Science Porn

[vorlon13]

3122 Florence has 2 moons!!

Goldstone radar observed Florence during recently flyby of earth and saw this:

[Anomalocaris]

3122 Florence has 2 moons!!

Goldstone radar observed Florence during recently flyby of earth and saw this:

One wouldn't think so puny an asteroid has enough gravity to make a satellite go around it in 8 hours. The presence of the satellite perhaps puts some upper limit on how close Florence has ever come to the earth or the moon, because I suspect a sufficiently close passage to the earth or the moon will strip those satellites from Florence.

[vorlon13]

I wonder if they will name it Rama ??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/2017_U1

[vorlon13]

Update:

object is HIGHLY elongated.

Very unusual. Might be 10:1 ratio of length to width

[Anomalocaris]

Update:

object is HIGHLY elongated.

Very unusual.  Might be 10:1 ratio of length to width

Perhaps it is not elongated. Instead there is dramatic difference in albedo between different parts of the surface of the object, creating a light curve that mimic an elongated object with uniform surface albedo.

[Fireball]

Update:

object is HIGHLY elongated.

Very unusual.  Might be 10:1 ratio of length to width

Perhaps it is not elongated.  Instead there is dramatic difference in albedo between different parts of the surface of the object, creating a light curve that mimic an elongated object with uniform surface albedo.

Yup, all kinds of weird optical effects can happen when you look at something that far away.

[vorlon13]

MU69 has a moon ?


Maybe . . .


https://www.nasa.gov/feature/does-new-ho...ave-a-moon

[vorlon13]

Since 2016 Pi is known to more than 22*10^12 digits.

[Anomalocaris]

MU69 has a moon ?


Maybe . . .


https://www.nasa.gov/feature/does-new-ho...ave-a-moon

I am waiting for the first natural moon to have a natural moon of its own.

[Succubus]

Since 2016 Pi is known to more than 22*10^12 digits.

What I find to more mind destroying is the largest prime number:

23,249,425 digits. And it's divisible by nothing. Yeah I know.

Regarding Pi, will there come a time when people just give up for being a waste of time and resources. I mean it is indeed fascinating but isn't it rather futile?

Unlike the grueling 371 days that was needed for our previous computation of 10 trilllion digits, this time we were able to beat it in about 94 days.
 
The computation was interrupted 5 times - all due to hard drive errors. Furthermore, a bug was discovered in the software which had to be fixed before the computation could be continued.
 
Memory Statistics:

• 60.2 TiB of disk was needed to perform the computation.
  
• 9.20 TiB of disk was needed to store the compressed digit output.
  
• More disk space was needed to make backups of the checkpoints.
  

From here.