LIGO measures differential distortions in the length of two 4 km arms. It needs to be able to distinguish changes in length at the level of one part in 10^21 to be able to detect these gravity waves. For comparison, it is able to measure a difference of distance between say here and the nearest star system 4 light years away to within the width of a human hair!!!
The editors of Slashdot should not allow self-promotion. StartsWithABang is Ethan Siegel and we had several of these astronomy and science stories submitted by him that link to his own Forbes articles!
The TMT consortium studied the viability of another northern site in Baja California, Mexico, which is almost as good as Mauna Kea. That could be another potential destination.
This has been already done. Read up on multi-junction solar cells: http://www.energy.gov/news/4503.htm. They basically sandwich PVs with different wavelength responses to capture a significant fraction of the solar spectrum. The record right now is 40% efficiency.
The star the planet is orbiting around is not a sun-like star. It is a K star, which is cooler and smaller in size than the Sun. I would argue that it is a planetary object near a star, period. It may not even be orbiting the damn thing. You would have to wait a few years to see if the star and the planetary object have common proper motion.
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It looks like it is yet another Startswithabang Forbes article. Only this time it is an AC submission.
A heat pipe in a smartphone! That must be one hot SOC!
Why would anyone possibly need more?
LIGO measures differential distortions in the length of two 4 km arms. It needs to be able to distinguish changes in length at the level of one part in 10^21 to be able to detect these gravity waves. For comparison, it is able to measure a difference of distance between say here and the nearest star system 4 light years away to within the width of a human hair!!!
The editors of Slashdot should not allow self-promotion. StartsWithABang is Ethan Siegel and we had several of these astronomy and science stories submitted by him that link to his own Forbes articles!
The TMT consortium studied the viability of another northern site in Baja California, Mexico, which is almost as good as Mauna Kea. That could be another potential destination.
I thought these things didn't happen anymore!
Maybe you meant OpenCL? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL
You obviously don't need 1000 hp all the time, so the average power output of the engine is going to be a lot lower...
This has been already done. Read up on multi-junction solar cells: http://www.energy.gov/news/4503.htm. They basically sandwich PVs with different wavelength responses to capture a significant fraction of the solar spectrum. The record right now is 40% efficiency.
The star the planet is orbiting around is not a sun-like star. It is a K star, which is cooler and smaller in size than the Sun. I would argue that it is a planetary object near a star, period. It may not even be orbiting the damn thing. You would have to wait a few years to see if the star and the planetary object have common proper motion.