We live in changing times. While we once flippantly threw villains to the lions, now we seek to fire them into the Sun.
It sounds easy enough. The Sun is unbelievably massive, with gravity sufficient to keep the planets in their orbits over billions of years. How hard can it be?
Well, it may be harder than you think.
Fire away
The obvious way to fire someone into the Sun is the direct approach, as shown in South Park Season 1. Point a rocket at the Sun and fire. But can that work?
For a start, the rocket has to reach a speed greater than 11 kilometres per second, so it doesn’t get stuck orbiting Earth. Fine – we can send off our rocket at 20km per second for good measure. What happens next?
The results are, to be honest, disappointing. It isn’t even close: we miss the Sun by almost 100 million km.
But why? It’s because we have launched from Earth, which is travelling around the Sun at 30km per second.
In late October, the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) captured this dramatic and beautiful phase occurring in what’s known as the Red Spider Nebula, or NGC 6537.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
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