Out of Pod Experience

good ones! yay!

1) so, some background for those who may not be familiar with it. the Main Sequence is a long, continuous band that is formed when you make a plot of a stars color vs how bright the star is (spectral class VS absolute intensity or luminosity) for many many stars. the "average" stars we have observed live somewhere on this band and during the course of their life, travel along it to other parts of the diagram.

now, the short answer to your question is i don't know. if it is, i haven't heard of it, but that doesn't mean it isn't the case. because the plot is only one of color vs intensity, the time behavior of a stars emissions is not taken into account. if we were to quantify and measure the regularity of stars on the main sequence we would probably see something like a normal distribution or bell curve. it may very well be that the sun is on the "more regular" side of this curve. i will do some reading and try to get back to you when i find anything.

2) i made a post about the big bang earlier in the thread if you haven't read it yet =D basically, the key thing to remember is that we start with just energy, and as the universe expands this energy condenses into elementary particles like quarks and leptons. now, the leptons are the electron, the muon, and the tau, but only the electron is stable, so eventually the muons and taus should decay away.

as for quarks, we have observed that they only form particles in specific numbers: 2 quarks, 3 quarks, and we think 5 quarks. (there are other higher groupings but we haven't seen 5 yet). two quark particles are called Mesons and all mesons i know of have a very short lifetime (the pi+- meson, one of the most common mesons, has a lifetime on the order of 1E-8 seconds). 5 quark particles are simply called Pentaquarks (literally, 5 quarks). we have yet to observe a pentaquark in any of our experiments and the conclusion is that they are either can't form for some reason, or have an incredibly short lifetime. so this leaves 3 quark particles, which are called Baryons. of all the baryons, the proton and the neutron are the most stable. the neutron has a lifetime of about 885.7 seconds when it isn't in the nucleus of an atom or clustered with other neutrons, so they would decay. the most stable baryon we know of is the proton. IF it has a lifetime, we haven't observed its decay yet. current calculations put the lifetime of the proton beyond the current age of the universe.

so what does this leave? protons, electrons, and very few neutrons; 1 proton + 1 electron = 1 hydrogen! (there's probably some stray helium in there too from the old neutrons, but i don't think there would be very much. i haven't made any calculations).

3) the frequency of the Cosmic Microwave Background has to do with the the temperature of the universe at the time it was formed. when an object is heated, it emits a continuous radiation spectrum (so the amount to radiation you measure as a function of wavelength forms a smooth curve). this kind of radiation is called Black Body radiation and it has very specific characteristics that allow us to link the radiation we see to the temperature of the object that emitted it. the cosmic microwave background corresponds to a black body temperature of 2.7K +- .00057K (yes, we can make the measurement that precisely) and the peak of its frequency distribution lies in the microwave range (hence the name). if we take our current measurements for the expansion of the universe and project backwards, this corresponds to a temperature of 3000K ! (water boils at a temperature of 373K).

4) Gamma radiation is what we call any radiation beyond X-rays. the gamma ray spectrum starts at a wavelength around 1E-12 meters. so yes, we have seen some pretty intense stuff coming from subatomic collisions, but we just call them gamma rays heheh.

You mean you can't calculate the necessary explosive force to rip apart an entire galaxy? No one is going to take you seriously if you can't do something simple and pop science-y like that!

I wonder if it would make more sense to use it all at the middle of the galaxy and watch the blast spread out over millenia until the galaxy is obliterate, or throw some in each star and see what happens. i'm betting the latter, even if it would be far less spectacular.

Random semi-related thought question: What happens if we throw antimatter into a black hole? (I'm pretty sure I know the answer)

People have made 4D games (like 4D snake, which is like snake except in a Hypercube and you move along 4 axis of movement).

Do you think it would be more effecient for the Tranquility server to simply move objects really fast when in warp, or to actually move them in the 4th Dimension?

Great thread, really enjoyed it so far .

Tsadkiel, can you tell us something about neutron stars? How do they form and what are they special properties compared to normal stars? Also heard something about quark stars, what's up with that?

I guess I'm a noob when it comes to science.... Though, I've read almost every post up to now and first started when it was at page 3. Then every time I read a page, there was another, I actually went to bed an hour later last night reading all these posts, lol.

If space is a vacuum, how exactly does heat travel from the sun to earth and keep us warm? Is it as simple as traveling with the light? As you mentioned earlier light can travel through a vacuum.

Also, given unlimited resources (Money, man power etc) and our current technology, exactly how fast of a ship could we potentially build at this moment in time?

Can you explain what an air shower is? And what is cherenkov light?

What are the major differences between the HAWC detector and imaging atmospheric cherenkov teleskopes like MAGIC or HESS? What are the respective aims of the experiments?

What do you do to seperate the gamma ray signal from the hadronic background?

heya guys, today is super busy and i have a meeting in about 5 minutes and then after i'll be at the bladder factory (i go to CSU and we make the bladders that hold the water for the tanks used in HAWC. these are GREAT questions (especially the ones about HAWC ;) ) and i promise i WILL answer them but it may not be until later.

if CCP wanted to we could just teleport from point A to B, no dimensions required... it's a computer simulation. we can make it do whatever we want.

Yeah, but you can be stopped mid-warp by Interdiction Bubbles, so it isn't as easy as just teleporting the ship and making it look like you're actually moving.

Nevermind.