General / Off-Topic Relaxation Thread

[Bounder]

A general chit chat thread...


Soo... found this on Physorg today:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-galaxy-swarm-nomad-planets.html

..iirc there was a similar paper about a year ago suggesting the majority of all planets may be rogue.. i remember the subject came up here at one point, before either of these papers came out, but whod've thunk it? There was even one paper suggesting life may have first arisen on a rogue (or nomad, as described here) - that a star would be more likely to preclude life emerging on a planet, than to nurture it, and that an internally heated one might be more conducive.. The article above considers the possibility that nomads may also be responsible for distributing the seeds of life around the cosmos..

If these objects are confirmed by the upcoming generation of infrared observatories, this could add a whole new dynamic to Elite - what if star-bound planets are the exception, and most are hurtling through space with random speeds and directions..? It turns conventional starmap navigation on its head for a start - rather than a static map of locations you'll need a constantly running simulation, or at least a map that's recalculated periodically in relation to the current time...


Also news from the OPERA team at CERN regarding their faster-than-light neutrinos:

The report on the Science Insider website of the prestigious US journal said the "60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fibre optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer.

"After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fibre, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed," it added.

"Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos."

http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-hitches-emerge-culprit-faster-than-light-particle.html

Disappointing if predictable but spare a thought for all the string theorists who were falling over themselves with explanations.. lol

 

[turwhitt]

what if star-bound planets are the exception, and most are hurtling through space with random speeds and directions..?

Then i would think that planetary collisions would be much more common.

 

[Bounder]

...not if the density of planets per unit volume's much lower than in stellar systems, in which case interstellar collisions would be less likely than stellar-based ones... but who knows, maybe such inter-stellar prangs are the source of these gamma ray burst events..

According to this news from Physorg today, the energies might be high enough:

Runaway planets zoom at a fraction of light speed