ydrozd - Slashdot User

Comment Re:It's not an error (Score 2) 102

by ydrozd on Sunday October 04, 2015 @02:21PM (#50657149) Attached to: Vostochny Launch Building Built To the Wrong Size

If you mean "Mir" (which is not the first, BTW, the first was Almaz/Salut circa 1971), it was built by Soviet Union, not Russia. In fact, the most technologically advanced systems, such as nav/docking systems ("Kurs") and "Kvant" controls were developed in Ukraine (Kiev Radiozavod and Kharkiv Elektropribor correspondingly), and are now lost to Russians (esp. given current war with Ukraine). Russia has been leaking science and engineering brains at ever increasing rates; so the failures of their space exploration programs are not surprising.

Comment Re:This is absurd (Score 1) 263

by ydrozd on Monday October 28, 2013 @09:22PM (#45264849) Attached to: How an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Would Die Part 2

That is absolutely not true for supermassive black holes, such as the one in the center of our galaxy. For these, the even horizon is far enough from the singularity so that the tidal forces there are not very large.

Comment Re:Conduct an experiment (Score 1) 263

by ydrozd on Monday October 28, 2013 @01:06AM (#45256145) Attached to: How an Astronaut Falling Into a Black Hole Would Die Part 2

Hm.. Let's do some math here: LHC *total* beam energy is 362 MJ. Assume that with 100% efficiency ALL the beam energy is used to create micro black hole. It will be pretty small, with a weight of M=J/c^2 = 3.61 * 10^8/ (3 * 10^8)^2 = 4*10^-9 kg. It will not have much pull on the objects around it, so it'd need quite a bit of time to wander around to gobble up additional mass. Fortunately for us, in time t = 5120 * pi *G^2 / ( h * c^4) * M^3 = 3.4 * 10^-27 seconds the black hole will evaporate in a burst of Hawking radiation. Even if you "crank up" LHC to product a 1 kg black hole (you would need 250 million "current" LHCs to do it), the resulting black hole will live for about 8 * 10 ^ -17 seconds (that's 0.00008 picoseconds), before evaporating in a burst equivalent to a large thermonuclear explosion. So, I wouldn't bet on black hole experiments in the near future :-)

Submission + - New black hole firewalls argument, now without reliance on quantum entanglement.

Submitted by ydrozd on Saturday October 26, 2013 @11:12AM

ydrozd writes: Until recently, most physicists believed that an observer falling into a black hole would experience nothing unusual when crossing its event horizon. As has been previously mentioned on Slashdot, there is a strong argument, initially based on observing an entangled pair at the event horizon, that suggests that the unfortunate observer would instead be burned up by a high energy quanta (a.k.a "firewall") just before crossing black hole's event horizon. The new paper significantly improves the argument by removing reliance on quantum entanglement. The existence of black hole "firewalls" is a rare breakthrough in theoretical physics.

Yellowstone Supervolcano Larger Than First Thought 451

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 15, 2009 @11:50AM from the even-superer dept.

drewtheman writes "New studies of the plumbing that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park shows the plume and the magma chamber under the volcano are larger than first thought and contradicts claims that only shallow hot rock exists. University of Utah research professor of geophysics Robert Smith led four separate studies that verify a plume of hot and molten rock at least 410 miles deep that rises at an angle from the northwest."

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