Starship Asterisk*

If I were in space, and hurled a spinnng gyroscope in such a way that I caused it to tumble as it flew, I make a guess that it's anybody's guess as to when it becomes "free falling". I don't think it quite works like that. You can't "set a gyroscope tumbling" without applying a ...

I just wonder, whether such a trail of stars is also (faintly) visible around our galaxy, caused by the two Magellanic clouds. As you were proffering, the plane of the orbiting system must be right, the angle of view, etc. These are all parameters we can not influence. Not in the least the abundant...

I agree. Additionally, supernova aren't overwhelmingly bright in the visible/infrared light portion of the spectrum, so I'm sure it's unlikely that we'd see one so easily compared to the billions of stars in the parent galaxy. I was under the impression that supernovae often outshone their host gal...

I found this particular APOD rather terrifying.. Yikes! Me, too. How many thousands (?) of miles did this prominence protrude out from the sun? Or, put another way, what percentage of, say, the distance to Mercury's orbit did it protrude? Are there even larger prominences on record? Cherie Just doi...

ta152h0 wrote:does ice turn to vapor without liquefying first on MARS ? unlike beer here on Earth ?
Pass the beer

For the most part, yes. Liquid water can exist on the surface of Mars in a very narrow temperature range, but sublimation would certainly be much more common.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080601.html It does look a little intimidating at that! :shock: When the sun ejects material like that; it makes me wonder just what happens to the ejecta. I'm sure much of it falls back toward the sun; but surely some of it goes off into orbit. After cooling down; does ...

I think the height difference could be a simple illusion due to the field of view of the camera, and the difference in light levels. Then again, permafrost slabs don't necessarily all lay at the exact same depth.

Ten Earth-diameters just about crosses the width of the hook-shape of the prominence in that image. If you view the full-scale image, Earth would be just a hair under seven pixels in diameter (the Sun is 109 times larger in diameter than the Earth).

I guess I made an arbitrary mental distinction between "dust" and "molecular clouds" and was thinking of the latter pulling itself in to such a density as to be able to support life, but somehow without squeezing down to form a star or planetary system - at some point becoming a...

It's a bit of sloppy language, really. The parahelic arc always appears on the sky at the same 'height' from the horizon as the Sun. "Altitude" is precisely the correct word, no sloppiness at all. However, "height from the horizon" is a little sloppy <g>. You're right, I stand c...

Oliver Manuel has great respect for the scientific method, and all his papers prove this. It is the mainstream scientific community that hates him because he is an outsider and shows that mainstream is wrong about some very basic things. The clique of mainstream hates outsiders who show them they a...

"Surrounding the zenith (the point directly above the observer) and always at the same altitude as the Sun is a lovely ...." How can the halo be at the same "altitude" as the sun? It's a bit of sloppy language, really. The parahelic arc always appears on the sky at the same 'hei...

As I understand it, collisions between unbound stars (of any sort) are very rare events, simply due to the enormous probabilities against them. However, collisions between bound neutron stars (ie. those in orbit around each other) are practically inevitable over time, as gravitational radiation stea...

Bees rely on the strong polarization of blue/UV skylight 90º from the sun to orient themselves. You can detect this polarization yourself by looking at skylight 90º from the sun with polarized sunglasses which you rotate in front of your face. Only one polarization of light can be scattered from th...

Oh, as in... do galaxies tend to move through space edge-on? I'm pretty sure their orientation and their direction of motion are unrelated. There'd certainly exist galaxies that are traveling edge-on, but it'd be coincidental. At least, I've never read anything that would suggest otherwise.

I daresay the majority of stellar mergers aren't headlong collisions, but rather the result of orbital decay causing the participants to spiral together. I am not blessed with your intuition for this process. Would not it depend on the relative velocity and the nearest distance between the stars, o...

What puzzles me is why are some sources mentioning supernove explosions, while others mention Blue Stragllers? I think that the difference comes from the types of stars that are merging. Blue stragglers, I believe, are the result of mergers between relatively low-mass main sequence stars, whereas t...

Rare stellar mergers may be the cause behind the appearance of "blue straggler" stars in globular clusters, as well.

I'm not quite sure what the problem is. A sizable fraction of the images here on APoD aren't 'real', but I don't hear you complaining about them. Astronomically-useful images rarely resemble what the human eye would see. Take today's image of Saturn for example: it's a combination of three different...

I was kind of startled that something that stood out so prominently in the APoD image didn't rate any mention in the text blurb below. Thanks Case!

Redshift - This will be seen as sacriledge, but not long ago, before the discovery of theoretical Dark Matter, a scientist whose name I can't remember wrote a book suggesting that Red Shift was the result of absorbtion of light by matter, and not result of speed. Not sacrilege, just wrong. 'Tired l...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_%28dwarf_planet%29

No, Eris is just a trans-Neptunian object, and the ninth-largest known satellite directly orbiting the Sun. Its orbit never brings it closer to the Sun than about 39 AU.

orin stepanek wrote:Isn't is amazing that the nearest supernova just happens to be in another galaxy? Maybe that's a good thing!
Orin

I'd rather it was closer. I want to see a naked-eye supernova at least once.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080426.html I almost went nuts trying to find SN 1987A in this image. :lol: It's not actually visible in this view (or rather, it's visible as an undifferentiable blob), and it's a good bit left and below the center of the image. Oh well, it's still one heck of a ...

As I understand it, our 'most distant possible view' of the universe should always be the surface of last scattering, no? Which would mean you'd not see the leading edge of a galaxy before its trailing edge as our 'wavefront of visibility' travels across it, since every visible part of the universe ...