Humanity has officially touched the Sun (or, at least, one of its probes has) NASA's Parker solar probe has become the first spacecraft to reach the Sun, after solar boffins announced the feat at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The event actually happened way back on April 28, but it took months before the data made its way back to Earth and a few more before scientists could confirm the …
Hmm... Pink Floyd, Disaster Area or a nod to both? Icon anyway for getting in first.
Certainly beat Steamhammer (Mountains album); "Higher, we're getting higher, we can almost touch the Sun" - sure thing Kieran, can I have some of what you're on too?
FWIW Ray Bradbury wrote a short story about a spaceship sampling the Sun back somewhere around the 1950s. "The Golden Apples of the Sun" IIRC. Was a manned craft which extended an arm and slurped off a scoopful. He wrapped it in a load of poetic crap which I found impenetrable - something to do with the Garden of Eden and Original Sin, I guess - yawn! next story please, Mr. B.
Well done, Parker and Ray Bradbury wrote a short story about a spaceship sampling the Sun
Thunderbirds, too.
Yes! I thought of that Bradbury story as well. It fascinated me when I discovered it in 1987, which was 7th grade for me in the U.S. school system. I think I still have that old paperback copy of "The Golden Apples of the Sun," with its dark red cover art and faded yellow type. It made such an impression on me that five years later, I performed a reading of "The Pedestrian" for the high school forensics tournament in the category for prose reading. That reading advanced me to the state championship, where I did a cutting of "A Clockwork Orange," complete with the Russian bits.
I was the champion all right.
Trying to think of a smartass comeback re "the sun is eclipsed by the moon", with wittily ambiguous reference to the Dark Side, then somebody firmly handed me this icon.
Guess I'll just go home, fire up my classic Quad 33/303 and KEF 104AB's, and pity the poor digital kiddies with their crappy little soundbars.
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For comparison:
# sysctl dev.cpu | grep temperature
dev.cpu.7.temperature: 40.0C
dev.cpu.6.temperature: 41.0C
dev.cpu.5.temperature: 52.0C
dev.cpu.4.temperature: 52.0C
dev.cpu.3.temperature: 41.0C
dev.cpu.2.temperature: 41.0C
dev.cpu.1.temperature: 41.0C
dev.cpu.0.temperature: 40.0C
and that's in my office, not in (very) direct sunlight.
Graphic illustration by Jorge Cham, aka PHD Comics
Hmm! I was hotter here in Australia today than if I was perched on the back of Parker while "touching" the sun. That's some impressive heatshielding. Especially considering it's basically in a thermos flask.
Mind you, I fled indoors to the aircon -- not sure if Parker's fitted with that. Might have to wait till Parker 2.0.
> but remember how cold the moon's surface gets at "night".
Oh god yeah, that bloody awful camping trip last summer. Froze my nuts off. Slathered in SPF1,000, holding my breath for a month, didn't think to bring a bloody blanket, did I? The campfire was completely useless, I'm not gonna bother with it next time. At least it didn't rain, that's something.
icon for orbit --->
But it IS in a thermos flask -- a thermos flask's insulation layer is vacuum. Your tea is kept piping hot by wrapping a layer of outer space around it.
That's why I'm so impressed by the 32C external rear temp. I'd assumed some sort of heat-pump for the innards, but the outside is the vacuum interface and is stuck with radiation as the only heat-shedder. And _still_ only 5C hotter than the inside.
Would your thermos flask keep your tea warm for long if the environment outside the flask was only three Kelvin?
(I don't actually know the answer to this. Does heat loss by radiation across the vacuum flask depend on the temperature differential? I'd guess it does, and the tea is normally receiving almost as much energy radiated in as it loses by radiating out - which won't happen in outer space.)
> Would your thermos flask keep your tea warm for long if the environment outside the flask was only three Kelvin?
Hmm. Had to think this through. My initial reaction was: yes because only radiation, not conduction or its big-brother convection.* But I think that's wrong -- pls check my work:
Posit: a _perfect_ thermos flask, with the inner bottle magically suspended in vacuum without touching the outer bottle. So the only temp.change is via radiation.
But it is also surrounded by matter which is itself radiating in infrared: the outer bottle (room temperature). The net effect on the inner bottle's temp is the _net_ radiation, the difference b/w outgoing & incoming radiation.
So the inner bottle temperature will drop more slowly when temps inner&outer are close to each other, and will drop more quickly when temp.differential is high.
So the answer to your question is: no.
And since a real-world thermos flask has something holding the inner bottle in place, thus providing a Conduction link to the outside world: more no.
Am I missing something obvious there?
* Convection keeping the temp.gradient for conduction to a fluid** at about its average temp.** Fun Fact: if it wasn't for the combination of convection + water's flipping back&forth between evaporating at ground level and condensing at troposphere level (operating as a toggling temperature-battery on the convection conveyorbelt, supercharging the heatpump), the Greenhouse Effect of water vapour assisted by CO2 would mean earth's average surface temp would be 60°C (140°F). You could poach an egg by biffing it outside. Instead, courtesy of convection+watertoggling, we are at ~14°C (57°F).
> Am I missing something obvious there?
Oh wait, you asked re an Absolute time, not a Relative one.
Re the Absolute time @3K, and whether that counts as "long [enough]": no idea. We'd need some actual measured benchmark numbers to estimate it, say time for a given flask's contents to drop to 40C when surroundings are 30C, 20C, 10C, & 0C and see if we can extrapolate a further 270K.
Your thinking appears to be on the same lines as mine regarding the effect of external temperature on the balance of radiation coming in and going out. Not sure you could do your experiment in a way that would give you confidence, as a real-world flask will be losing temperature by conduction too.
I think you just convinced yourself that the space probe can quite effectively dump heat into the vacuum of space though. Just as well, since that's what the actual probe is doing.
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> I think you just convinced yourself that the space probe can quite effectively dump heat into the vacuum of space though. Just as well, since that's what the actual probe is doing.
?? Errr... what made you think I thought it could not lose heat? It loses heat by radiation, same as a thermos flask. But same as a thermos flask, because it's only radiation it's very slow compared to conduction so "stays hotter longer". So depends what you mean by effective -- it's so slow that it has to be doubly careful to keep the accumulating nett of sun-rate less radiation-rate below its max.heat.limit at/after perigee.
First the craft has to get as far from the sun as possible, that thing emits a fair bit of radiation which would swamp any signal sent from close to the "surface".
Next line of sight between craft and receiver on Earth is needed.
Lastly there is a ton of data sent, it can take months before it is all processed.
Someone's gone a bit too Brian Cox Wonders of the Cosmos here - How exactly is flying a probe into the sun's corona going to provide any evidence whatsoever for life on other planets?
It's already impressive, no need to overexcitedly overdo it.
So many of my favourites things wrapped up in this story.
Humour - HHGTTG: Heart of Gold and Disaster Area
Storytelling - Ray Bradbury: Golden Apples of the Sun
ScienceFi - David Brin: Sundiver
What days we live in. Sun skimming, Pandemic, Climate Change, Fools on the Hill governing the country.
... unfortunately climatology isn't real science either. More like pseudo-science like astrology or skientology.
They don't have any proven theory, no correct predictions and whole pile of shit is based on *numerical model*, for f**ks sake!
That's *engineering tool* and it's used only when you've no f***ing clue what is causing what. In scientific terms numerical model is barely a hypothesis, not a theory. And 'reseach' isn't even hypothesis, it's at even lower step at stairs to actual science.
Not even a *proven hypothesis* as *all* predicitions have been seriously wrong. Every one of them. To me, as a scientist, that's kind of problem: If I present BS instead of correct predictions, I get fired. Obviously IPCC isn't.
Anyone can slap a pile of numbers into curve fitting program and call it 'numerical model'. Even me, I've done that and got about correct results, too. IPCC can't do even that, despite 30 years of trying.
Remember the hockey stick curve? It was pure BS, but the idea of it still lives because money IPCC gets for selling CO2 emission permissions.
Always *follow the money*.
Notice that warming is/was obvious, I'm strictly talking about so called science used to trying to explain it. Because in actual science you've a theory and a formula derived from the theory, like temp = correction factor* CO2 concentration squared.
Simple, eh? Where is that formula?
On the other hand Solar fluctuations are easy to measure directly and SOHO satellite is doing exactly that. That's hard evidence.
Also astronomers did tell us that there was 2% increase in it, in 1990s. You tell us they are wrong, like IPCC already did? I wonder what kind of qualifications they had for doing so.
Obviously climatology is so difficult no-one ever is qualified to question their BS methods, according to IPCC.
By now it's no more than a pseudo-scientific cult. Funded by governments raking billions and billions in various CO2-related taxes.
*Follow the money*. The difference to skientology is getting very, very thin.
The common thing: Believers believe, no matter what. In actual science you prove stuff and when it's proven, there's no room for a) belief nor b) doubt.
Climatologist have absolutely no proof whatsoever. If they had, they'd have a proven theory generating correct predictions (up to 4 decimal positions), instead of numerical models.
The usual denial of reality I see - I dont see the problem, really. Either WE are changing the climate (and solar fluctuations don't really account for the rapid temperature rises we are seeing) and need to do something to limit the damage, or in the remote chance that it ISN'T us, then we will end up with a cleaner planet. Win-Win. However, I do adimre the ability of people like you to simply put your fingers in your ears and go la-la-la when the overwhelming majority of scientists across the planet agree that humanity is at least partly responsible, and I'd be willing to bet that 99.9999% of them aren't paid to say it by anybody, unlike the "scientists" employed by petrochemical companies or countries with a vested interest in making as much money out of fossil fuels as they can.
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