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OT: The F*cking Science Thread

Remember the Philae lander? That successfully landed on a comet in November, but then died because it's solar panels were in the shade?

Well, it's woken up:

The European Space Agency (Esa) says its comet lander, Philae, has woken up and contacted Earth.

On its blog, Esa said Philae had contacted Earth, via Rosetta, for 85 seconds on Saturday in the first contact since going into hibernation in November.

"Philae is doing very well. It has an operating temperature of -35C and has 24 watts available," said Philae project manager Stephan Ulamec.

Scientists say they now waiting for the next contact.
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Remember the name Kepler 452b. Because in our search to discover if we are alone in this vast and fascinating universe, a sole life-harboring world among countless dead and uninhabitable planets, we may finally have a true candidate for Earth 2.0.

For the first time, scientists have found what appears to be a rocky world orbiting a Sun-like star at almost exactly the same distance that Earth orbits our own Sun. While other potential habitable planets have been found before, this is the first that could plausibly be another Earth. This might be the real deal, people.

Kepler 452b, found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, is located 1,400 light-years from us. It orbits a star that is 4% more massive and 10% brighter than our Sun. The planet itself is 1.6 times the size of Earth – making it a super-Earth – but the scientists are fairly sure that it is a rocky world, owing to its size and the type of star it orbits.

Its orbit, 384.84 Earth days and 5% more distant than our planet is from the Sun, places it right in its star’s habitable zone, where it is not too hot or cold for liquid water to form: the same region Earth is in around the Sun. This is not the first Earth-sized planet found in a habitable zone; last year, the world was abuzz with the discovery of Kepler 186f, more similar in size to Earth. But that planet orbited a red dwarf star, smaller and cooler than the Sun. Kepler 452b, excitingly, orbits almost an exact clone of the Sun.
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http://www.iflscience.com/say-hello-earth-20-historic-kepler-discovery-suggests-we-are-not-alone
 
1400 light years. Such a tiny distance on a cosmological scale, but at the same time, such an impossibly huge distance for us to travel with our current technology.

We need some faster-than-light propulsion or space-folding technology already, goddammit.
 
LeafGm said:
1400 light years. Such a tiny distance on a cosmological scale, but at the same time, such an impossibly huge distance for us to travel with our current technology.

We need some faster-than-light propulsion or space-folding technology already, goddammit.
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Maybe we should go the other way like Columbus.

Or, stay home and fix our own planet.

533+magnus_pyke_science.jpg
 
They're "fairly sure" it's made of rock, and it's 1400 light years away! get hyped people! earth 2.0!

but yeah, we're going to have to either figure out how to move a hell of a lot faster in this dimension or access a different one such that intergalactic trips work on our temporal scale.
 
Speaking of spaceships...

link

The EM Drive (Electro Magnetic Drive) uses electromagnetic microwave cavities to directly convert electrical energy to thrust without the need to expel any propellant. First proposed by Satellite Propulsion Research, a research company based in the UK founded by aerospace engineer Roger Shawyer, the EM Drive concept was predictably scorned by much of the mainstream research community for allegedly violating the laws of physics, including the conservation of momentum.

However, NASA Eagleworks – an advanced propulsion research group led by Dr. Harold G. “Sonny” White at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) – investigated the EM Drive and presented encouraging test results in 2014 at the 50th Joint Propulsion Conference.

White proposes that the EM Drive’s thrust is due to virtual particles in the quantum vacuum that behave like propellant ions in magneto-hydrodynamical propulsion systems, extracting "fuel" from the very fabric of space-time and eliminating the need to carry propellant.

...

Wired notes that an EmDrive could get to Pluto in less than 18 months and mentions more ambitious ideas including a manned trip to the moons of Saturn with a three-year mission time. "Some damage to our theories of physics is an acceptable payoff if we get a working space drive," concludes the Wired article.
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This video is a trip.

[video=youtube;1AAU_btBN7s]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AAU_btBN7s[/video]

It's just so mind boggling how distant the outer gas giant planets are.
 
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