Starship Asterisk*

On the topic of visualizations, Jean-Pierre Luminet is a French astrophysicist who made this image of a black hole 45 YEARS AGO! The first one ever apparently. Using maths, and a 1970’s computer… He’s still alive and still studying black holes today, he deserves a mention on this black hole week! (I...

I thought that a visualization such as this one only shows the theoretical anatomy of a black hole, but if we sent actual observers all around the black hole and asked them what they saw, they would all report the same thing! No matter where you stand around a black hole, it will eerily appear as fa...

Is a black hole the brightest thing in the Universe because it keeps its light? In a black hole, things go to infinity, things go to zero, things go we know not. What does light do? Is there a limit to the number of possible photons, or is brightness theoretically infinite? Photons are just packets...

From the link posted just above: "You can roughly think of a black hole as a star that traps all of its light" . I like the " its " light. We normally read that "even light" can't escape a black hole, but saying "its" own light makes me wonder further. For in...

From the link posted just above: "You can roughly think of a black hole as a star that traps all of its light" . I like the " its " light. We normally read that "even light" can't escape a black hole, but saying "its" own light makes me wonder further. For ins...

Black holes are often depicted as devouring cosmic cannibals that destroy everything, even equations! In my book however they are of an all-mighty beauty. Black holes are the ultimate objets, the ultimate manifestation of gravity, the ultimate evolution of stars (leaving aside galactic ones), we cal...

Roy wrote: ↑Mon May 06, 2024 11:40 am Superb. Magnificent. Appropriate music, never heard it before.

The caption credits some guy named Strauss for the music but due credit might belong to someone else.
Who knows, maybe a total eclipse seen sideways looks like this:

If a black hole is, indeed, a singularity, then by definition it has zero volume. No matter what its mass. As we have no physics at this point that can describe the details of the actual black hole, though... who knows? I appreciate your answer! I imagine mathematicians being comfortable with singu...

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_240505.jpg A Black Hole Disrupts a Passing Star If the star directly impacts a massive black hole, then the star falls in completely -- and everything vanishes . I suppose the "everything vanishes" part is a manner of speaking. Everything falls out of...

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_240505.jpg A Black Hole Disrupts a Passing Star If the star directly impacts a massive black hole, then the star falls in completely -- and everything vanishes . I suppose the "everything vanishes" part is a manner of speaking. Everything falls out of...

DJE44 wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2024 4:53 am I am blessed with Bortle 2 skies in Northern Arizona.

And we're blessed with the fruits of your hard work! Beautiful image...

Once again a masterpiece! Congratulations to the Deep Sky Collective team. Be sure to click twice on the image to see the Nova up close, gorgeous object! I like cosmic dandelions too! ...and when you overlay older images (e.g. from Hubble) you can clearly see how the nova is developing... https://l...

The APOD link showing a fish head bears little resemblance, here's another one, colour and shape alike!
(I usually consider such resemblances distractions, but this time it happens to be a favorite fish of mine! - the giant trevally)

Be sure to click twice on the image to see the Nova up close, gorgeous object!

I would not say "fate". But this will be a step in the evolution of the Sun into a white dwarf. Ok, agreed. The Sun would be merely senescent, but not yet entirely dead! 😊 Maybe these stars are quite comfortable in anticipation; a ripening chrysalis perhaps. The ripening is only beginning...

Had Messier discovered this planetary nebula with the same fine details seen here, I'm sure he would have ditched the term "planetary" nebula right away! We read over and over that it's a misnomer; what would be a better term? Red giant remnant?

The "little king" star, a "dwarf" galaxy, and one HUMONGOUS black hole! As supermassive as the Milky Way's but in a galaxy fifty times smaller!

I'm still somewhat puzzled by JWST colour choices. Is there a scientific reason why they chose pink/red for NGC 604 but a kind of rusty brownish not-really-red for the Tarantula Nebula? Is it to reflect different molecular properties or are these different colours for no real reason? 604.png 2070.j...

I'm still somewhat puzzled by JWST colour choices. Is there a scientific reason why they chose pink/red for NGC 604 but a kind of rusty brownish not-really-red for the Tarantula Nebula? Is it to reflect different molecular properties or are these different colours for no real reason? 604.png 2070.jpg

Mighty Jupiter… Twice as massive as all other planets of the solar system combined. But 80 times less massive than the smallest stars!

I was examining details of the Fox Fur nebula and this funny thing happened: From the position it is below I rotated the image 90 degrees left and a deer head appeared where the fox's head was, then another 90 degrees left and the profile of a cow's head appeared! (with a large owl above it, maybe) ...

The Southerners who can feast their eyes on the Carina Nebula anytime they want are lucky people!

wilddouglascounty wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2024 1:20 pm a fool's task, and falls short in the same way as, for instance, trying to describe a symphony to a mostly deaf person

I wonder what Beethoven would say about that!

I saw this eclipse and the bright pink prominences were stunning, and it got me reading about H alpha emission. And after some reading, I feel betrayed by every "H alpha" filtered photo of the sun I have seen. Because the prominences appeared obviously PINK to human eyes, doesn't that mea...

The red/pink is H-alpha. Is that to say that upon seeing the red/pink during totality, we are seeing with our own eyes the actual H-alpha colours of distant pink/red nebulae? The Sun is made of hot hydrogen. That hydrogen is emitting the same red light we see in emission nebulas. But where its gas ...