Starship Asterisk*

Very interesting to see the changing ion tail of Comet Pons-Brooks!


Does this mean that the release of gas from the parent body of Pons-Brooks is "episodic"? Like a series of little explosions?

Ann

Mount Etna in Italy is the most active volcano in Europe. Since April 3, 2024, it has been blowing smoke rings in the air! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md7hRFrngk8 The reason seems to be that there is a new vent on Mount Etna that is almost perfectly circular in shape. As gas is being released fr...

I don't see the scientific lesson here about the unwinding. Although you can't see it on the APOD main page, if you click on the larger screen version for it you can see double. The rectangle is divided into two double portions, the left and right sides are with with the identical star formations i...

Am I the only one who thinks there is a similarity between today's APOD and yesterday's? https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2404/M51Unwound_crop600.jpg https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2404/CoronaGraph_1024.jpg Well, I'm nodding good-bye to yesterday's solar corona to concentrate on today's M51. Being...

I suppose the Sun has no meaningfully permanent longitude map that would allow these two coronal un-wrappings to be matched up. Which makes sense since the Sun is just a ball of plasma! But I gather that the rotational north-south pole line should remain the same long term. Or does it? I know the r...

It looks gorgeous! :D https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2404/CoronaGraph_1024.jpg It is such a beautiful, otherworldly (that's right!!!) image. Thanks to Peter Ward for producing it. I can tell from the picture that, indeed, the solar corona behaves differently during solar minimums and solar maximum...

Says ChatGPT: The radioactive decay of nickel-56 (⁵⁶Ni) typically proceeds through electron capture, where one of the atom's inner shell electrons is captured by the nucleus, resulting in the transformation of a proton into a neutron. This process converts the nucleus into iron-56 (⁵⁶Fe) through th...

Yes, Pons-Brooks is a nice comet! :D https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2404/12P_Pons_Brooks_2024_03_30_JuneLake_DEBartlett1024.jpg APOD 4 April 2024 annotated.png I still find it very interesting that Pons-Brooks is so "gassy", even though it has (or so I think) visited the vicinity of the ...

Some random comments: .... - And finally, Ann, what exactly is a "color commentator" (though I suppose that is obvious) and how did you acquire that title? (After two years here, I figure I'd ask. 😊) Well, the title was given to me soon after I joined Starship Asterisk* in 2010 (before we...

With a temperature near 200,000 K, WD J005311 is the hottest star known. The extreme properties of the central star are being powered by the residual radioactive decay of ⁵⁶Ni, where the usual half-life of 6.0 days from electron capture is increased to many centuries due to the nickel being complet...

At first I ho-hummed this APOD, because I didn't find it beautiful or immediately interesting. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2404/Pa30V_NASA_960.jpg I still don't find the image beautiful, but now I think it is really interesting! The event that created the nebula seen in the APOD was the merger ...

I should have commented on this APOD before, because it is really stunning! https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2404/CoronaExmouth_Hart_1080.jpg APOD 2 April 2024 annotated.png So these are my questions. Are the long straight lines magnetic lines, where particles rush out away from the Sun into the out...

Unfortunately I could find no information about the star driving HH 30. HH 111 is another matter. According to Wikipedia, The HH 111 driving force is a 25 L ☉ class 1 protostar, so, in other words, it is 25 times brighter than the Sun. Already! Very young stars are always a bit faint, and they grow ...

I have nothing to say about the magnetic lines in today's APOD, but there is a video that explains why the black hole images (minus the magnetic lines) look the way they do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUyH3XhpLTo I found the video kind of hard to understand, but then, I'm a math idiot. But even...

I look forward to reading APOD every April Fools Day. What happened, guys? Want more "The Moon is made of green cheese" jokes? I've only got that one. https://lightsinthedark.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/green-moon.jpg Jason Major of lightsinthedark.com wrote: Way back in 1546 ye olde Engl...

Can anybody tell me the date this APOD was posted? If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time that this APOD has been posted. The first time this picture was posted here at Starship Asterisk* was in the Found Images thread a few days ago. It has not been an APOD before, because the image was only ...

I like it. Of course an Earth-centered solar system has nothing to do with reality, but the Ptolemaic system was very carefully constructed and worked extremely well, before humanity had better instruments to measure the actual motions of the planets relative to the Earth (Tycho Brahe) and mathemati...

I'm mostly passive on this board and just like reading the comments. But I do like my Star clusters. Wait a minute on this remanent core talk. If it is a dwarf galaxy core. It had to be a real old galaxy. The estimated age of the Omega Centauri stars is from 10-12 billion years old. If that is the ...

The solution is goats. Ours will happily gobble up vegetable remnants we don't eat ourselves. I'm sure your neighbors would be fine with a few goats around the house, no? _ https://asterisk.apod.com/download/file.php?id=49416&t=1 Thanks for the suggestion, Chris, I didn't think of that! :D 🐐 Th...

Very true... but possibly excepting flowers! The color of the petals of pink/red/blue/purple flowers is created by a class of molecules called anthocyanins, and the actual color can vary across that range, determined primarily by pH. So really, there is no "natural" or "real" co...

I think that if you see a color photo whose color balance seems surprising, chances are that it is the picture that is different, not the natural phenomenon that has taken on a strange hue. Very true... but possibly excepting flowers! The color of the petals of pink/red/blue/purple flowers is creat...

Globular clusters are leftover galaxy cores? The 2010 count of them was 157. We see large numbers of them in the Andromeda galaxy, and other galaxies. So, based on that number crunching, clusters are two or three orders of magnitude more common than galaxies. There is no evidence that globular clus...

I've asked this before re the Hercules cluster: do astronomers know the approximate distance between the closest stars to each other here? They seem to know the approximate number of stars, and the size and distance of the structure. I'm assuming things are not homogeneous tho: some stars are relat...

So... globular clusters are not my favorites because they are not so colorful. Anyway... Let's compare the two largest globular clusters of the Milky Way! NGC5139_mdf1024[1].png Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri Image Credit & Copyright: Massimo Di Fusco and Mirco Turra https://www.universeto...

Why is the galaxy cluster such a hostile environment for star formation? I would have thought that all the chaotic movement would create shock waves to collapse the dust and gas and kick off star formation? The way I understand it, large galaxy clusters and giant elliptical galaxies "grow up&q...