Starship Asterisk*

Does anyone know if it would actually look like this if you were standing there? The sky shot looks separate ... the whole thing is a composited image. The sky looks like a long exposure tracking shot with triple filter for the colors, I presume. Meanwhile the ground shot was probably only a second...

> Its last eruption is thought to have been about 25 million years ago.

That's pretty recent!

The Dinosaurs were long dead.

The planet was 4B years old and Olympus Mons was still erupting?

What really struck me about this image is how MANY foreground stars there are. Even the dim dots are solar systems (though some of those could be noise). Just about every other pixel is a system, it seems.

I wonder if the cloudy sections in the core would resemble the nebulas - making ours " milky " :?: The way I understand it, the milky-ness is a consequence of the vast sea of stars being unresolved by our eyes. Our eyes have tiny apertures and are nowhere close to being able to resolve th...

Whenever I see a closeup of a galaxy like this, the numbers are just mindblowing ... something like 300B star systems for the Milky Way alone. Just staggering. And I *think* those survey estimates are only counting live stars. There could be many more dead systems on top of that... Brown Dwarfs and ...

So as I understand it, the weird shape of this planetary nebula arises from the presence of a rather thick and unusually opaque torus of matter surrounding the star. Were it not for the torus this nebula would be more spherically shaped. The central remnant is apparently remarkably hot, ~200k degree...

Sometimes I like to set up some lawn chairs out back and watch these go off.

You know, like on weekends.

I presume that most (or all?) of those stars are either in the foreground or the background?

Would be an amazing thing to see... if only we could survive the radiation.

There probably needs to be some blazing jets blasting out of the magnetic poles of that BH.

if the blast come from the "+", why is the edge of the cavity concave to it? My guess is it is a turbulent jet that is blasting toward us but off axis a bit, maybe 30 degrees. As the jet blasts into the local medium, it balloons out in turbulent eddy's that expand radially away from the l...

10 billion supernova explosions?

How much energy is one standard supernova (sn) I wonder?

The sub-link in the APOD description was less helpful than I was hoping.

Still worth reading though.

Edit: (Answer by asking Google to convert between Joules and Supernovae.)

If its incoming and outgoing trajectories seem to aim at the same star, that could be a somewhat convincing clincher. incoming and outgoing trajectories are not consistent with this statement. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/a2017_u1_v2a.jpg?itok=1...

That 6 to 1 aspect ratio looks suspiciously unnatural? No ice or dust ejecta near the sun. Hmm. Comes out of nowhere and pulls a nice tight slingshot maneuver well inside Mercury's orbit? I'm starting to wish that maybe this thing just blew the Fermi Paradox away ;) If its incoming and outgoing traj...

Wow, two supermassives that will eventually merge? Spectacular image. Are there any estimates on the actual mass of these two black holes? Supermassive means on the order of millions or billions of solar masses, but that's a fairly wide range. I wonder what the gravitational waves from this event wo...

As I recall from school, neutron stars are in fact not composed of pure neutrons. There is expected to be some complexity in their structure. Some ratio of protons are typically mixed in with the degenerate neutron matter and to balance the charge there is also a soup of electrons typically flowing ...

Are the features exaggerated? Caption says the colors are enhanced, but what about the vertical relief?

The mountains look much higher than they ought to given the scale. Craters look too deep.

Is that left side image the best resolution we have?

Or is there a full resolution image available somewhere?

-s

Here's a lecture by Laird Close where he talks about this system and how he hopes this technology will ultimately enable us to image light coming off of exoplanets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVeTncz3G2Y&feature=youtu.be Some of the talking points from this lecture: - By analyzing Kepler da...

LocalColor wrote:The "wow factor" is off the scale with this image!

Looks so amazing that it seems fake to me. Without inspecting the image carefully with photoshop, my first guess is that this is a composite of several lucky lightning strike shots.

-s

At 500 ly, I think it is going to be awhile until we have anything near able to get there in a reasonable time frame Where "awhile" equals "never". ... Terraforming, I think, at best, would take centuries. Can humanity engage in endeavors that condemn entire lives to barren and ...

At 500 ly, I think it is going to be awhile until we have anything near able to get there in a reasonable time frame Where "awhile" equals "never". Well, when considering current culture and technology, "never" might be true in a practical sense. But "never" ...

Wow, so much material is being stripped out of the galaxy that stars are forming outside of it?

Amazing.

I wouldn't think that the medium between galaxies would be so dense that such a thing could happen.

-s

String Theories are a good example... People have been hunting desperately to find ways to validate many of the core and exotic assertions of these theories precisely because these theories suffer a lot of disrespect and disregard for being "unverifiable philosophy". I'd say string theori...

Theories don't get very far unless you can back them up with experimental results based on their predictions. That's a rather obsolete view of how science works. It would be much more accurate to say that theories are either bolstered or disproved by observational results (which may or may not be f...

It has been suggested that gravity acting over multiple universes explains its supposed weakness relative to the other basic forces in physics, which would mean that gravity from 'elsewhere' could affect this universe, as well as the reverse situation. There was a Science Friday show last year wher...