Recent comments in /f/askscience

RWDYMUSIC t1_jba6e1z wrote

I guess a decent analogy would be like if you were a salmon swimming in a river that is increasing its flow rate as you move down. Eventually the water starts flowing so fast that you can't out swim it and you can't make it back where you started. If you were swimming next to a salmon friend that friend wouldn't suddenly get launched to oblivion when they hit the no-swimming-back point, you could watch them appear to swim normally next to you but neither of you can make it back up river. Your only option at that point is to keep moving in the direction the water is flowing. In the black hole case, just replace the water with space-time and its the same scenario.

1

tylerni7 t1_jba5rgd wrote

The distance will affect the field strength, which will fall off as the distance cubed.

However, this is NOT the same as efficiency: if the stove ran with no pan coupled to it, the power usage would be low (only resistive losses and some negligible energy from the field permeating the air).

So while things will get slower further away, the stove will also use less energy. Trying to estimate the actual effect is tough and depends a lot on practical things (like the specifications of the coil and its drivers and the magnetic permeability of the stovetop and surroundings), but it's probably fair to round it to zero in practice.

28

aecarol1 t1_jba5q5u wrote

There is no telescope on Earth today that could resolve the lander. Even telescopes planned over the next few decades, with perfect skies, probably can't do much better than a couple of pixels. The can't effectively can't do anything other than say "something" is there. But they can't produce a "photo" of the lander you would recognize.

But the astronauts will lay down retroreflector panels, just like the Apollo astronauts did. Any decent size university has the equipment to flash a laser at that part of the moon and see a few photons reflected. This is done all the time to establish the distance between the Earth and the Moon, as well as to study the wobble of the moon.

Before they go, the place that they will land will not reflect laser pulses, but after they lay out the panel, it will.

tl;dr it will not be possible to photograph the landers from Earth, but it's easy to shoot large lasers at the moon and observe the photons come back only from places where astronauts or other man-made objects have landed. This is because they carefully place retroreflector panels.

13

msalerno1965 t1_jba416f wrote

Like putting a case on your phone, and wirelessly charging it. It does affect it. How much? Inverse square law most likely applies.

Which basically means, double the distance from a radio (magnetic) source, quadruple the signal loss.

Also why people crying about cell phone tower emissions while holding their phone to their ear are ... delusional.

Caveat: I have no degrees in anything, just a 40 year career in IT.

9

drhunny t1_jba3f78 wrote

There is almost no difference between how a Pu vs U fission bomb works. There are several minor differences in their chemical and nuclear properties that affect the engineering details.

The explosion in both cases is not chemical but nuclear. A lot of regular chemical explosives are used to suddenly change the shape of the plutonium or uranium mass in such a way that it goes from being a shape that absolutely can't generate a nuclear explosion to a shape that easily can. And then a tiny particle accelerator (basically similar to a Tesla coil but about the size of your finger) turns on and sprays the new shape with a bunch of neutrons which kick-start the nuclear reaction. The timing is important because it's in the ideal shape for less than a thousandth of a second.

The particle accelerator acts just like a spark plug in a car's engine. A car engine that uses gasoline (petrol) has a mix of gasoline and air inside a cylinder. That mix changes shape (the cylinder compresses it) and when it's at just the right shape, the spark plug ignites the mix.

But think about a diesel engine. Those don't have spark plugs. The mix is compressed down so much that it ignites itself. That can also happen in a gasoline engine if the fuel is bad or the design is wrong -- the mix can ignite before the spark plug fires. Similarly, the only key difference between Pu and U bombs is that Pu has a high possibility of accidentally starting the nuclear explosion a bit early, before it's at the ideal shape (and without needing the particle accelerator).

As a result, you can't use the simplest engineering design with plutonium. You can make a uranium bomb where the starting shape is a rod and a hollow cylinder and use an explosive to shoot the rod into the cylinder. Then the particle accelerator is turned on right when the rod is perfectly lined up with the cylinder. But if you try this with plutonium, there's a really high chance that before the rod gets lined up, the nuclear reactions start in the plutonium. The nuclear reactions are so fast that basically the plutonium rod melts and expands into a blob and hits the cylinder instead of sliding right into the center. It's still a nuclear explosion, but it's a dud because instead of getting the equivalent of thousands of tons of TNT explosive power, it only generates maybe the same as a few tons of TNT before it shatters and stops the nuclear reaction. So for plutonium you have to use a much harder to engineer design where it starts as a large hollow sphere and the explosives compress it into a small solid ball.

25