Starship Asterisk*

Hi Chris, It seems we were both responding almost simultaneously to the question above our two responses. But now that I have your attention ... :D I asked way up in this thread about that small orange dot surrounded by fuzzy stuff which is to the top-left of the two main galaxies in this image. Fro...

As I mentioned above, there is a note on another site which says the galaxies may not be interacting in the sense of "colliding". Since you may not have seen the link, here is a quote from that page... Arp 274 was previously thought to be a set of interacting galaxies, galaxies that are &q...

Elsewhere on the web today, there's a note* saying that these three galaxies, previously assumed to be interacting, may just be close neighbours, especially from our point of view, and may not be interacting at all (any more than Andromeda and ours are interacting, which is to say, weakly at the mom...

So you're picking number 3, a "far-off galaxy with a very hot core"? (I should have said very bright core, since I don't know the temperature. ;-0 ) I did, of course, look at the picture blown up to 100% -- going larger just makes for larger pixels, not more information. I still couldn't t...

There's an interesting looking object to the top-left of the two main protaganists in this picture. See the hot little orange spot inside a swirl of something? I can't tell whether that might be a star coincidentally in front of a far off galaxy, or the glowing centre of a relatively nearby nebula, ...

Thank you for that. Though I am shocked to my very core by this lack of precision.

Rob

Hello,

I notice that the sizes of, and therefore the distances to, the two nebulae given in the linked pages in the last line of the APOD post, differ considerably from the sizes and distances given in the APOD post. Is there that much disagreement about these things, still?

Rob

Thanks to both of you for that clarification. I gather from this that there is no direct (or at least, no obvious to me) correlation between the degree of luminosity (2.5 million times a large supernova) and the actual "bang" or shockwave that might be emitted. [a few minutes later] Prompt...

Hello, I'm particularly interested in the size of the explosion. It's described as "over 2.5 million times more luminous than the brightest known supernova". Is that big enough to be a galaxy buster? Or is the average distance between stars still too big for any kind of chain reaction, eve...