Starship Asterisk*

sillyworm2 wrote:Someone is hurling stones at us.

Given our current state of readiness, would we have any recourse if this thing were on a collision course with Earth? It's going really fast, and since momentum is mv², it would be packing a punch!

Wow. Seeing the surface of a comet! Pretty jet of tail-stuff! When I was born 77 years ago we knew so little about any solar system denizen. We thought Mercury's rotation period was the same as its orbital period. I remember heartbreak when I read in the Toronto Globe and Mail that radio astronomer...

melrod wrote:Pictures like this give me a sense of relatable place compared to the grandeur of a galaxy or wondrous enormity of a nebula.

Same here. I find the nebula and galaxy pictures interesting, but I like the pictures of solid bodies better.

I like the small circular shape top center. It looks like a crater remnant with a small peak.

Would any of this energy be converted to radiation? So for example, you detect a gravity wave, get an idea of where to look, then see the radiation pulse follow it? Follow it because presumably gravity waves travel unimpeded, while radiation has the intervening intergalactic medium to slow it down.

When I click the image then zoom in, what strikes me are how many similarly bright stars are aligned in short arcs. Is that just an optical illusion, like my brain trying to find patterns in randomness?

This is a point, near the top, about one quarter of the way in from the right.

At first I thought it was Mars because it was slightly orangish.

Anyone know what that is?

I like zooming in for the Jupiter "dots", seeing those satellites in a row is so cool...

Where is that very clear evidence of present life on Mars? Ann It would be erroneous to expect a teeming biosphere on Mars. If the deserts of Antarctica by comparison are a tropical paradise, and life is just barely surviving in that environment with billions of years of evolution behind it, then w...

I've read that the meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs is estimated to have deposited in the order of a tonne of material on the Gliese 5 planets, so if there wasn't life there before, there is now. However, some simple analysis reveals that this is complete nonsense. You could vaporize the ent...

My guess is that all potentially habital bodies will have life. "Life" being bacterial or similar organisms, which is what 99+% of scientists mean. The reasoning is that life appeared very early in Earth's history, basically as soon as life could fossilize, we see fossils. Whether it cames...

What is the significance of the red arrow associated with the blue dot which, according to the explanation, represents our location? The red arrow is not mentioned in the explanation. Thanks in advance for any help. Overall, very interesting! Based on the video at the bottom of this page https://pu...