Starship Asterisk*

http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressreleases/2006/images/nixhydraorbit_lg.jpg This is a great created image of the system. Nice. Looks like that screenshot was taken in Celestia, a space simulation in which you can fly basically anywhere in the observable universe. Why even attempt to understand ...

Yeah, I was hoping he'd someday read my ridiculously late reply and register to tell me what you did in your post, thus adding another active participant to these great forums.

Hello All Can an elliptical galaxy form a spiral galaxy? or Can a spiral galaxy form an elliptical galaxy. What would cause such changes? observations of actual systems and simulations of merging galaxies on a computer suggest that merging spirals create elliptical galaxies. http://curious.astro.co...

jackienle wrote:Does it take in matter from both sides?

What does this mean?

Nice work my only criticism is that the telescope bottom looks too cut away. Did you also use only APODs?

One thing about that theory, Harry, is that neutron stars are more massive than the Sun... Also, just as Qev pointed out, a few neutron stars are observed to be trying to "follow in the Sun's footsteps" in accordance with your theory by accreting matter (from binary companions in most if n...

Marcello, what operating system are you running? Is APOD the only site with which you're having trouble? Have you scanned for spyware / viruses?

Happy B-day APOD! Props to RJN & JTB for presenting astronomy in such an accessible way.

Sorry 'bout the late reply and the continued thread-jacking... I agree that most of the images to which you linked bear signs of flowing liquid, but I wouldn't call those features "geysers". I'll wait for evidence of geyser ejecta (see Triton ) or actual imagery of an erupting geyser (agai...

Sowndbyte: you linked to M87, an elliptical galaxy. Stars in elliptical galaxies follow random orbits which don't add up to any bulk rotation pattern. To quote this random but informative page , "star orbits [in elliptical galaxies] are aligned in a wide range of angles and have a wide range of...

Martin wrote:

Does this mean that all galaxies may in fact be spinning in the same direction

Yeah, around their centers.

I'd also agree with orin's statement that the direction of rotation of a galaxy simply depends on how it happens to be oriented with respect to us. Spiral Galaxy orientation certainly appears to be randomized in photos, so I'd expect a 50-50 split between cw and ccw observed rotation. On the subject...

Thanks for the post, aichip - lots of info! What this all implies is simple: ... 5 - life may form in just a few million years, but impact events might reset the biological clock many times before the environment stabilizes on a planet (I have a technical article about this, but I am still searching...

what is rather irksome is that they will not actually say "this is a dried ocean". I think it is clear that when you look at the water levels that had to be present in Meridiani and the elevation map of the planet, that about half of Mars was covered with water at one point. While I could...

Good question - I'd think that's because the line of sight through the edges of Earth's disk passes through the most amount of atmosphere.

I'm not much of an artist, but here's my rendition of the sky as it would appear to an observer on a planet similar to Earth whose star lies near the center of Omega Centauri : http://images6.theimagehosting.com/white.6b9.th.PNG The best good globular cluster visualizations I could find are from the...

Whoa, I didn't know about most of those benefits! Except crime rate being lower among Firefox users: some IE users deal with the stress of infections and crashes by going on murderous rampages.

Joking aside, I'd also recommend switching away from IE if possible.

I also thought it was a shooting star, but the movie's made of 49-second exposures of a relatively narrow field of view (?), and the streak appears in more than one frame; its actual speed across the sky seems too slow for a shooting star.

Looking closely at the first part of today's animated GIF, one sees a faint streak cross above the comet from right to left. Satellite?

Endeavour, the heaviest of the three currently operational space shuttles, masses about 78 metric tons without fuel or payload. The highest gross launch weight I found was 145 tons, which is pretty close to the 116-ton mass limit mentioned in the APOD . Couldn't the Canadarm2 simply move the entire ...

At the risk of threadjacking: I had never heard of Bok globules before due to apparently missing April 20th's APOD mentioning them. They're cold, dark molecular or dust clouds that are condensing to form stars.

Something new every day. Thanks!

Your math looks correct, makc. One small thing bugs me, though: the derivation of the Lorentz transformations requires the assumption that light travels at speed c. Lorentz transforming the two events cannot result in the speed of a causal influence w being greater than c, which is exactly as expect...

It's not an astronomy pic but it does fall under geology and perhaps planetary science. Besides, it is cool!
"EPOD "retaliates" by posting a pic of Mars from Spirit."

Right, harry, not all "quarks" are "strange quarks". Nevertheless, "strange quark star", "quark star", and "strange star" are synonymous terms according to the "Quark Star" Wikipedia article and the external links found within.

ta152h0 wrote:everything radiates from our eyeballs

Well, sorry, Mr. Summers, but my eyes can't do that.