Starship Asterisk*

Hehe, nice one!

Tody's picture refers to two recent supernovae, SN1987A and SN1993J. It would appear that there are not many supernovae occuring. I find this very surprising, given the large number of large stars in a typical galaxy. Why are there not many more supernovae? Lots of Supernovae are discovered every y...

Since when did nature begin permitting such discrete fields of operation? Assuming the shape of the Milky Way is a result of gravity, then why didn't globular clusters get sucked into the malestrom centuries ago, like all of the water in my sink after I am done the dishes? This is not an anomaly of...

Wow, makc, nice work! May I use that picture on my site for a newsitem?

How would you like to be reffered to? I guess we need to put NASA in there somewhere...

-Odegard

Stars colliding is extremely rare due to two reasons: they are small compared to the interstellar distances, and they all move in the same general direction (in the galaxy). For stars to collide you'd need a direct hit. If the stars pass each other real close they will probably (depending on the rel...

Stars in globular clusters orbit around a common center of gravitaty. It's like a mini-galaxy in the real galaxy. They are kept apart due to individual directions of velocity, i.e. they orbit. It's the same with earth-moon system. They orbit a common center of gravity. The earth-sun also orbit a com...

Take a quick peek at Kepler's laws. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/kepler.html "The square of the period of any planet is proportional to the cube of the semimajor axis of its orbit." P^2 = a^3 P is measured in years, and a is the semimajor axis measured in AU (mean distance Ea...

Hi there, it seems we have already been introduced :) Did you recently claim responsibility for the site? I have offered the norwegian mirror now for 4 months and I love the job. I really should get an "ally" to alleviate the work some times, especially considering my trip to Crete in 3 we...

This site is very good:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni.html

And this recent article is also very good (atleast entertaining):
http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Arc ... nergy.html

Well, I finally did what I should've done from the beginning - read the paper. It says in the introduction already that neutron stars not only accrete matter but also angular momentum from the companion star. There is no explanation of this in the paper, but they referred to another paper by D. Bhat...

Hehe, I guess it's rather big. I only started two months ago but I enjoy free storage and bandwidth (atleast for the time being). APOD just celebrated their 10th year online. Images vary from a few kilobytes to several megabytes. Also, the main site stores two versions of the images. Anyway, let's s...

Roy Kerr solved Einsteins equations to find that objects influence their surroundings, called frame dragging. Frame dragging was indeed observed not long ago , however, my question has nothing to do with frame dragging. There is no doubt that material in an accretion disk spirals inwards. It's the o...

On todays APOD and in this pressrelease , it is said that the accretion of matter on a neutron star spins it up. Can this be correct? An accretion disk lights up due to internal friction forces .The inner ring spins faster than the outer ring. The outer ring slowes the inner ring, creating the frict...

The Milky Way is a relatively thin disk of stars. Earths rotation axis points outwards from this disk. There might be stars located behind Polaris, or more aligned to the rotation axis, but I don't know of any such stars. However, you can be certain of finding a galaxy if you look hard enough. Take ...

Stars move about in the Milkyway and it's only chance that there is a star close to earths rotation axis today.

Happy anniversery to Nemiroff and Bonnell. May you continue for atleast another 10 years!

Regards,
Agnar Ødegård