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  • Hacker News
  • And the nearest star to our solar system is 4.3 light years away. Coincidence?

    :-)

    by gramie
  • careful, the Alpha Centaurians might be on HN ...
    by insane_dreamer
  • This sounds like the "hmm this is strange" first step of discovery.
    by two_handfuls
  • cue:ominous creapy alien sound track .play
    by metalman
  • It's well known that higher solar wind/CMEs density/speed/etc that comes with the peak of the 11 year intensity cycles scatters cosmic rays before they enter the inner heliosphere. Combine this with the 1~3 years it takes for the solar wind to travel out through the heliosphere and you get the phase difference. Really cool unintended sensor empirical data on it though.

    Don't try to correlate with the sun spots, correlate with the solar wind/cmes from the spots getting out far enough to effectively scatter the incoming cosmic rays away.

    by superkuh
  • The paper claims directly "the rate of degradation over time remains unsatisfactorily unpredictable" but you are claiming the authors do not understand or are unaware of the point you are making?
    by terminalbraid
  • I thought it only takes a few days for solar wind to travel from the sun to the Earth? Can you clarify?
    by 3lambda
  • Is the relevant radiation solar radiation, or is there damage from radiation coming from the direction the optics are pointed? If it's the latter, then maybe the sun's emissions interact with inbound particles from sources outside the solar system? (I don't have sufficient background or time to check whether the paper already rules this out.)
    by jimrandomh
  • you should see what cosmic rays do to space telescopes

    public almost never sees what raw images look like

    RAW https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/spiral...

    FINAL https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/spiral...

    * https://blog.galaxyzoo.org/2010/04/12/how-to-handle-hubble-i...

    they also slowly destroy the sensors since they are physical particles moving at almost the speed of light

    by ck2
  • thanks for the links, that's really interesting to look at

    do you happen to know how exactly those artifacts are cleaned up?

    by r_lee
  • Oh wow, I thought those were stars at first.
    by plmpsu
  • Reminds me of the radiation after Chernobyl causing flashes on the physical film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOLBEx5DBaE
    by netsharc
  • There is a known reason for this (among radiation belt enthusiasts) that the authors either don't mention or don't know. Hubble's orbit is in the inner Van Allen belt, where the radiation intensity is out of phase with the solar cycle (because the atmosphere is thinner at solar minimum, and expands at solar maximum, affecting the inner radiation belt). See Figure 6 (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/718954d6-3...) of this paper (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020JA02...). Hubble is in a low altitude, near equatorial orbit, so the red curve (small L) is the most relevant one.
    by AgentLemon