Starship Asterisk*

NASA’s Webb Reveals New Features in Heart of Milky Way

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasa ... milky-way/

If there were equal parts of matter particles and anti-matter particles way back when, why didn't everything just annihilate leaving no particles at all? The fact that we now find a lot more matter than anti-matter, suggests something separated the remaining particles at some point in time. Perhaps ...

"In the first few hundred thousand years after our Universe was born, a primordial hum ripped through a plasma of superheated particles. Scientists are listening in with the hope of gaining new insights about the mysterious force known as dark energy." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20...

In the linked article on the neutrino, the observatory "spotted a neutrino with relatively high energy that appeared to come from beyond our galaxy." How can you tell from where a particular neutrino came? Is there some characteristic of intra-galactic neutrinos different than a Milky-Way ...

The hot blue stars "have formed only in the past few million years" yet the galaxy is "300 million light years away." Sew! the hot blue stars formed in the galaxy's time frame a couple of million years ago, which we observe 300 million years later, a couple of million years plus ...

In a few thousand years, after there is nothing left to create jets, Rosetta's remains and the non-watery bits will still follow CG's orbit?

Mid-sized black hole discovered?

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/lang/a ... 2003734435

I thought Congress cancelled All Fools Day as racist, since it refers to them.

Does not the Dark Sky program mandate sodium lights? Is not the nearby light pollution attenuated or eliminated by sodium filters?

I'm amazed at the fine detail. It's like standing there. We really need to insert a huge electromagnet at the L1 point to protect against the solar wind. Only then will the atmosphere return.

I still believe it is a space phage in the process of engulfing and consuming its prey. PN G234.9-09.7 is it's youngling.

The dust lanes appear circular, not spiral, like a pebble dropped into calm waters. Gravity waves from the super-massive black hole? I don't believe in dark matter, methinks the gravitational effects of the black hole are severely underestimated, but then, my feeble understanding of such matters dis...

Does the term 'clouds clouds' refer to the atmospheric clouds and the reflection of the clouds?

Thanks, Ann! I had no idea they were so close together. Could go to such gas clouds an refill the oxygen tanks. Not that such a consummation would be necessary. Probably will use a closed hydrogen-based system, burn hydrogen to get water, then separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen.
- Hank

I didn't know you were bluish. Just wondering, about how far apart are the glowing particles of such dust or gas fields?

290 million km is somewhere in the middle of the asteroid belt.
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4758
Collision would be nice, maybe send some pieces our way to study?

What is that dot just to the right of the Moon, Saturn?

In a thousand years, the Northern Hemisphere will be tilted toward the sun at perihelion. Things will be pretty hot thenabouts. Did humans cause the miles-thick ice sheets that carved out the Great Lakes, Hudson River Valley, Columbia River Valley, to melt? What about the interglacial warming period...

APOD suggestion: Image 1 with mouse-over image2, just like bystander's image above.

I did not know that elves were directly connected to a lightning bolt. Am I correct in postulating the tip of the bright bolt marks the boundary between the stratosphere and ionosphere? Is the violet color from ionized nitrogen?

If the particles in the accretion disk are "like a liquid swirling around a drain," does it not then follow that all of the stars in the galaxy behave in much the same way? That is, will the stars orbiting the central super-massive black hole eventually approach and fall into the hole? Is ...

Thank you for your kind explanation to an obvious dummy, that'd be me. Of course my force figgers were merely an amusing exercise, since the interstellar distance is wrong, too far apart for much gravitational interaction. Sew! the cluster behaves like a miniature galaxy with the center of mass orbi...

A lot of people of the Buddhist mind-training flavor who escaped from Tibet use names for large periods of time such as kalpa s. One kalpa is the time between two big bangs. They posit infinite k alpa s of universes coming into being from causes and conditions, arising, existing, then ceasing to exi...

10 million stars in Omega Centauri spanning 150 light-years means about 1 star like our sun every 1.500.000 kilometers. Lessee, now where'd I put my slide rule?... F = GMm/r^2 Units m^3/kg-s^2 X kg^2/m^2 = kg-m/s^2 == N Slide Rule (1.99x10^30)^2 x 6.67x10^-11 = 2.69x10^50 (1.5X10^9)^2 = 2.25X10^18 ...

Sew! this is a huge region of protons? A stream of electrons from Xi Persei zipping through the cloud of widely separated protons fall into the protons releasing the photons we detect? Fascinating! Once captured, do incoming electrons then transfer enough of their energy to the captured electrons, k...