“What are your favourite things to talk about?”
also GIVE ME YOUR FAVE SPACE FACTS because i know thats your favourite thing (maybe Moon Facts if you need me to narrow it down but if not go wild!!)
Okay, so water is actually the second most common molecule in the universe, behind molecular hydrogen, but basically hydrogen is everywhere and oxygen is one of the first few things that get made in stellar cores, and so H2O is super easy to find
Speaking of things in the universe, I was always fond of M class stars which are cool enough that they have titanium dioxide in their atmospheres, a common ingredient in sunscreen
Also the star classes provide what is my favorite mnemonic device, their order is OBAFGKM, (the history of their naming is a mess that’s why) and the way to remember it is that Only Bad Astronomers Feel Good Knowing Mnemonics, as an aside I’m 90% sure that’s where Phil Plait gets the name for his blog at slate.
Not 100% space, but in a very space heavy field my favorite end of the earth scenarios is the Total Existence Failure, which is just a thing that could, theoretically, happen. With the sort of probabilities generally associated with the number zero, of course, but none the less it is not impossible from a physical standpoint.
The coolest thing I think we’re studying right now is gravity waves, which is basically ripples in the fundamental fabric of spacetime from truly massive objects orbiting each other at tremendous speeds, and in order to detect them we’ve got incredibly long measurement devices with absurd accuracy and as space contracts and expands minutely the length of these multi-mile detectors changes by nanometers, currently LIGO is the big experiment, but a proposed project called LISA hopes to measure even bigger distances by being on satellites in space and thus not constrained by the usual constraints.
My favorite space scientist of all time is one Jim Arnold of the University of California, San Diego. He was one of the principle scientists at the Lunar Recovery Laboratory and his post doctoral work was in Willard Libby’s C-14 lab. He spent years in charge of the California Space Center, and made many significant and important contributions to the field of astrochemistry, he also helped raise three lovely sons the youngest of whom raised two lovely children of his own, and this Jim Arnold was a caring grandfather too, who left us with bountiful intellectual curiosity and compassion. Asteroid 2143 is named in his honor.
One of his dream projects was the space elevator, which is a place I hope technology gets us someday. The principle is thus, it is possible to launch a satellite that stays above the same point of the earth at all times, the orbital mechanics of it are a physics I problem, and so if you could put an anchor in orbit like that you could in theory run a cable down to the planet’s surface. The problem is that we have nothing strong enough to hold up against that kind of strain, although carbon nanotubes are promising but nowhere near the scale we’d need.
My favorite named object in space is one of the four too-fucking-big-to-exist things we know about: the Huge LQG, the LQG stands for Large Quasar Group, so it’s called the Huge Large Quasar Group which IMO: A+ naming. The thing is about four billion lightyears in its largest dimension and contains 73 quasars, but given how far away from us it is, ~9 billion ly [z=1.27], something as large as it shouldn’t have formed as early on in the universe as it is, so it’s a bit of a puzzler, although it’s actually the second smallest of those objects, the biggest of which is possibly on the order of ten billion light years wide which is even goofier
One of the weirder results of astrophysics is that black holes can evaporate over time through the process of Hawking Radiation. It’s not something that happens fast, except for very small black holes, but for the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies it’s a process that will likely take literally googols of years
