Let's say that the radiation intensity is such that the energy dumped out on the equator is 0.01% as intense as the total average flux. If all of earth falls into a black hole and the conversion efficiency is 50%, the total energy is about 6e24kg * 9e16 * 0.5 = 2.7e41 joules. Assuming a nice geosynchronous orbit at 42000 km radius, the energy flux would be 2.7e41 * 1e-4 / (4 * pi * 4.2e7^2) = 1.2e21 J/m^2. Conclusion: Any satellite orbiting at that altitude would be vaporized.
The Moon would take a hammering of about 1e19 J/m^2 on the Earth-facing side. The entire near side would also be vaporized, along with every trace of human activity on the Moon. It would also receive a hell of a kick. I don't know if it would hold together or be blown to pieces, but I'm absolutely certain that it would not remain in orbit around the former Earth.
Mars, at some 40 million miles away at closest approach, would get about 1/40000 as much flux as the Moon at the worst. That's still on the order of a megaton per square meter! Just face it, if any planet in the Solar system went down a black hole, the entire neighborhood would be a pretty unhealthy place to be for the duration. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
They dismiss any risk in this experiment by stating the fact that collisions in our upper atmosphere are often much more energetic than their collisions will be. They also point out that there are plenty of other accelerators in the world that produce higher energy collisions. Now, it seems to me that all of these collisions are of the same nature involving high energy particles. This experiment is uniquely different in that it is colliding heavy atoms of Au.
Except it's not uniquely different; this isn't so unusual in nature. If you scan old Scientific Americans for articles on cosmic rays, you'll find that some of them are almost certainly atomic nuclei, some of them heavy ones. They have been observed to strike Earth with orders of magnitude more energy than our puny efforts can achieve. And that's just what we've observed.
The Brookhaven effort has one thing going for it, and that is observability. The collisions will be nice and conveniently placed so we can analyze what's going on in them and get data; to get anything new about quark-gluon plasmas we're going to have to have detectors right on top of the action. If it weren't for that, we'd be far better off just watching what Nature throws at us for free. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Even if the Earth became a black hole, there would be evidence of humans having existed. Earth would be a black hole with the same gravitational pull as it has now, just no size and an accessible event horizon.
It would be a black hole with a moon and satelites, some of them artificial.
Given that the collapse of the Earth into a black hole would involve the conversion of perhaps 50% of the total mass into energy in the accretion disk, all the artificial satellites would probably evaporate. And with the combined effects of the radiation evaporating the surface layers (producing thrust) and the loss of gravitational pull, if the Moon did not just vanish it might well achieve escape velocity and go sailing around on its own. I should run the numbers, but I'm tired. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
... when something could produce a black hole, shouldn't we be REALLY sure that it can't first?
The Schwarzchild radius of a black hole is given by the equation Rs = 2GM/c^2. Now G is a mighty small number, the mass M of 2 gold atoms is less than 1e-22 kilograms, and 1/c^2 is a pretty small number too (about 1e-17 in MKS units). The upshot is that a black hole with the mass of 2 gold atoms would be much, much smaller than a proton. The atoms are too wide to get all of the mass into a space that small during a collision.
Actually, I've read that black holes under a certain size evaporate. Steven Hawking too I believe.
Yup. You'd get a pretty good energy flash from the decay, and then it would be gone.
Another note, if creating the conditions of the beginning of the universe creates black holes, shouldn't the universe be littered with the things by now? We've just recently (couple of years) found a black hole.
Astrophysicists have been finding evidence of things that couldn't be much else for years (things in galactic cores, whose influence on surrounding objects shows they have masses of a million suns and more), but given that a black hole doesn't radiate or do anything in and of itself other than pull on things it's difficult to prove that the object is truly a black hole and not something else. Every galaxy seems to have a big one in the center.
What was theorized that we might see left over from the Big Bang is quantum black holes, of a few million or billion tons (the mass of a big iceberg or small asteroid). So far there is no evidence for their existence. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
OTOH the efficiencies of combustion engines and power plants are only on the order of about 20-40%. I believe that maximum efficiency possible with Carnot egnine is about 40% with the current temperatures our engines run at.
Combined-cycle gas turbine powerplants exceeded 51% thermal efficiency some years ago. And back in '92, Caterpillar was working on a new-generation diesel (insulated combustion chamber, turbo-compound energy recovery) which they claimed would reach 51% thermal efficiency without a bottoming cycle. I don't know what became of that one (fuel got too cheap, I guess). -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Any method that purports to show something is millions of years old is only speculation - we don't have anything we *know* is millions of years old to test these methods against.
Nobody ever saw the world and the vast majority of extant (let alone extinct) species being created either, so the stuff we dig out of the earth and DNA are the most reliable evidence we have.
We do have a huge amount of evidence like tree rings for recent ages and progressions of fossils in various strata for older things. C-14 works for a few thousand years, decay of other elements can be used to radiometrically date things far older. And insofar as we can cross-check these dates, they all agree. Whether you're dating things by the decay of K-40 to argon, uranium to lead, or anything else, the dates all line up neatly with the old stuff on the bottom of the geological column and the young stuff on the top. If you are going to postulate that these dates are all way wrong you have to explain why the physics of radioactive decay changed and provide evidence for it. Lotsa luck!
If you find a mineral that gets natural uranium in it but chemically excludes lead during its formation (as you can prove in the lab and in young rocks), and you find a sample where there is an equal number of uranium atoms and lead atoms in it, you know that it is one uranium half-life old; the lead had to come from somewhere, and that could only be the decay of uranium. And there's literally mountains of evidence in support of those timelines.
The Earth, and life on it, is billions of years old. The evidence is irrefutable. If you insist on believing otherwise, you have to postulate a God who conjures up an enormous and consistent set of false evidence of age into His creation (in other words, a pathological liar). So I guess you could say that young-earth Creationists worship the Prince of Lies by definition. Scary, huh? -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
In other words, science studies in the hinterlands will be bowdlerized to remove evolution and cosmology from the curriculum, and it will have no impact on state achievement test scores because it will no longer be on the tests. This will have two major effects:
High-school students in the regressive areas will never be exposed to the facts which prove the bankruptcy of young-earth creationism, and thus will not resist believing in it. (This is the goal of the religious right.)
Despite their grades and test scores, these students will be ill-equipped for studies of biology, astrophysics, and possibly other coursework; they will need remedial education before they have a grounding in the essential concepts which underlie those fields.
THIS is what happens when people allow their religion to blind them to the truth. It becomes a war, and truth is always the first casualty. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
We want more people like that coming to our country, not less.
If it's an excuse for allowing our own schools to be lousy because "we can always hire Indians" (and who says we'll always be able to?), I would rather slam the doors. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
You obviously didn't read Bruce's response carefully, or you would have seen this:
I got a brand-new solar panel system on my house right now,
and it started pumping wattage into the city's grid yesterday.
This implies that he is not storing power, he is merely offsetting his own consumption; if he ever needs more than his panel supplies (which would be every night), he pulls it from the grid. If he ever has any excess, he feeds the grid. He makes no mention of batteries, and may not have any. This is consistent with a desire to reduce the use of fossil fuels without any need for independence from the grid; whatever he generates will get used by someone.
To see how much of a battery bank you need to exist off-grid, you have to:
Calculate or measure your power consumption (including losses in wiring, inverters, etc).
Determine how long you have to go without recharging.
Multiply power by time to get energy.
Get a battery bank which will store that much energy.
It's no more magic than calculating the operating time of your system on an UPS; if you draw 1 KW and your batteries store 2 KWH, they'll go flat in 2 hours. If you have 50 KWH squirrelled away, you can run for about 2 days. Your recharge rate depends on how much juice your charging sources give you over and above your immediate consumption. You can figure about 70% efficiency for storage in lead-acid batteries.
This is not rocket science, and I'm amazed that you asked the question without doing your homework. If you want more information, surf over to Home Power magazine for a good place to start. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Even assuming dial-in access may be too much, and taking control of a crossbar phone switch is kind of a funny idea. Ever heard of an "alarm pair"? It's a copper circuit with DC continuity. No way to hack it without getting into it physically, and very useful for simple control stuff. And this is what the USA had 30 years ago; I doubt that most of Yugoslavia is even up to those standards.
On the other hand when Milosevic tries to use the Internet to push his propaganda, he's out in the cracker's home territory and they can keep him from getting his message out. That's where I would expect the cyberwarfare to have its impact, not on the ground in a relatively backward country. Turning off the lights takes an airplane dropping a carbon-fiber mesh net, not a guy sitting at a keyboard.
Well, that's warfare for you. No matter how fancy the weapons get, sooner or later someone has to put their ass on the line and do some real work. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
... except that the water and power systems of the ex-Communist Bloc nations are probably not connected to the Internet; how would you hack them? You gotta be able to route there from here. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
And we've been figuring out 'algorithms' (how a teacher 'works') forever.
Yes, but you never had the chance to get the source to the teacher before. Consider what you could do if you had the grading program, and a genetic-algorithm based paper writer? You could "breed" yourself an A+ paper overnight, with minimal input from yourself.
If this becomes commonplace, expect papers to become obsolete and be replaced by oral exams and quizzes. Sometimes the old ways are the best. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
What do you mean when you say compact fluorescents?
A compact fluorescent light ("CF") has a circular or folded fluorescent tube, attached to a ballast with a screw base. It screws right into a standard lamp socket. You can get cheap, flicker-starting ones with the heavy magnetic ballasts for about $8, lightweight no-flicker electronic ballasts starting at maybe twice that. Over their lifespan they'll save several times their purchase price.
I have several fluorescent lights that were installed with my house, and I'm removing them. They give me headaches with the buzzing and the flickering, and I hate turning on a light and watching it flash.
That's old technology. You have fixtures with magnetic ballasts (loose laminations is where the buzzing comes from) and probably bad starters. The state-of-the-art in fluorescents is high-frequency electronic ballasts (the flicker goes from 120 Hz up to 20 KHz or so) and smart starter circuits. You can probably get the same advantages by buying and installing electronic ballasts for your ceiling fixtures instead of ripping them out. You might want to try one and see if you like it.
I personally would rather have a solar energy system than having all my lights behave so poorly.
Photovoltaic electricity is very expensive, so if you want to actually live on what you generate you are going to be using a lot more fluorescent lamps or spending a LOT of money on PV panels.
$5/peak watt. Maybe 8 hours of sun a day. $1000 will buy enough panels to run 2 100-watt bulbs for 8 hours a day, and that's before you look at the price of the battery bank. Solar-electric power is not a substitute for efficiency, it forces it. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Why are you asking how well solar cells handle nighttime loads? <g>
Seriously, you can cut out an amazing amount of your electric usage by using compact fluorescents everywhere you can and doing something about your refrigerator. (After I re-lamped some years ago my average electric consumption went from about 8 KWH/day to 6, and 4 of that seems to be the fridge. If I was going to be able to take advantage of the investment I would get something like a SunFrost.) -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Only if you have a static IP. If you have a dynamic IP, your data gets anonymized by mixing with the data from everyone else who eventually gets assigned that IP; over time, this could be everyone from your ISP.
If your machine's MAC address is attached to every packet, that follows you regardless of routing information or even your ISP. This is truly in a different league. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
An internal database of MAC addresses earns the company absolutely NOTHING.
But if that MAC address can be used as a globally-unique key to identify a machine (and, in all likelihood, its regular users), it becomes even more valuable than a cookie.
In order for this to even be remotely successful, you'd have to get all of the NIC companies and the VENDORS themselves together on the conspiracy and have them all sharing their MAC addresses and databases of customers and buying preferences.
No, all they have to do is build up a profile of access patterns for each MAC address, which builds a picture of the user(s) of that computer; even if you succeed in remaining entirely anonymous or pseudonymous, every access can be related to every other. The first time you do anything on the Net that associates that MAC address with your name, all of your past anonymous and pseudonymous activity is instantly "outed" (and all of your future activity ditto). -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Surely there must be some constraint if we assume that this object isn't extragalactic in origin?
Nope. If you look at the sky, the Milky Way's plane goes from something like NNE to SSW; it's a long way from the plane of the ecliptic. A collapsing cloud of gas could have all kinds of swirls and eddies, especially if the collapse is driven by violent local phenomena like supernovae. Whatever plane the accretion disk winds up in will be the orbital plane of the planets it forms (or very close) but that doesn't have much to do with the orbital/rotational plane of the thing from which it formed. Look at Earth, which spins on an axis 23.5 degrees off from its orbital plane, or Uranus, which has an axial tilt of 97.9 degrees. You have all the disproof you could want right here in our own Solar system.
If you have a second nucleus in the gas cloud which is gravitationally bound to the first one, but isn't in a region of gas density sufficient for friction to pull it into the same plane of rotation, anything that accretes from it will stay in whatever orbital plane it had to begin with (ignoring outside perturbations). And captured bodies can go any direction at all, depending on how they make their approach. There are no constraints of physics. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
While the Windoze stack may put the card MAC address in the standard field, I don't see how any computer beyond the first router could know, or care, if that data has been spoofed or not. How many Linux implementations are going to have 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00 or 07-81-51-12-06-66-66-66, or some random sequence, stuck in that field? Unless the final router uses it to get packets back to the sender (or something like @Home uses it to route packets to the recipient or the bit bucket!), it's going to be completely irrelevant.
So... what am I missing? -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
The ecliptic is a plane containing the sun and planets.
The ecliptic is, IIRC, the plane of Earth's orbit. The other planets orbit in somewhat different planes. They're all pretty close, according to our best models, because the entire solar system was formed by condensation from an accretion disk around the proto-Sun. They didn't form in radically different planes and then get warped around to similar ones (there is no known mechanism for that), they were that way from their beginnings.
If a planet was captured from outside the solar system, or if it was formed from a separate clot of gas and dust which was too far from the main accretion disk to be forced into the same orbital plane by gaseous drag, then it could easily have any orbital plane or direction. Posigrade, retrograde, polar... it is not constrained by anything we know of today. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
I seem to recall hearing about a news conference in France in which Miterrand was asked "Do you have a mistress?" His response was along the lines of "Sure, doesn't everyone?" and the matter pretty much died to to lack of interest.
If our society ever grows up, this will cease to be a problem; it's impossible to sell scandal sheets when nobody is scandalized. Unfortunately, we seem to be going in the opposite direction these days. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
This does make me wonder: how long will it be before someone turns the openness of their opinions into an asset? If the media try to spin some comment out of context it could easily backfire if that entire context is available for the asking; the publication or reporter who tried this might wind up zeroing their own credibility. And imagine what might happen if the public starts using the Net as a way to check on the views of candidates. Who's going to be more "real" to a discerning electorate: someone who's been on the record for years, or someone whose carefully-tailored platform appeared ex nihilo on their campaign web site last week?
</optimism><normal_cynicism>
"Discerning electorate"? What was I thinking. Never mind! -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Escape velocity is 25,000 MPH or so (from the surface of the earth; it is a function of altitude).
The Space Shuttle is nowhere near our fastest booster.
The Space Shuttle cannot get anywhere near escape velocity; it can get to an orbit at a few hundred miles altitude carrying no payload, and that's it.
Omni is a poor guide to anything other than fiction. You are much better off using the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Analog, or even the sci.space FAQs.
I just can't put it any nicer right now. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
The acceleration of a solar sail drops as inverse cube of your distance from the sun.
That's inverse square. Inverse cube is the fall-off rate for the static far-field from a dipole.
Something like a StarWisp probe could investigate this in a short time. A StarWisp is essentially a very thin piece of metallic lace, and it is propelled by a microwave beam (a "light sail" that operates at microwave instead of optical wavelengths). It weighs a few grams; you hit it with a few gigawatts of microwaves and it takes off at an enormous acceleration. p = E/c, so 10 GW impinging on the sail with 100% reflection would yield about 67 N of force. If the probe weighs 10 grams, that is close to 700 G's of acceleration!
If the cruising speed of StarWisp is 0.5 c, then it could do a flyby of this planet about a year from launch and we get the data 6 months later. That's quick enough to build the probe for your Master's degree and analyze the data for your PhD. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Unlikely. IIRC there is an inner-system planet with a moon orbiting in the retrograde direction (Neptune?), and the moon and planet (and the planet's other moons) have been going in opposite directions for as long as we can tell; neither influences the other much.
Such a planet would have no influence on the plane of the inner planets' orbits, nor they upon it. -- Deja Moo: The feeling that
Slashdot Mirror
The Moon would take a hammering of about 1e19 J/m^2 on the Earth-facing side. The entire near side would also be vaporized, along with every trace of human activity on the Moon. It would also receive a hell of a kick. I don't know if it would hold together or be blown to pieces, but I'm absolutely certain that it would not remain in orbit around the former Earth.
Mars, at some 40 million miles away at closest approach, would get about 1/40000 as much flux as the Moon at the worst. That's still on the order of a megaton per square meter! Just face it, if any planet in the Solar system went down a black hole, the entire neighborhood would be a pretty unhealthy place to be for the duration.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
The Brookhaven effort has one thing going for it, and that is observability. The collisions will be nice and conveniently placed so we can analyze what's going on in them and get data; to get anything new about quark-gluon plasmas we're going to have to have detectors right on top of the action. If it weren't for that, we'd be far better off just watching what Nature throws at us for free.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
What was theorized that we might see left over from the Big Bang is quantum black holes, of a few million or billion tons (the mass of a big iceberg or small asteroid). So far there is no evidence for their existence.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
We do have a huge amount of evidence like tree rings for recent ages and progressions of fossils in various strata for older things. C-14 works for a few thousand years, decay of other elements can be used to radiometrically date things far older. And insofar as we can cross-check these dates, they all agree. Whether you're dating things by the decay of K-40 to argon, uranium to lead, or anything else, the dates all line up neatly with the old stuff on the bottom of the geological column and the young stuff on the top. If you are going to postulate that these dates are all way wrong you have to explain why the physics of radioactive decay changed and provide evidence for it. Lotsa luck!
If you find a mineral that gets natural uranium in it but chemically excludes lead during its formation (as you can prove in the lab and in young rocks), and you find a sample where there is an equal number of uranium atoms and lead atoms in it, you know that it is one uranium half-life old; the lead had to come from somewhere, and that could only be the decay of uranium. And there's literally mountains of evidence in support of those timelines.
The Earth, and life on it, is billions of years old. The evidence is irrefutable. If you insist on believing otherwise, you have to postulate a God who conjures up an enormous and consistent set of false evidence of age into His creation (in other words, a pathological liar). So I guess you could say that young-earth Creationists worship the Prince of Lies by definition. Scary, huh?
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
- High-school students in the regressive areas will never be exposed to the facts which prove the bankruptcy of young-earth creationism, and thus will not resist believing in it. (This is the goal of the religious right.)
- Despite their grades and test scores, these students will be ill-equipped for studies of biology, astrophysics, and possibly other coursework; they will need remedial education before they have a grounding in the essential concepts which underlie those fields.
THIS is what happens when people allow their religion to blind them to the truth. It becomes a war, and truth is always the first casualty.--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
To see how much of a battery bank you need to exist off-grid, you have to:
- Calculate or measure your power consumption (including losses in wiring, inverters, etc).
- Determine how long you have to go without recharging.
- Multiply power by time to get energy.
- Get a battery bank which will store that much energy.
It's no more magic than calculating the operating time of your system on an UPS; if you draw 1 KW and your batteries store 2 KWH, they'll go flat in 2 hours. If you have 50 KWH squirrelled away, you can run for about 2 days. Your recharge rate depends on how much juice your charging sources give you over and above your immediate consumption. You can figure about 70% efficiency for storage in lead-acid batteries.This is not rocket science, and I'm amazed that you asked the question without doing your homework. If you want more information, surf over to Home Power magazine for a good place to start.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
On the other hand when Milosevic tries to use the Internet to push his propaganda, he's out in the cracker's home territory and they can keep him from getting his message out. That's where I would expect the cyberwarfare to have its impact, not on the ground in a relatively backward country. Turning off the lights takes an airplane dropping a carbon-fiber mesh net, not a guy sitting at a keyboard.
Well, that's warfare for you. No matter how fancy the weapons get, sooner or later someone has to put their ass on the line and do some real work.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
... except that the water and power systems of the ex-Communist Bloc nations are probably not connected to the Internet; how would you hack them? You gotta be able to route there from here.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
If this becomes commonplace, expect papers to become obsolete and be replaced by oral exams and quizzes. Sometimes the old ways are the best.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
$5/peak watt. Maybe 8 hours of sun a day. $1000 will buy enough panels to run 2 100-watt bulbs for 8 hours a day, and that's before you look at the price of the battery bank. Solar-electric power is not a substitute for efficiency, it forces it.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
- Why are you drawing "a LOT of power"?
- Why are you asking how well solar cells handle nighttime loads? <g>
Seriously, you can cut out an amazing amount of your electric usage by using compact fluorescents everywhere you can and doing something about your refrigerator. (After I re-lamped some years ago my average electric consumption went from about 8 KWH/day to 6, and 4 of that seems to be the fridge. If I was going to be able to take advantage of the investment I would get something like a SunFrost.)--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
If your machine's MAC address is attached to every packet, that follows you regardless of routing information or even your ISP. This is truly in a different league.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
If you have a second nucleus in the gas cloud which is gravitationally bound to the first one, but isn't in a region of gas density sufficient for friction to pull it into the same plane of rotation, anything that accretes from it will stay in whatever orbital plane it had to begin with (ignoring outside perturbations). And captured bodies can go any direction at all, depending on how they make their approach. There are no constraints of physics.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
So... what am I missing?
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
If a planet was captured from outside the solar system, or if it was formed from a separate clot of gas and dust which was too far from the main accretion disk to be forced into the same orbital plane by gaseous drag, then it could easily have any orbital plane or direction. Posigrade, retrograde, polar... it is not constrained by anything we know of today.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
If our society ever grows up, this will cease to be a problem; it's impossible to sell scandal sheets when nobody is scandalized. Unfortunately, we seem to be going in the opposite direction these days.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
<optimism>
This does make me wonder: how long will it be before someone turns the openness of their opinions into an asset? If the media try to spin some comment out of context it could easily backfire if that entire context is available for the asking; the publication or reporter who tried this might wind up zeroing their own credibility. And imagine what might happen if the public starts using the Net as a way to check on the views of candidates. Who's going to be more "real" to a discerning electorate: someone who's been on the record for years, or someone whose carefully-tailored platform appeared ex nihilo on their campaign web site last week?
</optimism><normal_cynicism>
"Discerning electorate"? What was I thinking. Never mind!
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
- Escape velocity is 25,000 MPH or so (from the surface of the earth; it is a function of altitude).
- The Space Shuttle is nowhere near our fastest booster.
- The Space Shuttle cannot get anywhere near escape velocity; it can get to an orbit at a few hundred miles altitude carrying no payload, and that's it.
- Omni is a poor guide to anything other than fiction. You are much better off using the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Analog, or even the sci.space FAQs.
I just can't put it any nicer right now.--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Something like a StarWisp probe could investigate this in a short time. A StarWisp is essentially a very thin piece of metallic lace, and it is propelled by a microwave beam (a "light sail" that operates at microwave instead of optical wavelengths). It weighs a few grams; you hit it with a few gigawatts of microwaves and it takes off at an enormous acceleration. p = E/c, so 10 GW impinging on the sail with 100% reflection would yield about 67 N of force. If the probe weighs 10 grams, that is close to 700 G's of acceleration!
If the cruising speed of StarWisp is 0.5 c, then it could do a flyby of this planet about a year from launch and we get the data 6 months later. That's quick enough to build the probe for your Master's degree and analyze the data for your PhD.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that
Such a planet would have no influence on the plane of the inner planets' orbits, nor they upon it.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that