Starship Asterisk*

A very pretty picture to be sure, but how is it related to astronomy? If anyone wants to see wonderful photographs, there are hundreds of good photography sites; I'd prefer that APOD stick with astronomy.

I am always struck by the nearly-perfect spherical shape of these 200-odd clusters. (Yeah, I know... they're called 'spherical clusters'!) I cannot understand how there could have been all these spherical hydrogen clouds at the outset, all with well-distributed denser regions ready to condense into...

fastartcee wrote: I've contemplated whether some kind of mega-nova could eventually produce a spherical cluster, but, as you've pointed out, unless the expanding debris of a nova 'bumps into' something (a molecular cloud, or another expanding debris field), star genesis will not occur. But what if ...

I am always struck by the nearly-perfect spherical shape of these 200-odd clusters. (Yeah, I know... they're called 'spherical clusters'!) I cannot understand how there could have been all these spherical hydrogen clouds at the outset, all with well-distributed denser regions ready to condense into...

I am always struck by the nearly-perfect spherical shape of these 200-odd clusters. (Yeah, I know... they're called 'spherical clusters'!) I cannot understand how there could have been all these spherical hydrogen clouds at the outset, all with well-distributed denser regions ready to condense into ...

Come on, AstroBuffs ...it's obviously a bull's-eye target built by Klingons. They (ugly, but very advanced) accomplished this by burying a powerful anti-gravity device at a depth of 90 +/- 3 kilometres, knowing that in a few million Earth years natural erosive processes would slowly create the desir...

many people argue that this is some other phenomenon, because the lensed quasar appear as four distinct dots as opposed to common "ring" feature I know of nobody who makes that argument. The mechanism by which gravitational lenses can produce multiple images (as opposed to arcs) is well u...