Starship Asterisk*

Hmm, I'm curious, how do they know it's a gas giant?

I would have thought that a gas giant orbiting that quickly and close to a star would get evaporated (or something similar) over time.

This is a great pic : http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061005.html
I wonder why it looks so 'washed out' when compared to the more usual pics of galaxies they put up such as http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060707.html
Is there more of our Milky Way to look through or is it just camera settings?

Back on topic - more or less...
How come a black hole is black if photons have no mass? Surely for gravity to act on something, that thing has to have mass?

And if photons do have mass then how can they travel at the speed of light?

This should be easy enough for someone to en-lighten me

"Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man." ~J. Robert Oppenheimer (speaking about Albert Einstein)

unfortunately Oppenheimer's will take a bit longer!

This article is one of the worst I've ever read : http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2003/cloverleaf/ Using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, the scientists found a huge quantity of dense interstellar gas -- the environment required for active star formation Just because ...

This article is one of the worst I've ever read : http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2003/cloverleaf/ All they have actually got is a large amount of hot HCN. From this they have inferred everything else they talk about. I haven't got time to explain precisely what I'm talking about as I'm at work on my lunch b...

Harry, thank you so much for posting that link. I'm no scientist, just an interested observer, and have been having problems with the big bang theory for a while now. It's just always seemed too precarious to base a creation theory on (basically) one observation. When I was at school, I was taught t...

Has anyone else noticed that all the other mesas have very irregular shapes but 'the face' has 4 straight (ish) sides with rounded corners?

Chance????

Has to be the Hubble Ultra Deep Field for me.
I downloaded the full size (150MB) tiff from NASA and zooming into that is one of my favorite ways of daydreaming

Absolutely!

Conclusive evidence of life on mars!