Starship Asterisk*

Very interesting, but I don't understand the images. Two sets of images are set against each other. One set of images shows the clumpiness of the dark matter distribution and the proto-galaxy distribution, and the other set shows the clumpiness of the stellar distribution. But which is which? Ann T...

The Large Magellanic Cloud is a face-on (and therefore round-looking) galaxy. Appearances can be deceiving. From wikipedia (which has the bracketed references if you're interested): "More recently, this inclined geometry for field stars in the LMC has been confirmed via observations of Cepheid...

r.w.b wrote:What is the faint object, just below the centre of the overlay circle? Is that a background star or galaxy?

"The nebulous object is a random far-background galaxy of no connection." taken from http://www.phys.lsu.edu/SNprogenitor/

With this type of supernova, shouldn't the companion erupt due to the mass it gained while it was being buffeted by the supernova? I think the star's gases and dust that was blown out could have collected on the companion, therefore it gaining a lot of mass. If this were to happen, would there be a...

Stars merge atoms (fusion) Oops! guess I was inking without thinking on that one. But still, could the white dwarf star that is going supernova pull enough mass from its companion that it ceases to be a functioning star? I’d like to understand what happens to a star whose mass is artificially reduc...

We have previously heard, possibly on APOD, of anomalously fast moving stars. An example is RX J0822-4300, " currently moving away from the center of the Puppis A supernova remnant at over 3 million miles per hour " as the Wiki has it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RX_J0822-4300 If there i...

If we knew the lens and sensor size this picture was taken with, we could begin to deduce the critical angles of reflection and test this hypothesis against other images of pillars. If multiple images from different perspectives all show the fan at the same angular height, than it is entirely an op...