numbers of meteors. For another, no one else saw it? At all? Comets can be visible during broad daylight - I've seen one myself - yet there's not a single other observation of a comet that close from any other person on Earth. So I am very, very, very skeptical.
The camera lost focus so the dot of the Orbiter got big and fuzzy for a second.
Dagnabbit. I should've logged in first. :) That's my post, and I meant to say it is an anaglyph of the amazing re-entry plume image seen from the space station.
Oh for Pete's sake. Obama did NOT cancel the Shuttle program, George W Bush did! Obama canceled Constellation, the rocket program to followup on the Shuttle, but he did so because it was overbudget and behind schedule. I have a long-ish article about this in the New York Post today. NASA has some serious problems right now, mostly due to lack of a strong vision and the ridiculous turf wars between the White House and Congress. Most of these problems aren't hard to solve in theory, but in practice, with the rabid partisonship going on right now? Hmph.
D'oh! I wasn't logged in, but this comment above is from me, Phil Plait. :)
Yup. Hubble captures picture of asteroid collision! :) I think the news here is that the scientists have now had time to look into this more and have confirmed it. HOWEVER, I'm not sure of that. I'm thinking Emily Lakdawalla at The Planetary Society Blog will have something on this...
Except that it's been shown time and again that Mann has been working above board all along. Even when Cuccinelli was trying again and again to persecute -- I'm sorry, prosecute -- Mann, it was already clear Mann had been cleared of wrongdoing.
I prefer a .50 caliber over a bazooka. But yeah, the rest is pretty spot on.
Oh yeah: ;)
And thanks!
Well, it's not insulting. I've written for both magazines! :)
However, my source was the news release from Gemini, as well as a few previous articles I had written on this topic as well as this particular object.
Well, the link first posted by /., to an article on space.com, called this the first ever direct image of an exoplanet. That is factually incorrect, so it's not really the tabloids or Fox.
Oh-- I submitted my own writeup as a followup. Hopefully it will be added to this to make it more accurate.
In 2005, a planet was directly imaged orbiting a brown dwarf. That's not a sun-like star, but it was the first direct image of an exoplanet.
In 2008, it was announced that Hubble spotted a planet orbiting Fomalhaut. That's a star hotter and more massive than the Sun, but still sun-like. The images were taken in 2004 and 2006 and it took a while to make sure they were right.
However, those were taken from space. Also in 2008 images were taken of planets orbiting the sun-like star HR8799 using the ground-based Gemini telescope in Hawaii.
With me so far? The news today is from observations also taken in 2008, also taken by the Gemini 'scope (and a few months before the ones I just mentioned of HR8799). At the time, the planet was not confirmed. New observations indicate it is, in fact, a planet.
So to be completely accurate: the image from 2008 of a now-confirmed planet was the first direct image of a planet orbiting a sun-like star taken using a ground-based telescope. This is still very cool, but has been reported inaccurately (the space.com headline, for example, is wrong or at best incomplete).
Also, going back to the submitted text here to slashdot, planets have been found by three methods: the gravitation tug-of-war Doppler method, the transit method, and by gravitational lensing. I'll leave it up to you to look all that up; I'm exhausted. :)
FWIW, mass isn't the story here; we know of hundreds of planets in that mass range. I would say the story is that two images taken a few years apart show the planet's motion, and that Beta Pic, the parent star, was the first to have a disk seen around it back in the 1980s. This planet explains the warp and other features in the disk, too, that have been known for years! I wrote about this on my Bad Astronomy blog.
I should add that the article does state: "'It is reasonably close to being a perfect display, but Steve pushed it a little too far,' Soneira said." That's a reasonable statement. But just wait until the Apple haters and fanbois get into this. Yikes.
The PC mag article linked is confusing and poorly worded. I also think it's not quite correct. Basically, the human eye at 12 inches, according to their expert, can resolve 477 pixels per inch. Anything higher than that won't make the picture any clearer, but anything lower will look fuzzier (or pixellated). Since the iPhone 4 has a pixel density of 326 per inch, the expert says the claims of retinal resolution are false. However, he assumes the human eye has a resolution of 0.6 arcminutes (there are 60 arcminutes to a degree). I doubt most people have that good of eyesight; the number I always hear is about 1 arcminute for the eye. At 12 inches, that corresponds to a display of 286 pixels per inch to get retinal resolution, which the iPhone surpasses. So sure, if someone with extremely good vision uses this new iPhone, it'll be ever so slightly blurry. But c'mon, we're geeks here, and all wear glasses anyway, right? And either way, I don't think this means the claims by Jobs are *false*. At worst they're are very slightly misleading.
FWIW, I have a substantial blog post with details, including a rant against the ABC story. :) This was definitely the Falcon 9 second stage, despite the UFO guy's protestations: the timing, position, and appearance all match.