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Dumbass Question Amnesty: Science, etc.

Prepuce of Doom

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Prepuce of Doom

Prepuce of Doom 21074

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I have a few possibly dumbass questions that could benefit from a thread like this.

Perhaps you do too - post them. 

~~~~~

First, let's assume for the sake of argument that we can eventually create a telescope or some other means of long distance viewing that's just incredibly more powerful than whatever we have now. Orders of magnitude better. 

And you know how some of the stars we see in the sky are long extinct, right? Well what happens when you zoom in very powerfully on something that's no longer there? 

Is it just indistinguishable, uniform, and detail-free light? Just background?

Or can you look in some amount of "detail" (whatever that means) at something that's actually no longer there? Are you literally looking backwards through time? 

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ztejas

ztejas 43452

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Pretty sure you're looking at the exact same thing you would see with the naked eye - just magnified - since your perspective is the same. If a star is x light years away then it takes the light or "image" x light years to reach your theoretical telescope just like it would take it x light years to reach your eyes.

So, yes, you're looking backwards through time, just like the sunlight we see on any given day is the light that was produced from the sun ~8 mins ago. 

Maybe think about it in terms of sound. Say you had a super sensitive sound recording device set up right next to you, and there was a noise that originated x miles away. It's going to take the same amount of time between the sound being made and it reaching your ears as it does reaching the device - whether you hear it or not. Light is the same - it just moves much faster. 

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Homercles

Homercles 10205

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Everything we see in the night sky is looking back in time, hell the light from the sun is what it appeared like 8 minutes ago.  The father away it is, the longer ago we are seeing it...hell they’re not all even stars, believe the furthest thing you can see with your naked eye is a goddamn entire galaxy made up of trillions of stars.  
 

But regardless how powerful your telescope or whatever is, the photons that traveled across empty space for millions/billions of years arrives at the same time...so no, a more powerful telescope doesn’t let you see an object any earlier in its existence.  And since you can’t travel faster than light, there’s no way to race away from it and catch an older image of it.  It’s gone forever. 
 

In fact since the universe is expanding, there are very distant objects that will eventually fade out completely and future generations won’t ever see it (if mankind is still around), those last photons won’t reach us, ever.  

Maybe I misunderstood what you were asking...but better telescopes don’t let you see the same object at different points in time, they let you capture the tiny scraps emissions of the most distance objects...since they are so far away, it took that light billions of years to reach you so are seeing it as it was billions of years ago.  It’s like me mailing you a  Polaroid of myself that takes a decade to reach you...as far as you’re concerned that’s what I look like, but in reality it was long ago   

You should read about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.  They pointed that bad boy at what appeared to be empty darkness and found a thousand galaxies not much younger than the universe as a whole.  As far as we know, some star a million light years away collapsed and a deadly gamma ray burst is on its way to kill us all tomorrow...won’t know until it gets here and aggy can finally claim that natty.  
 

Edit:  Here’s the HULD on wiki >> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field

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thunderlounge

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Homer is correct. Zoomed in or not that light still must hit the scope to be seen. 
 

Now if you were to manually lengthen that telescope and the light is captured further away, that is different. However you can see that unless you built something that captured the light a looooooooong ass way away and sent the data back from there, the difference is negligible.

 

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Prepuce of Doom

Prepuce of Doom 21074

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I think the crux of my harebrained question can be distilled into an uncertainty about whether a tremendously powerful telescope aimed at a dead star is just going to pick up the same photon (in my conception, essentially just a bright but featureless flashlight beam) in greater "resolution," or if it would be hypothetically possible to see some element of detail of that dead star - sunspots, coronal ejections, etc., like you would see if you zoomed in on our sun, at least in the brief moments before you fried your eyeballs. 

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thunderlounge

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Details would certainly be more apparent. 
 

There are pics from hubble that are fucking awesome. Google up hubble dark field images. They basically pointed hubble at what looks to the naked eye as the blackness of space and found all kinds of fascinating shit. Like fuck tons of galaxies, but the light isn’t bright enough to the naked eye to see it by the time it gets here. 
 

Shit gets mind blowing at times. 

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Homercles

Homercles 10205

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24 minutes ago, thunderlounge said:

Homer is correct. Zoomed in or not that light still must hit the scope to be seen. 
 

Now if you were to manually lengthen that telescope and the light is captured further away, that is different. However you can see that unless you built something that captured the light a looooooooong ass way away and sent the data back from there, the difference is negligible.

 

Actually that would be pointless anyways, as the information you send back can only travel at the speed of light...by which time it’d arrive exactly when the light (or IR, X-rays, radio, gamma, whatever) from that object hit earth...though it’d be amazing to see what an event horizon looks like up close.  
 

It’s incredibly sad that humanity will never venture outside even our little corner of the Milky Way.  The distances are just too immense and c is the universal speed limit for causality and information flow...it’d take millions of years to get anywhere and you couldn’t tell anyone about it.  Maybe if worm holes exist.  

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Prepuce of Doom

Prepuce of Doom 21074

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18 minutes ago, thunderlounge said:

Details would certainly be more apparent. 
 

There are pics from hubble that are fucking awesome. Google up hubble dark field images. They basically pointed hubble at what looks to the naked eye as the blackness of space and found all kinds of fascinating shit. Like fuck tons of galaxies, but the light isn’t bright enough to the naked eye to see it by the time it gets here. 
 

Shit gets mind blowing at times. 

Yeah, whenever I go down the Hubble rabbit hole, I eventually end up equally fascinated and depressed by the utter meaninglessness of our entire solar system. I appreciate the marvel of it all, but it's just a gateway to nihilism - for my brain, at least. 

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Homercles

Homercles 10205

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28 minutes ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

I think the crux of my harebrained question can be distilled into an uncertainty about whether a tremendously powerful telescope aimed at a dead star is just going to pick up the same photon (in my conception, essentially just a bright but featureless flashlight beam) in greater "resolution," or if it would be hypothetically possible to see some element of detail of that dead star - sunspots, coronal ejections, etc., like you would see if you zoomed in on our sun, at least in the brief moments before you fried your eyeballs. 

Define a dead star?  Here watch this

 

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thunderlounge

thunderlounge 7834

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12 minutes ago, Homercles said:

Actually that would be pointless anyways, as the information you send back can only travel at the speed of light...by which time it’d arrive exactly when the light (or IR, X-rays, radio, gamma, whatever) from that object hit earth...though it’d be amazing to see what an event horizon looks like up close.  
 

It’s incredibly sad that humanity will never venture outside even our little corner of the Milky Way.  The distances are just too immense and c is the universal speed limit for causality and information flow...it’d take millions of years to get anywhere and you couldn’t tell anyone about it.  Maybe if worm holes exist.  

 

Right, but not quite what I was going for. 
 

In a big picture sense, if we could get something up to even 1/3 the speed of light and send it way way out say, 50 light years. It could collect data from that point, send the data back, and we could see what was what from that vantage point. 
 

However in the end you are correct. That same light would still be getting here at the same time anyway, so point is moot for the most part.

You would have to be able to transmit significantly faster than the speed of light, and also be thousands of light years away to even be worth the data. 
 

If we could do that then we are probably “warp” capable and shit is irrelevant at that point.  

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Homercles

Homercles 10205

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7 minutes ago, thunderlounge said:

 

Right, but not quite what I was going for. 
 

In a big picture sense, if we could get something up to even 1/3 the speed of light and send it way way out say, 50 light years. It could collect data from that point, send the data back, and we could see what was what from that vantage point. 
 

However in the end you are correct. That same light would still be getting here at the same time anyway, so point is moot for the most part.

You would have to be able to transmit significantly faster than the speed of light, and also be thousands of light years away to even be worth the data. 
 

If we could do that then we are probably “warp” capable and shit is irrelevant at that point.  

Oh yeah agreed, fidelity up close would trump any kind of telescope.  When I first saw Gargantua on Interstellar I stared in awe, they did such a great job showing how gravitational lensing let you see the far side of the accretion disk that I was blown away.  Apparently they did dumb it down a bit as the part rotating away from you would be so dim it wouldn’t make sense.  But yeah I’d kill to see a black hole or neutron star up close.  

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thunderlounge

thunderlounge 7834

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2 minutes ago, Homercles said:

Oh yeah agreed, fidelity up close would trump any kind of telescope.  When I first saw Gargantua on Interstellar I stared in awe, they did such a great job showing how gravitational lensing let you see the far side of the accretion disk that I was blown away.  Apparently they did dumb it down a bit as the part rotating away from you would be so dim it wouldn’t make sense.  But yeah I’d kill to see a black hole or neutron star up close.  


Definitely man. That was a good flick on many levels. It wasn’t strict science, but wasn’t complete shit either. Enough to get you thinking and also be somewhat realistic. 
 

I enjoy that movie and watch it now and then. Adult Murphy (not elderly) is hittin the wheelhouse. LOL


Then again I also like 2010 and watch it now and then too. 
 

Wish they would hit Clarke’s third book 2067 where they go back to Europa. 

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thunderlounge

thunderlounge 7834

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Even that though, if you think about Europa and it’s ocean deep under that ice, there is a possibility of something. 
 

We wouldn’t have considered that even 20 or 30 years ago, but what we’ve come to learn from our own ocean and deep sea vents has at least lead to a remote possibility that a bacteria or organism may be present. 
 

The one that slightly baffles me is the curiosity around Titan and one other moon in that system. I’m not sure what the drive or theory of possibility for something being there is. I didn’t think the atmosphere or environment would even be conducive to anything. But maybe. 
 

Wasn’t there something about some kind of methane or acid pool in some park or something and they surprising found some type or organism? Maybe that is the deal. 

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Prepuce of Doom

Prepuce of Doom 21074

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In the beginning of Tropic Thunder, during Ben Stiller's character's "preview," the premise appears to be that the Earth abruptly stopped spinning and is now some kind of magma-saturated hellscape, and he's been in six movies where he somehow saves the world from something (???) each time. 

Anyway, what exactly would happen if the Earth were to instantaneously and completely halt its rotation? 

Evenly distributed explosion of the entire planet?

The planet breaks apart into large sheaves in a sort of momentum-driven "spiral"?

Every object on the surface just becomes one giant amalgamated smear via a worldwide grease-spot tsunami of inertia? 

Something else? 

Edited by Prepuce of Doom
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Doc Holliday

Doc Holliday 199

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3 minutes ago, thunderlounge said:


Doc, it’s: puff, puff, PASS. Just sayin. 

Fair enough...this thought experiment did start while I was stoned over the weekend

1 minute ago, bernorange said:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/sounds-of-the-ancient-universe

Yes, like this, except this is the ambient background noise.  Earth has a frequency, Saturn, Jupiter, etc.  I am curious to hear how they harmonize and create dissonance.

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Doc Holliday

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3 minutes ago, Doc Holliday said:

Fair enough...this thought experiment did start while I was stoned over the weekend

Yes, like this, except this is the ambient background noise.  Earth has a frequency, Saturn, Jupiter, etc.  I am curious to hear how they harmonize and create dissonance.

I also am curious how they fluctuate between each planet's lifecycle, i.e. polarity switches.  The sun switches polarity every ~11 years and during this phase, does it create a different pitch? Does it change?  Does it impact the other planets?  Do they change their sound?

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CooterBrown

CooterBrown 18012

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In the beginning of Tropic Thunder, during Ben Stiller's character's "preview," the premise appears to be that the Earth abruptly stopped spinning and is now some kind of magma-saturated hellscape, and he's been in six movies where he somehow saves the world from something (???) each time. 
Anyway, what exactly would happen if the Earth were to instantaneously and completely halt its rotation? 
Evenly distributed explosion of the entire planet?
The planet breaks apart into large sheaves in a sort of momentum-driven "spiral"?
Every object on the surface just becomes one giant amalgamated smear via a worldwide grease-spot tsunami of inertia? 
Something else? 

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