NASA’s New Horizons probe completed its fly-by of the dwarf planet Pluto this morning at 7:49 AM ET, completing a 9+ year, 3 billion mile journey to our favorite Kuiper belt object and is now continuing off into the outer reaches of the solar system.
On its way by Pluto, New Horizons snapped the clearest and most hi-resolution images ever taken of the dwarf planet, but since the probe can’t upload data back to Earth while it’s scienceing, we won’t see the best ones until tomorrow (also keep in mind that it takes 4.5 hours for signals to travel between Earth and Pluto, even at the speed of light!). New Horizons’ multiple instruments are collecting so much data that it will take nearly 16 months to get it all sent back to Earth! So keep following the NASA mission page and official Twitter account for plenty of Pluto updates over the next year.
Above is a collection of Pluto as we’ve seen it through the years, from its 1930 discovery at Lowell observatory (bottom), to Hubble’s 100-pixel Atari version taken in 1996 (middle), to New Horizons’ most recent color image taken July 13, 2015.
Here’s to the New Horizons team, congratulations from everyone on Earth!
(scale image of Pluto and its moon Charon compared to Earth)
Interesting side note: The dwarf planet Pluto’s name was suggested in a letter by an 11-year-old schoolgirl named Venetia Burney. But what about this Pluto?
While there’s no documentation to back up the claim, Disney’s Pluto character debuted just nine months after the dwarf planet’s discovery in 1930, and it’s widely assumed that Walt Disney’s animators were capitalizing on Pluto fever. I’d say we’ve got it again, wouldn’t you?
Tags:
#history #space #the power of science #Pluto #oh look an update
Kids entering high school this fall weren’t alive during the 9/11 attacks.
Good. I’m looking forward to when they start voting.
I don’t remember the 9/11 attacks…
I do remember the endless flow of news about “what on earth is our government up to now” afterwards (on the one hand, hyperlexia means I can read my parents’ copies of the Funny Times, on the other hand, I should really have read some more apolitical material when I was younger, and maybe if you think I’m not mature enough to read about my own autism).
On the other hand, I cannot remember not having the “War on Terror”, and I hear enough complaining about it that it doesn’t seem like a good standard to me but it basically feels normal. This, uh, may not be a positive feature that will lead to my cohort making good voting decisions.
But you’re right that I’m not panicking about “terrorists”, I’m more concerned that one of my friends will end up being accused of being one, or that sometime I will have a meltdown at an airport and I won’t catch myself and hitting my head against a wall will look suspicious, or that information derived from mass surveillance will be used for more malicious purposes than it’s currently being used for (ah, yes, this “have an autism-specific tracking device program” will never go wrong when we keep getting accused of every mass shooting committed by a white person ever and people running mass surveillance tend to have worse data security than I would like and people have committed anti-autistic hate crimes in the past, nothing is likely to lead to harm here).
Coincidentally enough, I was just wondering yesterday how much you knew about 9/11. (As an extension of wondering how much my brother knows, since he’s roughly the same age as you.)
I, for one, spent a significant portion of my childhood and adolescence wishing someone would teach me about late-20th-century history. I mostly had to gather vague impressions from media and conversations designed, not to teach, but to evoke memories that I didn’t share.
Despite the clear evocation focus of the title, I found Where Were You When? to be helpful. Unfortunately, it stops at the new millennium. This was fine for me, because my first-hand experience with historical events starts at the new millennium, but not so good for anyone even slightly younger than me.
(I keep meaning to find a webpage that gives the lyrics of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and links each lyric to its Wikipedia article. I’m sure there must be some, and it would be a reasonable place to look for further details. Of course, that ends even earlier.)
My understanding of recent historical events is, while still probably not ideal, usually good enough. I still run into some trouble hanging out with groups of people 5 – 10 years older than me who implicitly expect everyone involved to be familiar with 90′s pop culture. (I spent the 90′s variously non-existent, pre-sapient, and not paying much attention to the world outside my family.)
We didn’t start the fire It was always burning Since the world’s been turning We didn’t start the fire But when we are gone Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on
We didn’t start the fire It was always burning Since the world’s been turning We didn’t start the fire No we didn’t light it But we tried to fight it
We didn’t start the fire It was always burning Since the world’s been turning We didn’t start the fire No we didn’t light it But we tried to fight it
(Done with the Wikipedia page, multiple links or no links may appear per term.)
…”Ask Wikipedia itself for a list of relevant Wikipedia links” is a solution so utterly obvious that it had not occurred to me. Thanks.
Kids entering high school this fall weren’t alive during the 9/11 attacks.
Good. I’m looking forward to when they start voting.
I don’t remember the 9/11 attacks…
I do remember the endless flow of news about “what on earth is our government up to now” afterwards (on the one hand, hyperlexia means I can read my parents’ copies of the Funny Times, on the other hand, I should really have read some more apolitical material when I was younger, and maybe if you think I’m not mature enough to read about my own autism).
On the other hand, I cannot remember not having the “War on Terror”, and I hear enough complaining about it that it doesn’t seem like a good standard to me but it basically feels normal. This, uh, may not be a positive feature that will lead to my cohort making good voting decisions.
But you’re right that I’m not panicking about “terrorists”, I’m more concerned that one of my friends will end up being accused of being one, or that sometime I will have a meltdown at an airport and I won’t catch myself and hitting my head against a wall will look suspicious, or that information derived from mass surveillance will be used for more malicious purposes than it’s currently being used for (ah, yes, this “have an autism-specific tracking device program” will never go wrong when we keep getting accused of every mass shooting committed by a white person ever and people running mass surveillance tend to have worse data security than I would like and people have committed anti-autistic hate crimes in the past, nothing is likely to lead to harm here).
Coincidentally enough, I was just wondering yesterday how much you knew about 9/11. (As an extension of wondering how much my brother knows, since he’s roughly the same age as you.)
I, for one, spent a significant portion of my childhood and adolescence wishing someone would teach me about late-20th-century history. I mostly had to gather vague impressions from media and conversations designed, not to teach, but to evoke memories that I didn’t share.
Despite the clear evocation focus of the title, I found Where Were You When? to be helpful. Unfortunately, it stops at the new millennium. This was fine for me, because my first-hand experience with historical events starts at the new millennium, but not so good for anyone even slightly younger than me.
(I keep meaning to find a webpage that gives the lyrics of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and links each lyric to its Wikipedia article. I’m sure there must be some, and it would be a reasonable place to look for further details. Of course, that ends even earlier.)
My understanding of recent historical events is, while still probably not ideal, usually good enough. I still run into some trouble hanging out with groups of people 5 – 10 years older than me who implicitly expect everyone involved to be familiar with 90′s pop culture. (I spent the 90′s variously non-existent, pre-sapient, and not paying much attention to the world outside my family.)
So there’s a pretty long tradition in math of people coming up with problems they can’t solve, and talking to their friends, and realizing that nobody they know can solve them either, and then announcing to the world that you would get some sort of prize if someone could solve them.
Usually the prize is a small amount of money.
Sometimes, if someone is really cocky, or the problem is known to be really hard, it’s a lot of money.
And sometimes there’s Stanisław Mazur, who offered a live goose as a prize for finding a particularly pathological object (a Banach space for which some compact operator is not the limit of finite-rank operators).
And then, Per Enflo did manage to find such an object. Today, there is photographic evidence that he did, in fact, receive his prize. Go look at that picture, and tell me that Enflo is not 100% pumped about his goose. The older Mazur, on the other hand, looks mostly like “WTF, this fool actually called my bluff”.
It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow. In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).
Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended.
…
35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.
This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world – was destroyed.
You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.
December 9th was when it was first declared eradicated by a group of scientists. Their conclusion was endorsed by the WHO on May 8th, 35 years ago today.
Brinens and Things 