cbusalex t1_jd88zh4 wrote on March 22, 2023 at 3:26 PM

Reply to comment by MesaBit in Japanese lander enters lunar orbit by Afrin_Drip

There are actually a lot of moon landings scheduled for this year:

cbusalex t1_jd822u5 wrote on March 22, 2023 at 2:41 PM

Reply to comment by MesaBit in Japanese lander enters lunar orbit by Afrin_Drip

It's landing, probably in about a month. It's also delivering a moon rover for the UAE.

cbusalex t1_j295xdr wrote on December 30, 2022 at 3:36 PM

Reply to comment by Xethinus in What is our current "best guess" about how to observers that entered a black hole on opposite sides would look to each other once they crossed the event horizon? by WittyUnwittingly

> You might get a glimpse of them just before you both pass the event horizon

At the very least, you'd see them (well, a very distorted image of them) at 90 degrees left and right as you cross the photon sphere.

cbusalex t1_itr53i5 wrote on October 25, 2022 at 6:17 PM

Reply to comment by incarnuim in If you lived on a planet in the center of the Milky Way would the nighttime be significantly brighter compared to Earth’s nighttime due to the larger concentration of stars? by bad_take_

> Why would stars 860 AU away preclude planets?

If 860 AU is the average distance between stars, and the stars are moving relative to each other, then over a long enough timeline most stars will have much closer encounters than that.

Gliese 710 is projected to pass within 0.1663 light-years of the sun within the next couple million years, 30 times closer than the 5 light-year average distance between stars in this neighborhood. If that sort of thing is typical, then you'd expect stars with an average distance of 860 AU to have occasional passes at only a few dozen AU.