Za Abyss

WEBDEV IS HARD

2025-02-06T03:08:59.628468+00:00

Feb 5, 2025. I finally decided to move off of Github in favor of a self-hosted solution. Related, I finally have a use for yinglet.com zat isn't just a redirect! Last semester was a goddamn nightmare but zis one is shaping up to be a lot nicer. A few classes I'm extremely interested in, and one zat's entirely unnecessary but also has no attendance policy. Of particular note is Intro to Quantum Computing; I zhink it's interesting, and it's honestly a nice reinforcement of some basics from quantum mechanics, but it's required too.

I GOTS CRITTERS

2024-09-30T21:35:56.741475+00:00

Sept 30, 2024. Finally gazhered some more 88x31s for my friends page - if you want yours added, please poke me! If I know you well enough to accept, you'll know how to get in touch. I've had a partner visiting for za past few days (I love you byte ðŸ’•) but I've been managing to stay on top of my homework so zat's good also.

STARS ARE LIKE OGRES. SOMETIMES.

2024-09-22T03:31:25.215114+00:00

For the most part, anything that happens in space takes either hundreds of thousands-to-millions of years, or it's just one big cataclysmic event. Star formation and supernovae are pretty good examples of this dichotomy, and for the most part, it's true. Everything involves just So Much Stuff that there's no way anything reasonable would happen on Earth timescales, right?
Well, I mean, there's variable stars - I haven't talked about those yet, but rest assured they're coming eventually - which have periods on the order of hours to months. Their luminosity oscillates with time by... I'm getting ahead of myself.

RIG FOR SILENT RUNNING

2024-09-14T20:54:47.937832+00:00

Sept 14, 2024. Traffic is a bastard sometimes, i zhought i was gonna be 20 minutes early to pick up my QPP from za airport but i ended up being 45 minutes late.

weh.
at least za fishes are safe here! we're gonna get some damn good carbonara soon.

I have a blog now

2024-09-13T19:10:35.351533+00:00

It's currently Friday, September 13zh, and I've spent like 2 hours writing pyzhon code to generate an atom feed. It's been a good review of working wizh databases and whatnot, but I decided to use notepad++ as my dev environment.
Jury's out on if zat was a good idea.

TIME TO TALK ABOUT MY NAME

2024-09-13T19:00:35.335535+00:00

Abyss isn't just my handle - it's the name I use in real life! When I give my name at cafes and such I always go "Abyss, like the ocean place" but it's really a space thing (surprising absolutely nobody). But to talk about that, we gotta build up to it so strap in, we're goin on a trip.

Hey. Why do galaxies look like that?

2024-09-13T19:00:35.319407+00:00

Image: NASA
Not every galaxy looks this pretty, but a lot of them do! There are many kinds of galaxies, and today we're going to talk about spiral galaxies. Spirals are near and dear to my heart - we're in one right now! The Milky Way, our home galaxy, is a spiral, as is the Pinwheel Galaxy pictured above. You'll never guess why we called it that :3
The neat thing about spiral galaxies is that they're very flat. Almost all their stars are located in a disc, orbiting a central supermassive black hole. In our galaxy, we call that black hole Sagittarius A*. Those of you who read my last space post might be able to guess why it's called that! In a physical disk, like a CD or vinyl record, the outer rim spins faster than the inner rim. However, when dealing with orbits (like a solar system), the general rule is that further away things are moving slower because there's less gravity to keep them held in the system. Spiral galaxies don't really do either of these things. It turns out that, due to some weird dark matter physics, most spiral galaxies have a (alright time for a fancy phrase) flat rotation curve; stars on the very outer rim are moving at just about the same speed as stars closer to the center. This is one way we can determine things like the density of dark matter!

Imagine a spherical cow in a vacuum.

2024-09-13T19:00:35.304799+00:00

That's a star, baby! Or, well. almost. The funny thing about stars is that they are remarkably simple. They're spherical plasma in a vacuum! Sure, they have all sorts of fun physics in the core, and stellar atmospheres are an incredibly complex environment, but as soon as you leave their immediate vicinity they become extremely easy to study. You wanna know the best part? 90% of the time, knowing one specific thing about a star is enough to tell you everything you'd ever want to know.

My favorite celestial object is PSR B1257+12

2024-09-13T19:00:35.288770+00:00

and by the end of today's space fact y'all are gonna know exactly why it's called that. Turns out, there's a lot of sky! Exactly 4*pi steradians, to be precise. (We'll get to what those are in a bit i promise) There are a bunch of different ways of telling someone where something is up there that are way better than "that bright dot by the moon", and we're gonna talk about a few of them today. Starting at the beginning.

Astronomy has some weird conventions.

2024-09-13T19:00:35.273552+00:00

Radio astronomy especially. Our field uses CGS instead of SI units, for one. CGS stands for centimeters, grams, and seconds, which are the base units in astronomy. For comparison, SI uses meters, kilograms, and seconds. Let's look at my least favorite unit, for energy. In SI, the rest of the physical sciences, energy is given in Joules. You've almost certainly heard of this unit before, though maybe not the definition - 1 joule is the amount of energy you'd need to push 1 kilogram a distance of 1 meter with a 1 newton force. Easy stuff, nice units. (technically that definition is for work but work and energy are basically the same thing it's fine)