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Joined 7 months ago
Cake day: September 7th, 2025
  • MotoAsh@piefed.socialtoscience@lemmy.world•At The Edge Of Our Solar System, NASA's Voyager 1 Found A 'Wall Of Fire' - JalopnikEnglish
    5·
    4 months ago

    It has quite a few sensors for various particles and plasma/etc. “A single particle” isn’t as crazy as you might think. Even a human eye is chemically sensitive enough to see a single photon (though highly unlikely the brain would notice unless you’ve been living in a cave for a long while), and electronics can be made to be far more sensitive.

    https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/instruments/ Gives a decent high level on the sensors these probes have.

    The ‘how’ might take a good bit of your own research because I’m running out of free time today, but for a loose example on photons (not particles), the YouTuber AlphaPhoenix built a 2,000,000,000 fps camera https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o4TdHrMi6do The TLDW for how to sense individual particles is to have very good instruments to make clean signals, and then boost those small signals with good electronics. Of course NASA is going to design and build excellent electronics. Notice how AlphaPhoenix is using vaccuum tubes. A very old tech. The biggest factor that changes over time is how expensive and small electronics can be. As someone already said, the exact tech hasn’t actually changed that much. It’s mostly all the same theories, just refined and mass produced again and again.

  • MotoAsh@piefed.socialtoscience@lemmy.world•At The Edge Of Our Solar System, NASA's Voyager 1 Found A 'Wall Of Fire' - JalopnikEnglish
    16·
    4 months ago

    Their analogy is just a touch backwards depending on how you’re visualizing it. It DOES touch the heat. It traveled through a huge region that was that hot. The match is an extremely hot particle and the pool is Voyager. Their point is a single molecule, even at 30,000 degrees, isn’t going to transfer much actual energy to the space craft.

    The measured temperature is more of a function of directly detecting some lower temperature and cross-referencing density measurements. It’s not enough molecules to heat up the spacecraft to the same temperature, so figuring it out becomes a function of how much heat is being absorbed and radiated back out in relation to the detected density of particles. So per detected particle, it’s getting a lot of heat, but there aren’t enough particles to really heat the whole craft up much at all.

  • MotoAsh@piefed.socialtoscience@lemmy.world•A mysterious glow is coming from the middle of our galaxyEnglish
    11·
    6 months ago

    There is a diffuse gamma glow around the center. There are only a couple of paragraphs quoting the most silly versions of explanations: Dark Matter interaction and spinning neutron stars.

    The article offers no answers.

    IMO, it’s FAR more likely we just don’t entirely know how dense the region is and what atoms/particles are in it, and it could be as silly as interstellar particles getting excited from high energy particles that escape the SMBH accretion disc. Or some similarly ‘common’ thing.

  • MotoAsh@piefed.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.world•The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized CatastropheEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    Yeah, a union would be great, although I feel like that would be something that would have to come quite a ways down the road of ethical devs coming together. After all, not even the FOSS community agrees on what is ethical to give away and to whom.

    Maybe a union is still the right term for the abstract ‘coming together’ I’m thinking of, since it’s hard to imagine how they could go from a generic collective to a body that could actually make effective demands, but perhaps it’s roughly the same process as getting a job-wide union off the ground.