I'm sure there are a bunch of beach bums wondering if they can surf those gravitational waves.

SpaceX’s Starship prototype has taken flight for the first time







BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—It flew. It really did. On Thursday night, SpaceX's stainless steel Starship prototype took to the skies for the first time.

It was a beautiful night for Starhopper's debut. In the wake of a rare mid-summer front, temperatures in South Texas fell below their sultry averages for late July, with somewhat drier air. By 10:45pm local time, a mostly cloudy sky had broken into a mostly clear night along the coast. So when Starhopper leaped into the skies, it did so beneath the stars—toward the stars.

Never before had SpaceX taken this stubby, cobbled-together spacecraft off its leash. Never before had the company's next-generation Raptor rocket engine flown free. And so as the engine roared to life Thursday night, no one wearing a SpaceX badge was quite sure what would happen when they set Starhopper free.

It made for nervous moments at the roadside, about two kilometers from the launch pad. The launch lit up the night sky, first with fire, and then smoke. Soon, the prodigious amount of smoke produced by the Raptor engine obscured the vehicle. Was it moving? We couldn't tell. Eventually, the smoke cleared, and the vehicle had moved. How high had it gone was not immediately clear, perhaps 20 or 30 meters, but company founder Elon Musk declared the flight a success.

And the test was a success. SpaceX had shown that not only could Raptor breathe fire, but they could control the complex engine enough to ascend, hover, move a short distance horizontally, and then safely return to the surface.

TESS hits the trifecta: Nearby bright star has 3 interesting planets

Thanks to the massive trove of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler mission, we now have a good idea of what kinds of planets are out there, where they orbit, and how common the different types are. What we lack is a good sense of what that implies in terms of the conditions on the planets themselves. Kepler can tell us how big a planet is, but it doesn't know what the planet is made of. And planets in the "habitable zone" around stars could be consistent with anything from a blazing hell to a frozen rock.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (or TESS) was launched with the intention of helping us figure out what exoplanets are actually like. TESS is designed to identify planets orbiting bright stars relatively close to Earth, conditions that should allow follow-up observations to figure out their compositions and potentially those of their atmospheres.

Right now, there's a conference happening that's dedicated to describing some of the first discoveries made using TESS. Those discoveries include a three-planet system that seems perfectly positioned to test all of our exoplanet characterization techniques.

. . .

The new system

The new three-planet system is called TOI-270, and it's about 75 light years from Earth. The star at the center of the system is a red dwarf, a bit less than half the size of the Sun. Despite its small size, it's brighter than most of the nearby stars we know host planets. And—critically—it's stable. That means that variations in the star's light are minimal, and they're less likely to get in the way of trying to pick up subtle changes caused by its orbiting planets.



The three planets have orbital periods of 3.4 days, 5.7 days, and 11.4 days. The ratio among these periods can be expressed as ratios of integers, a feature that's called "orbital resonance."

These resonances tend to stabilize the orbits, keeping the planets' interactions from ejecting one of them from the system or send one diving into the star. Based on the size of the planets, the trio consists of a super Earth as the innermost planet, while the two outer planets are somewhat larger, falling into the class termed sub-Neptunes.

Right now, we only have enough observations of the TOI-270 system to confirm the existence of the three planets. Orbital simulations, however, suggest that a wide range of orbital eccentricities would be stable in the system, so it will take extended observations to figure out the precise details of the orbits.

But, since the longest orbit is under 12 days, that's not so onerous. Once the orbits are figured out, the planets are close enough together to cause transit-timing variations, providing us one avenue toward getting the masses of the planets. They're also large enough and close enough to the star to drag it around a bit while they orbit, creating Doppler shifts that would allow an independent measurement of the mass.

Dang it, looks like non are habitable do to temp. I want us to find one that we MIGHT be able to move to.

Mars was volcanically active too, so it stands to reason there are Lava tunnels and caves on Mars too.

No none of those are acceptable. Still to close to the idiots on the earth. I want it hard for them to find me.

Have you tried getting to the moon? Go ahead. We'll wait

Odds are, but I haven't seen pictures of them. I have with the moon.



Have you tried getting to the moon? Go ahead. We'll wait.