Various astronomy news

[FluffyFreak]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11 ... e-company/

Barnards Star appears to have more planets! A Super Earth orbiting in 233 days at the edge of the "Snow line", and possibly a Neptune sized object within the equivalent orbit of Jupiter. More signals also found but very faint which might indicate more planets.

[impaktor]

https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iii ... efault.jpg

- A hand drawn diagram from Carl Sagan representing all of space and time. The X axis represents time, going into the future and into the past and the Y axis represents scale, from the size of the electron to the distances between galaxies. It marks the relatively small "realm of direct human experience" and the much larger "realm of quantum physics" and "realm of special relativity."

src

[FluffyFreak]

"The Earth has been experiencing more frequent asteroid strikes"
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01 ... comments=1

Bonus short story called "Sad Kapteyn": https://ph.qmul.ac.uk/sad-kapteyn

Speaking of Kapteyn's Star, it passed us by within 7lyrs about ~10,800 years ago, and I'm certain that we don't account for stars proper motion over time when they were imported.

[impaktor]

Good short story.

I can live with present day star positions. Feels like an added headache to take +1200 year movements into account.

[FluffyFreak]

This Twitter thread is really interesting about what data we have for the milkyway -> https://twitter.com/galaxy_map/status/1 ... 1527438336

But it also lead me to this KickStarter -> "The first accurate and detailed map of the Milky Way galaxy -
Using data produced by the Gaia astrometric satellite combined with exoplanets, dust, nebula, and hydrogen data from other sources."
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ga ... oject_link

[bszlrd]

Closeup pictures from the asteroid Benu

[FluffyFreak]

Water worlds, seems like there could be a lot of them.

Might need some floating cities/spaceports

https://www.iflscience.com/space/the-ga ... er-worlds/

[bszlrd]

Floating starports would be cool then :)

[FluffyFreak]

@nozmajner https://www.iflscience.com/technology/u ... -concerns/

[FluffyFreak]

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11 ... -of-titan/

Maps of Titans surface show variations in the surface topography that looks really interesting