Science Tidbits #5

[RJDiogenes]

Phil Plait weighs in on the Oumuamua paper: He's not impressed.

[Lupine]

^Not surprised. I would really, really love for Oumuamua to be alien but like Sagan said. "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof".

[RJDiogenes]

I wonder if anybody will ever chase it down and take a real look at it.

[Lupine]

It'd take a ferocious amount of energy to do it. Probably not any time in the near future.

[RJDiogenes]

Yeah, you'd first have to catch up with it, and it's going pretty fast, and then slow down to rendezvous with it, doubling the fuel requirements. And the longer you wait, the farther outside the Solar System it gets. Still, it might make a nice scenario for a story....

[Lupine]

Yeah, the astronauts spend months catching up to it only to find that it's a giant tartigrade.

[RJDiogenes]

Actually, that would be worth the trip.

I've been doing a little thinking and researching to imagine what they might find out there, and it's actually not very promising. I was thinking that it could be tumbling that way to provide artificial gravity at the two "floors" at either end of the cylinder. The good news is that the floors of a quarter-mile cylinder with a 10-1 ratio would be over an acre in area-- the bad news is that the rate of it's tumble would not create any significant artificial gravity (I found an online utility that does the calculation). My alternate scenario is that there is a disc at either end with a centrifuge inside, spinning in opposite directions to balance out the torque (imagine a giant dumbbell-shaped vehicle with drums instead of spheres). The area available would depend on the thickness of the centrifuge, so I'll have to calculate that next. And figure out the purpose of the tumbling.

[Lupine]

^Part of some exotic form of propulsion perhaps? The tumbling motion in a sense "crawling" through space/time.

[RJDiogenes]

That's a good line of thought. I was thinking in terms of cosmic radiation-- maybe tumbling spreads the exposure evenly, rather than concentrating it in the direction of acceleration or something.

[RJDiogenes]

Oh, and I also realized that, between Tabby's Star and Oumuamua, my story "Photo Finish" has almost kind of come true.

[Lupine]

^

Hopefully "Supernumerary" won't come true however.

[RJDiogenes]

Yeah, that would be kinda bad.

[Lupine]

Banards Star has a Super-Earth!
I'll have to incorporate this into my work as one story of mine takes place at Banards Star.

And Space.com's take on it.

[RJDiogenes]

That's a great find. Too bad it's just about a tenth of an AU outside the habitable zone. I wonder if the possible density of its atmosphere would make a difference there-- plus it could be tectonically active. And I find it hard to believe that there can be a solar system with only one planet, so there may be more closer in.

[Lupine]

As big as it is though and coupled with the low temps I'm wondering how they decided it was a Super-Earth rather than a Exo-Neptune.