Starship Asterisk*

Can someone clarify why the ball representing "liquid fresh water" is so much larger than the one representing "all fresh-water lakes and rivers"? I thought at first that the difference must be held up in Arctic and Antarctic ice, but it's telling us "liquid fresh water".

An example of why we often use pseudocolor palettes when trying to get more out of an image. I've converted the original to grayscale and then applied a common pseudocolor mapping used for astronomical images. It results in an image that lets our eyes see more detail than would otherwise be apparen...

Can anyone explain whether space debris accumulates at the L-points and whether it could endanger the spacecraft? I originally understood the Webb to be targeted for an L-point along the line of the Earth's orbit, and thought in terms of Jupiter's "Trojan" and "Greek" asteroids -...

Oddly, the Moon's disk is quite large in the picture - but very faint. It took me a careful scan of the enlarged image to find it: just right of the frame centre. The lower limb, above the slight bulge in the skyline, is more obvious than the rest of the disk.

Can anyone say where on the planet this is located?

Also what are the black dots that litter the frame? Are they surface features or just imaging effects?

The text says it's computer-generated. Can anyone say what real-life scale it represents, in terms of distance/size, mass and time? I believe this is a simulation of stellar mass black holes colliding. So the black holes are several solar masses, and their event horizons several tens of kilometers ...

The text says it's computer-generated. Can anyone say what real-life scale it represents, in terms of distance/size, mass and time? I believe this is a simulation of stellar mass black holes colliding. So the black holes are several solar masses, and their event horizons several tens of kilometers ...

The text says it's computer-generated. Can anyone say what real-life scale it represents, in terms of distance/size, mass and time?

I don't see any "bar". What I do see is an asymmetric centre, with more bright material in the upper part (as seen in the image) of the central swirl than in the lower. What am I supposed to be looking for?

Intriguing. At first I thought it was suggesting that the Great Red Spot was the southern magnetic pole, but the text refers to the Great Blue Spot. Are they associated?

I've never seen a supernova myself (I was only six when the one in the Large Magellanic Cloud occurred), and I'd love to see something as impressive as a supernova as bright as the full Moon. It might put a handicap on other astronomical observations for the duration of the phenomenon. Can anyone s...

It depends what you're counting. If you're counting things , you start at one. If you're counting quantities (like time) you start at zero. Not in this case. The Christian Era (or "Common Era") started with the year 1, not the year 0 - which was not designated. This means that centuries -...

Much as I agree that the "new decade" stuff is misplaced, let's get back to the astrophysics. The main page says that the Betelgeuse supernova won't be a danger to us, but will "rival the full moon" in brightness. What it doesn't say is how long it will last. Wanting to know abou...

I read through the - informative as always - text below the image, expecting to find mention of the human figure in the centre, and the heavenly body s/he is apparently holding in their right hand. Somehow among the tour of the rest of the image content, this detail seems frustratingly to have been ...

Does the red emission nebula that makes the Horsehead visible, have a name? Yes it does. IC 434 But note, I am just an interested layman. I could be wrong. Wait for confirmation from an authority. Thanks for the info - although IC 434 seems more like a catalogue number than a name. I was just a lit...

Does the red emission nebula that makes the Horsehead visible, have a name?

"... unconfirmed sister planet ..."? Does that mean suspected to exist from actual observations, or added purely speculatively for the purposes of the artist's image?

Interested to see this, as I hadn't seen this information in such a form. What I've seen in TV programmes on cosmology, is that the collision that led to the formation of our Moon, also set Earth's rotational axis at 23.4 degrees - thus giving us our seasons. But this gives us the impression that ro...

This is disappointing in that the image of the galaxy remains a 2-D representation. When I read "virtual fly-by", I was kind of expecting it to reveal a 3-D structure - which of course I knew would have to be inferred rather than observed.

Why does it need to be a reconstruction? We can understand that the first time it happened, the Apollo crew were unprepared to film it, but the lunar mission continued for 10 more orbits of the moon, and there were further lunar missions, all with orbit modules. There was plenty of opportunity to fi...

The link purporting to show the start of the ionisation trail, under the text "can be seen" is a bit of a disappointment. Is it April 1?

Hitchhiker's Guide was right! The dolphins really did leave the Earth before it was demolished by the Vogons!

Are these actual telescopic images, false-colour enhancements, overlays of gamma images with visible light, or artists' impressions? The text doesn't make it clear.

Joules wrote:Is there a teapot in the trunk? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
It'd be nice to finally get this Russell conundrum out of the way.

I already raised this point (with the link to Wikipedia). But to satisfy (or confound) Russell, it would need to be in free orbit IMO.

But this was a test firing, where the usual payload would have been blocks of concrete, Thanks for this explanation. I thought the world - or at least NASA - had gone mad. Why didn't they think of making Bertrand Russell's teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot a reality if they fe...