It's 1.4 solar masses, the Chandrasekhar mass. The white dwarf then starts to collapse to a neutron star, but as it starts to compress the temperature shoots up past the fusion ignition point of whatever (C, O, Ne) it's made of, and *boom* runaway thermonuclear bomb. That's the type Ia SN, and recurrent novae like this are very likely how they get made.

There's already a prototype/testing mission rolling (planed for late 2025) to get a small radio telescope on the far side of the moon to see what the sky looks like away from the Earth's EMI, LuSEE: https://www.lusee-night.org/

Late to the comment party here, but: there's a country out there where EV market penetration is approaching 40%. In that same country, pretty much everyone lives in apartments. So, while in the US EVs make the most sense for homeowners... by observation, there exists a solution to the flip side of the problem. To be fair, it's China, where a whole class of their solutions are unpalatable to the rest of us: but still, What Is It?

A large fraction of people going to academic conferences also teach. And teaching doesn't happen on weekends, so weekend conferences are in part a solution to finding a solution to that part of the puzzle. And no, there's no such thing as "comp time" for professors. If I want to bail on a class, I have to find myself a sub for it. Which is sometimes possible, but sometimes not (especially at smaller schools).

The CBO has actually run the numbers on this, and agrees with you. That's why this part of the legislation had such a large revenue potential: the IRS should finally be able to get 10% of Romney instead of 10% of you. Currently, the IRS has so little resources, that the only cases they can afford to investigate are the really easy ones where you or I get audited, because they're simple and we can't afford to hire lawyers to fight it.

The proposed changes are to provide the resources to deal with the complexity of a Mitt Romney scale tax return, and then fight the inevitable court battle to get the money owed to the Treasury, which pays for the whole audit and then some because it's 10% of a lot. Which is exactly why the Red Team hates it so much: they might be riding a wave of little-guy populism at the polls, but the leaders are all still the same elite business types as before 2016. They just have to sell out their "enforce the rules, don't need new laws if we can't enforcement" history by dangling "we all hate the government" red meat in front of the little guys voting for them, and *poof*, mission accomplished.

The IRS can't use any resources to do that, congress writes the laws. And congresscritters are bought by campaign donors to make sure that it's a complicated system that they can benefit from. A good use of that $20B which was clawed back would be to use it to fund political campaigns and re-classify campaign donations as the bribes they really are. But, that would take a constitutional amendment to make it clear that bribes aren't protected free speech. And, the very people who benefit from this money train are the ones we are relying on to fix the system.

Part of the new IRS funding is going to that, actually. They realized that their previous deal with places like H&R Block and Intuit to provide free e-filing wasn't actually happening, so they're moving it in house. How well they do that remains to be seen: but they're trying at least.

If you weren't experiencing the strong force, the hadrons that you're made up of would disappate quite spectacularly and quite rapidly.

The weak force is harder to "experience", but I assure you that you've got weak force mediated beta decays popping off inside you are quite the impressive rate. Just because you aren't waving a Geiger counter around at the moment doesn't mean it's not happening.

Have another banana while you're headed over to the shelf to grab the Geiger counter.

Plenty. Most of the giant elliptical galaxies out there seem to have been formed this way: if you look closely you can even see the lumps in the center that are original galaxy bits. Also, galaxies like the Milky Way and Andromeda were already formed by gobbling up smaller galaxies: they've ID'd several dwarf galaxy remnants from semi-recent mergers with the Milky Way.

TFA mentioned one thing that seems a better idea I've seen discussed elsewhere: putting solar panels in vegetable farms. Far enough apart that you can get your machinery in between them of course. This apparently has the additional benefit that many crops appreciate the shade, grow better, and need less irrigation. I'm sure this isn't tre for all crops, but for whatever subset that is true, farmers being able to sell power, more vegetables, and using less water seems a win/win/win. Ahh - googling around, it's even got a specific name now: "agrivoltaic".

This! Also a prof, and the vast majority of my failing grades go to students who simply don't do the work. A student who legitimately tries will usually pass. Maybe with a D or C, but they will pass. And learn something in the process, which after all is what a passing grade is supposed to mark. Weirdly enough, those things that get graded that take work to accomplish are designed to teach you something in the process...

Depends on the airline. I flew to Johannesburg on a South African Airways 747, where upstairs was just another part of coach. Was momentarily excited to be going up the stairs... but same old seats :(

Citation? This post is right up there with all the widespread fraud that obviously happened in the 2020 election, which was obviously stolen by krakens.

Spewing random accusations is easy and sounds good. Coming up with reality-based evidence turns out to be hard. My own anecdotal evidence: The peer review publication and grant awarding process in my field (particle astrophysics) seems to work as intended. That's good, because my colleagues and I spend a lot of time trying to do it right. Must be that we're a weird island of special, insulated from vote and data faking krakens.

And good on JAXA for doing the right thing and taking egg on their faces to fix this. That's an example of the self-correcting system working as intended.

Oops. Missed the cosmological object qualifier.

1987A was close, but still extragalactic (barely - certainly not as much so as the cool new results from NGC 1068). Taught us gobs about SNe! Wasn't thinking about spatial resolution in SN nus though: even with straight lines, a neutron star would have to be moon-level close to do that. Was thinking tomography style using time-resolution. For example, even with IceCube's singles-rate recording SN-nu detection style, a near enough SN (IIRC, at the kpc scale) should resolve the SASI oscillations suspected to help drive the explosion. In a decade or so, toss in Hyper-K and DUNE for some high-stats nu-flavor discrimination, and you've got several different time-varying "beams" coming at us which could resolve all sorts of fun astrophysics.

For spatial resolution, we'd be happy with LIGO-style swaths on the sky to help localize the nascent SN well enough to get photon-based survey instruments on-target. In addition to nu-electron scattering in some detectors (eg, the way we see nu from the sun in Super-K), timing the SN nu wavefront as it arrives at different places on the globe will help with this (which is the same way LIGO "points" to GW events). Full disclosure: I'm not on IceCube. However, I do work with their SN team on the SNEWS project, wherein people from all the different nu experiments are working together to maximize the science output of the next galactic SN.

Actually, it's statistically likely to happen in your lifetime. The next time a core-collapse SN happens somewhere in our galaxy (rate on average of about 1.5 per century), it will be close enough that neutrino detectors on earth will get thousands of interactions each, allowing us to watch what happens in the collapsing core of that star, and what happens in the proto-neutron star as it forms. Including the sudden cut-off of neutrinos if it then collapses to a black hole.

Also, the very high energy neutrinos that things like Ice Cube sees have a large enough cross-section that we should see the structure of the earth shadowing the signal from the sky, after a few decades of allowing data to pile up.

The article posted to arXiv shows spectra with redshifts around z =0.225. That's about the distance of nearer quasars, so not particularly nearby: for comparison, the Virgo Cluster is 0.004, and the Coma Cluster 0.02. The cosmic microwave background has a redshift of z=1100, and that was several hundred thousand years after the big bang. That's also the point where the universe became transparent, so you're never measuring a larger redshift than that.

There's not a big bang shockwave. One of the biggest misconceptions about the big bang is that there was some explosion that expanded out into empty space. What it really is that the whole universe was once very tiny, and space has been stretching out ever since, cooling as volume expands. It's the stretching of space that causes cosmological redshift. So, in the time it's taken light from the galaxies in question to reach us, space has stretched by 22%, making the light waves 22% longer in wavelength.