kichae

@kichae@wanderingadventure.party

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Earth-sized Exoplanet is On a Death Spiral⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  typotyper@sh.itjust.works said in How fast is that in kilometers per hour?: So you’re saying as our own system ages the planets will get pulled in and eaten up.

  Not in the same way, no. None of our planets are touching the Sun’s atmosphere in the same way this planet is, and none of them are orbiting at rates that are faster than the Sun’s rotation. If anything, tidal interactions would want to speed up the planet’s orbits, and push them into higher orbits.

  But eventually the Sun will become a red giant star, which will change some of these relationships. We will see competing effects then: The Sun will begin shedding its outer layers, which will create a higher drag environment for the planets (that were not swallowed during the Sun’s expansion) which would tend towards inward migration, but this will also lower the Sun’s mass, which will lend itself toward an outward migration.

  typotyper@sh.itjust.works said in How fast is that in kilometers per hour?: Would Jupiter being a gas giant get slowed down equally to the outer planets or would it eat some planets on its own.

  All of the outer planets are gas giants.

  Jupiter is not currently migrating inward, nor are any of the other planets. If inward migration happens after the Sun becomes a red giant, those other outer planets will not get anywhere close to it. As a red giant, the Sun will approximately fill Earth’s orbit. Jupiter’s orbit is 5x larger than this; Saturn’s is 10x larger, and by the time the Sun actually grows this large, all of the planets’ orbits will be even larger than they are today, thanks to gradual mass loss.

  None of the outer planets are expected to fall into the Sun at any point in time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Earth-sized Exoplanet is On a Death Spiral⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Dwarf stars are technically any star that is in its core phase of life. They are dwarves in comparison to giant stars. The sun is a G-type dwarf star, for instance.

  The star is a K-type dwarf, which means it is cooler and smaller than the sun (stars are labelled froom hottest/most massive coolest least hot/least massive: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M for historical reasons).

  Planet formation is a complicated and still somewhat young field of study. Planets being close to their stars was a real shock 20 years ago when we stared finding them. The best models we have for this is planetary migration, where the planets form farther aewy from the star, but friction/drag forces from the nebula from which they formed causes them to slow down and fall into smaller orbits.

  This planet continues to see its orbit degrade for even more complex reasons, related to both drag – it is interacting with the star’s atmosphere, which is causing it to slow – and tidal effects. When you’re close enough to a massive, rotating body that the differences in gravitational pull strength due to things like variations in density become significant, the rotating body will force you into an orbit that matches its rotation length. If you’re already orbiting faster than it is spinning, that means it will slow you down. But slowing down will cause your orbit to shrink, which shortens the time it takes you to complete an orbit, which will make the central body slow you down more, which will shrink your orbit, which…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Earth-sized Exoplanet is On a Death Spiral⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The numbers are big, so it can be intimidating, but the math isn’t too bad. It’s a little bit of multiplication and division. The most daunting bit is a cube-root, which you can find on most scientific calculators these days.

  It’s hunting down the numbers you need to use that’s the trick, and making sure they’re all in the right units.

  The equation for the Roche limit is the most complex math, but that’s just something you look up:

  Roche Limit = 2.44 x {the radius of the star} x cube-root(( {the mass of the planet} / {the radius of the planet}^3 ) / ( {the mass of the star} / {the radius of the star}^3 ))

  All of the things in the braces are also just values you look up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This Earth-sized Exoplanet is On a Death Spiral⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  The paper doesn’t calculate the radius of the star’s Roche limit, instead opting to calculate the orbital period of the Roche limit. I’ve never done a Roche limit calculation for stars, but I have for planets/moons, and I’m not seeing anything that suggests it’s different than for planets. So, I think I did this correctly (excepting typos):

  The star’s Roche limit is about 1.5 million km from its centre (~1 million km above its surface), and the planet’s orbit is about 2 million km from the star’s centre. Assuming a circular orbit, which should be the case at these distances, the orbit has a circumference of about 12.7 million km, and the planet is whipping around at a speed of about 2.3 million km/h, or 0.2% the speed of light.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Touche. I guess what I should have more rightly said was, given the level of contribution users have shown themselves willing to make, it's too small to be a job.

  But in the end, I believe people aren't willing to pay because we look like other spaces where they don't have to pay, and we gate nothing behind paywalls. Most people don't pay for services on the Internet, they pay for special privileges and to stand out. And if basic talk and text service was freely provided by volunteers, they'd milk those volunteer organizations dry, too.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Weirdly enough, community might actually be enough, but the Fediverse doesn't really have much in the way of communities. As I think you yourself point out elsewhere, the Fediverse is lacking the connective tissue of shared ideology, goals, or even interests. It's also both too large to create the familiarity that binds people socially, while also being too small to sustain itself off a donation model that makes sure there are professional admins and server mods. It's too big to be a hobby, and too small to be a job.

  Aping the aesthetic of commercial social media is a significant issue here, because form follows function, and the function of commercial social media is not community, but convincing end-users to be content generators. People on Reddit and Twitter are accustomed to an endless stream of input generated by nameless, faceless entities that they don't give two shits about, with some celebrities and internet-famous people interjecting from time to time. That requires tens of millions of users fighting for fleeting attention from fickle consumers. We have tens of thousands of people who -- as far as I can tell, based on the types and volume of posts -- are mostly interested in consuming, not fighting for attention.

  These are not the people who fund these kinds of endeavours. Neither group is -- the content generators are no more interested in paying to get attention than the content consumers are to give it. So, without the firm social ties that motivate keeping the lights on, there is only burnout for the few who are willing to materially support the place, and gradual decay for everyone else.