What kind of natural event are you looking for? The atmosphere polarizes EM waves, binary stars polarize EM waves, debris disks polarize EM waves, supernovae apparently polarize EM waves...

That moment when you can't argue with facts so you tried to pull an 'am testing y'all'

Guy really needs to go play Kerbal Space Program RSS seriously

Good luck launching something up there to tow the junk all the way to Venus. The junk does not have its own propulsion system, and most definitely not enough to dish 4 km/s needed to leave Earth’s orbit and intercept Venus.

Why add prohibitive amount of fuel just to send the junk to some distant destination when you can just get functional satellites to, like, do controlled deorbit over uninhabited areas and let atmospheric entry destroy them.

The idea of high altitude haze is for the haze to be in a zone where the atmospheric pressure is too low to effectively transport heat from dayside to nightside, and thus causing it to look like airless planet. That said the haze itself might move and jeopardize this, but I figured it's better to ask.

People were indeed surprised, although I’m wondering if a very high altitude dark haze layer would be able to cloak signs of carbon dioxide, which the paper notably points to the lack of, and mimic airless body.

Well, the lack of atmosphere on a planet we expect to have the strongest outgassing (due to intense tidal/induction heating) to replenish anything lost in the wind is telling things about the other worlds. Still - fingers crossed for results on TRAPPIST-1 g which are apparently in the works right now.

JWST is a scientific instrument, not a pretty picture taker. If you want the science, here is the paper. it doesn't have the pretty pictures, because that's not the point.

I’d go with humans because humans are the only animals that do astrology

It’s also really, really young, at 140 million years according to Wikipedia. Jovian worlds and brown dwarfs form hot, and at young age they can be as hot as the coolest stars at ~2000-3000 Kelvins. They cool over time, but the rate is slowed from what you’d normally expect due to gravitational contraction converting planet mass’ gravitational potential energy into thermal energy as the planet shrinks down.

I swear we had this same proposal before except it was with comets. What’s with people suggesting we hitch a ride on passing rocks?

I swear we had this same proposal before except it was with comets. What’s with people suggesting we hitch a ride on passing rocks?

Good thing the actual length of the neck is written right at the beginning of the article, which makes zero mention of the ‘Hollywood sign’!

No one reads the god damn article.

We do not have data for the lower end, but we do have some clue of where the higher end may be. We already have discovered a few systems where the mass fraction is very different from the Solar System’s (where planets take up ~0.134% of all system mass). Going by Wiki numbers, Gliese 876’s mass fraction within known planets is almost 1%, while Titawin and HR 8799 both have that number at almost 2%.

Got it - you have no intention of learning. Hope your bubble is at least fun to stay in.

It's a little funny to hear Mercury mining now that I know it's weirdly iron-poor on the surface. Despite having the highest core fraction, its surface is really lacking in that stuff. I wonder what resources can be found on the Mercurian surface - I recall carbon is one, but not sure about other stuff aside from the usual silicates.

Mercury is known to have a magnetosphere (albeit a weak one). by the way.

please don’t try to get yourself a personal magnetosphere. It’s not worth it.

Jokes aside, I believe we’re not really sure how and why intrinsic magnetospheres show up on Earth and Mercury but not Venus and Mars (which have induced ones which block solar wind better instead). Mercury, Earth, and Mars are all known to have liquid core, but it seems Mars’ core isn’t convecting and thus no dynamo.

The atmosphere blocks radiation well enough on its own, thanks. An intrinsic magnetosphere doesn’t really protect the atmosphere either.

Last I checked like 95% the mass of the moons of Saturn are within Titan. You’re not really getting any benefit slamming the smaller moons, aside from destroying their own wonders and create a slightly bigger moon that’s just about as useless and probably way more boring.

Millions. Good luck finding the material as well

There is nothing in physics that prevents us from piling up enough rock until it turns into a planet, but honestly that would be a really stupid waste of resources

And why would you want to terraform those iceballs anyway? Just dig down and live in the ice shell or the subsurface oceans. Not much difference really.

I’d like to slip this link, which contains another link to an answer about why a magnetic field is not critically helpful in keeping an atmosphere intact.

Found it

I’m not sure how much thinner atmosphere would be required for radiation to be a big issue - I mean it doesn’t just instantly become an issue once it crosses a certain threshold - but I think it’s likely that any breathable mix is going to reduce the radiation to negligible levels.