2 big galaxies collided and shattered into a string of 12 small galaxies.

The dark matter is split unevenly among those 12 small galaxies in an hour-glass shaped distribution: very little in the middle of the string, and most of the dark matter concentrated at the ends.

I love the Kerbal-esque architecture of this mission.

-An ion drive stage drops it down a deep hole, toward the sun, then spends all its fuel slowing down almost enough to be captured by Mercury’s gravity instead of just flying by it at screaming fast speed. The empty fuel tanks and ion engines get thrown away when they’re used up.

-Then one of the stacked probes turns on its chemical engines for the capture burn, and it ditches some of its sun screen.

-When its just barely captured in a highly elliptical polar orbit, it releases a satellite equipped with its own independent systems.

-Then it maneuvers to a lower orbit that’s optimal for the other satellite.

Mercury is hard to get to, and only one other space craft has ever orbited it: MESSENGER. Now there will be 2 more delivered with a single launch.

Would be a lot cooler if they could just fucking not.

It is quite the temptation though. India is buying crude at a discount and selling it back as gasoline at a premium.

Could be propaganda for domestic consumption. Hyping an external threat to induce a rally around the flag.

Finding a dictionary on an asteroid would be pretty impressive, ngl.

deleted by creator

Locking in the gains and taking time to reload and refuel before round 2.

It was also rotated 90 degrees for some reason? The river is on the south side of the community.

The writing and atmosphere is better in New Vegas, but the gunplay is better in 4.

Walked through the revolving door from professional bribe solicitor to pro-active agent of bipartisan capitalist corruption.

The cease fire was broken on day one when USA blockaded the ports, Iran demanded ships pay tolls for passing through the strait, and Israel and Hezbollah never got the memo to stop shooting at each other.

‘Negotiating’ in those conditions is performative at best.

PBH with mass <10^6g would have evaporated before the universe had cooled enough for atoms to form. Its possible they didn’t fully evaporate, but instead became “Plank relics”, which are a dark matter candidate.

PBH with mass 10^7g to 10^16g would have evaporated already, producing a background of gamma rays and gravity waves that we don’t see.

PBH with mass 10^17g to 10^22g would still exist today, and the gravity waves they generate are too small to be detected by current detectors. These are also a dark matter candidate.

PBH with mass >10^23, in sufficient numbers to explain the existence of dark matter, would cause gravity lensing that we don’t observe.

So according to observations, if the early universe produced PBH, they didn’t have an even distribution of masses from giant to tiny. Either they were all tiny (<1 ton), or they were all medium size (asteroid mass).

My favorite explanation of dark matter is the formation of asteroid mass PBHs when the early universe went through the phase change that separated the electroweak force into the electromagnetic force & nuclear weak force. Just a bit before electroweak symmetry breaking, the universe was in a state of supercooled false vacuum, and then bubbles of today’s vacuum energy started expanding. The pockets of false vacuum between the expanding bubbles of true vacuum would be slower to inflate, causing their density to grow relative to the rest of the universe, until they collapse into PBH. Because they’re all formed at the same time, from similar size pockets of similar density plasma, the resulting population of PBH are uniformly asteroid mass rather than having a Gaussian mass distribution.

Further reading:

Gaussian Planck Relics are Ruled-Out as Dark Matter by LIGO

Constraints on primordial black holes from the Galactic gamma-ray background

18,000 km/s

H A U L I N G A S S ! ! !

Each is moving at ~6% of the speed of light!

The paper linked to in the article says the thrusters have a specific impulse of 600s, and a thrust-to-power ratio of about 50 mN/kW.

Compared to the xenon ion thrusters used on the Dawn spacecraft, these new multi-mode thrusters produce more thrust, but are significantly less efficient. Dawn’s thrusters have a specific impulse of 3,100s and a thrust-to-power ratio of about 36 mN/kW.

Even so, it means satellites can be built with one small fuel tank that can power high efficiency electrospray thrusters to make slow maneuvers, or use the same fuel as a monopropellant to quickly get out of (or into) the way of something. ASCENT monopropellant thrusters can have a specific impulse slightly better (240 Isp) than traditional hydrazine monopropellant thrusters (235 Isp).

To be fair, primordial black holes are a candidate for explaining what dark matter is.

…There is a range of masses, , usually described as the ‘asteroid mass window’, where PBHs can make up all of the DM…

source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0550321324000609

It looks like an interesting concept, but I wonder if a 2 stage system would be more efficient?

The rocket motor would provide more speed if it were not weighed down by the electric propulsion system. If it was built in two detachable parts, you could recover and reuse the launcher.

Went to school as an elvish impersonator.

Maybe the “Epstine didn’t kill himself” people will have something to say about that.

Changing USA’s constitution requires a 2/3’s vote in both House of Representatives and Senate, plus ratification by 3/4’s of the States (i.e. 38 States).

Right now, neither side has the numbers to pass a constitutional amendment.

Republicans control 28 states, Democrats have 18, and 4 are split.

At the Federal level, the House and Senate are both close to an even 50/50 split.