Recent comments in /f/space

beatle42 t1_j96espg wrote

Reply to so why don't earth slow down do to the drag of the water created in the tidel forces by the moon? by SnurrDass

It is. A quick read in Wikipedia notes:

> Over millions of years, Earth's rotation has been slowed significantly by tidal acceleration through gravitational interactions with the Moon. Thus angular momentum is slowly transferred to the Moon at a rate proportional to r − 6 r^{{-6}}, where r r is the orbital radius of the Moon. This process has gradually increased the length of the day to its current value, and resulted in the Moon being tidally locked with Earth.

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MonsterRideOp t1_j96dyz5 wrote

Reply to Sun unleashes massive X2-class solar flare during geomagnetic storm watch (video) by Realistic-Plant3957

I do wish they would stick with one descriptor here. "A massive solar flare" and "The huge solar flare", please just pick one.😅

That said this was neither "massive" nor "huge". X2.2 is just the start of the X scale and there is evidence for flares in the X45 range and it's thought the sun can produce flares up to and over X100. Now those flares are "massive" and "huge" and can even be called unbelievable.

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Felaguin t1_j963x1x wrote

Reply to comment by Academic_Peanut4232 in Where does space really begin? Chinese spy balloon highlights legal fuzziness of ‘near space’ by HarpuasGhost

You certainly chose a worthy Reddit name. You’re conflating things that are obvious balloons, leaving the discussion of spy versus weather versus hobby aside, with pilot reports of UAPs doing extraordinary things. Some of the pilot reports are easily explained, others (including footage captured by said pilots) are still unexplained.

Your original response to me talked about stuff coming in “from above 80,000 feet into the detection-edge of Earth-based radars”. We use radars to track objects in orbit at altitudes up to 1000 km (over 3 million feet since your inability to reason suggests a further inability to do math).

You further talk wildly about breaking the laws of physics. Nothing the first spy balloon we shot down or any of the other subsequent balloons have done breaks any laws of physics.

Control of national airspace is a point of international law. Whether or not the nation in question can do anything about violations of that airspace is a question of their capability versus the violator’s capability. No one questioned the USSR’s right to shoot down Francis Gary Powers’ U2, they simply weren’t able to do it until his flight. The US “controls” the sealanes within its national waters but drug runners violate that control regularly — it’s still the US’s national right to control those sealanes.

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