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| bio | website | keith-s-thompson.github.com |
|---|---|---|
| location | San Diego, CA | |
| age | 53 | |
| visits | member for | 1 year, 7 months |
| seen | May 9 at 14:35 | |
| stats | profile views | 194 |
I'm a programmer and all-around nerd living in San Diego, California and working at JetHead Development Inc.
E-mail: Keith.S.Thompson@gmail.com
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Oct 12 |
comment |
What is the current status of Pluto? @CarsonMyers: It isn't, according to the link in the answer. |
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Oct 12 |
comment |
What is the current status of Pluto? Is Ceres a planet in your book? What about Haumea, Makemake, and Eris? The real question is, would Pluto have been called a planet if we'd known what we know now about the bodies that exist int the Solar System? |
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Oct 12 |
comment |
What is the current status of Pluto? @CarsonMyers: The Earth-Moon barycenter is barely inside the surface of Earth; it's about 1000 miles below the surface, and would be above the surface if the Moon were about 35% farther away, or if were about 35% more massive. |
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Oct 12 |
comment |
Two planets in same orbit - not planets? The magic hexagon is called a Klemperer Rosette. And yes, it has been used in science fiction. Alas, apparently it's not dynamically stable. (In Niven's novel, presumably the Puppeteers had more than sufficient technology to keep their planets where they wanted them.) |
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Oct 12 |
comment |
the collision of Phobos Since Phobos is within the Roche Limit, that implies that there can't be any loose material on its surface, at least not near the points pointing directly towards and directly away from Mars. Any such material would be pulled off the surface by the tide. It also means that the local effective gravitational acceleration is negative. (But it appears to be covered with at least 100 meters of regolith, which is a bit of a mystery.) Reference. It would be fascinating to see a plot of the local acceleration over the surface. |
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Oct 12 |
comment |
Tropical year is 27s/year off from Gregorian year? Right. In other words, leap seconds correct for amount by which a solar day differs from 24 hours; leap days correct for the amount by which a solar year differs from 365 solar days. (And "24 hours" is defined as 86400 seconds, where the second is defined as "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom" (reference). |
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Oct 12 |
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What could this very dark planet be made of? Unobtainium, obviously! |
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Oct 11 |
comment |
Why do rockets need a cosmic ray detector? Um, maybe it's to detect cosmic rays? 8-)} |
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Oct 7 |
answered | Why is Uranus's axis of rotation tilted? |
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Oct 6 |
answered | Density of stars near the center of the Milky Way |
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Oct 5 |
answered | Are there planets that do not rotate on their axis? |
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Oct 4 |
answered | Why are most astronomy things spherical in the shape (like, the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, and other planets)? |
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Oct 4 |
answered | Will Neptune change Pluto's orbit some day? |
