Starship Asterisk*

Cowboys? :P The scientific community at large accepts nuclear fusion, induced by heat caused by friction which is in turn caused by gravity. Cowboys are the ones suggesting there's a neutron star hidden down in there somewhere. But hey, scientists can be cowboys too, right? No harm in questioning co...

Qev points out good reasons for the lack of a neutron star in the center of the sun; my biggest problem is the lack of mass. The sun is no where heavy enough to contain a neutron star! Harry, you mentioned that our model for the sun would have to be thrown out...but so would any theories of star for...

Nuts!

If this decision holds, the word "planet" doesn't have much meaning anymore. Personally, I think that only the major bodies orbiting the sun within the plane of the system should be "planets" and everything else should be considered "planetoids." Yes, Pluto should be de...

Australia changed to metric back in the 70's.

Why is USA so backward?.

I have asked myself that same question many times over the last 6 years or so.

Randal, I was talking about viewing the "entire spectrum" of EM radiation, including the very low-energy waves. To detect a wavelength of EM radiation, your receiving device (be it your eyes, radio tower, telescope, ect.) must be at least 1/4 the wavelength of that radiation. Since radio w...

Life, our eyes are simply not sensitive enough to detect colors from the feeble light emitted by a distant nebula. Cameras have the advantage of absorbing a continuous flow of photons...and therefore far more detail can be detected. Even a five minute exposure can show more color and detail than you...

Hey, pretty bizarre structure. Cool photo! And hey, it's an APOD that is close to where I live. Sort of. Yay, NW, w00t. I found a cool gallery of photos from one of the series of small eruptions not long ago. It's how the mountain appears from my neck of the woods, Portland (roughly 60 miles from th...

You can indeed see the Milky Way from the Northern Hemisphere.

The Magellanic Clouds, on the other hand, are only visible from the Southern Hemisphere...perhaps that was what you were thinking of, cmlmsp?

Harry, I doubt even your imaginary "light-speed ship" would have trouble with debris. The relatively small amount of material in the Kuiper belt and the vast amount of space it encompasses means the chances you'd even find a good-sized chunk is pretty small. In fact the article I mentioned...

Oh yeah, next you'll say the canals made by Martians aren't real, either!

Anybody read the article on planet-finding in last month's Discover Magazine? There was an interesting comparison between the labels "planet" and "continent." The article pointed out that there's no scientific way to classify something as a "true continent." After all, ...

Here's a list of the currently operating telescopes of great size.

I was just reading about the GMT, the Giant Magellan Telescope. It will have one effective surface using 7 individual mirrors, each 27 feet (8.4m) in diameter.

It seems to me that if neutrinos were massless (that is, if they had no rest-mass) they'd have to be traveling at light speed like photons. Yes? :?: What about the quantum mechanical concept of spontaneous particle pair annihilation? Quantum mechanics says that randomly through out the universe, par...

What about neutrinos...mass or no mass? If they do indeed have even the smallest amount of mass, they would account for a large chunk of dark matter. So a neutrino sits down at a bar and starts drinking shots. After the 12th shot the bartender asks, "Haven't you had enough?" "Naa, I a...

The Sun and its planetary system formed from heterogeneous debris1-11 of a supernova (SN) that exploded 5 billion years ago. Harry, I have never heard of this hypothesis before. Here are my initial questions: Granted, the Sun is a population 1 star ...that's why the nebula from which the protoplane...

http://fusedweb.pppl.gov/CPEP/Chart_Pages/5.Plasmas/SunLayers.html Instead of speculation, try researching. Here here. Not to mention spectral analysis of the sun's make up. Harry, the sun is in the main sequence, which means it is roughly composed of 75% H, 24% He, and 1% everything else. Iron has...

The universe simulator Celestia makes a vivid illustration of the differences in diameters stars can be. I took these screenies from within the program. Here's the Sun, as seen from Saturn, at about 9 AU (Astronomical Units...1 AU is equal to the distance from the Sun to the Earth): https://home.com...

A sun depending on the size of its core will shed its Iron skin several times. Leaving a core that looks new sometimes a dwarf or a neutron star. Only the heaviest stars produce iron at all. The Sun for example won't have enough mass to fuse elements much more complex than oxygen or so. Extremely d...

harry wrote:Hello Orca

I agree.

But! without evidence its like --------- in the wind.

huh?

makc wrote:

FieryIce wrote:So your quoting him means what?

It means we still have a sense of humor.

Here here. 8)

would have little use Isn't it so, that processing materials in an airless enviroment does have it's advantages. :wink: This is true; steel for example is stronger when forged in a vacuum than when created on earth. I was just saying that oil would not make a useful energy source on the moon, nor w...

Infinity does not exist within a black hole. That is, if a black hole can exist without a singularity at its center. As far a I understand it, at the center of a black hole lies a singularity. A singularity is said to be "infinitely dense" because it has a vast amount of mass taking up &q...

As for the age of the universe, its timeless and never ending. Man in the past have put limits to its size and brought in models such as the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe. Some prefer to live in the stone age. That is an interesting statement; considering that from the stone age until ...

IF, there is oil on the moon, and we DID go looking for it, it would not be a viable energy source onEarth as it would be too cost prohibitive to extract and return it to earth. it would only be usable there or to go beyond from there. Internal combustion engines would have little use on the airles...