Starship Asterisk*

Henk you said, "the thermodynamic pressure of the gas will increase and eventually overcome the magnetic pressure. " Now i'm wondering, aint the magnetic field also increase as the sun compact itself and about ready to blow ensuring then that the magnetic pressure will hold just long enou...

G'day Doum I read the link What ever you feed a computer it will produce what you want. The complex working parts of our universe have not been understood. So can we we feed the computer information that we do not have. The only way to do this is to assume that the Big Bang is correct, knowing quit...

If you want dark skies, you need to be at least 20 or 30 miles from any cities. Also, a surprising amount of light pollution is local. Just a few neighbors with bad outside lighting can ruin your sky as much as a giant city 10 miles away. A small town just a few miles away can be worse than a city ...

Thanks Guys... Seems that if you knew the relative scales and indeed how sharp the photography in both you could calculate how many foreground stars you would expect across the cluster. But presumably it is more likely to be the apparently brighter ones with the spike effects, and the redder ones? ...

G'day Chris This part of the Forum does not discuss topics. Open a new topic in Cafe and we shall tango till the cows come home. We are all well educated, that does not mean we know jack ,,,,,,,,. :roll: Still as evasive as ever, aren't you, Harry? Why do you still refuse to give more than brief re...

There may well be nothing left but an insignificant (and hard to find) brown dwarf (; perhaps the Spitzer IR telescope could be used to look for such things). I don't think so. During the red giant phase, the companion's core would be fusing helium at very high temperature, so when it lost its oute...

Hi All! http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080711.html mentions the following statement: "The arm is labeled in this illustration as the Far 3kpc Arm, located at a distance of 3 kpc (kiloparsecs) or about 10,000 light-years from the galactic center, on the opposite side from the Sun." How can th...

I don't know anything about large hypothetical " relatively dense regions of interstellar material " but two things we certainly can surmise about about an expanding Ia supernova explosion: 1) It will quickly impact a large companion giant star that is blocking almost one entire hemispher...

Still on topic but going off slightly on a tangent... Does dark matter get sucked into the black hole just like normal matter? After all, there is more dark matter in the universe than normal matter. If so, it would be interesting to know what happens at the singularity where dark matter would be fo...

"The Trifid, also known as M20, is only about 300,000 years old, making it among the youngest emission nebulae known."

How are the astronomers able to determine the age of the nebula and any other objects?

Gary

I don't know about that. Time is very much a part of the space time . So in a collapsing universe, time will shrink to its smallest non-zero value. Was there ever a zero time before the Big Bang? One astronomer, David Darling, said that if you runs the Big Bang backward, you can slice time into sma...

Hawking believed that in a closed oscillatory universe time would necessarily go backwards as the universe collapsed. His argument in A Brief History of Time seemed well reasoned. What would happen to matter and energy when time goes backward? Do we all start walking backward and regressing to embr...

Hello starnut, Nice to here from you! The element of time is a bit of a maze if you ask me, maybe even a labrynthe that, when followed, may, in fact, return to itself. But even in that context one may return to the same place but it won't be the same time. Does there have to be an awareness of time...

someone will ... include a "reverse" gear in our transmissions I'm more looking for an elevator where you can request a specific floor. And, unlike space, time can have absolute coordinates without ruining the theory, I think. But, before I carve the oars to row against the current of tim...

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...

How many thousands of feet above Earth's sea level would Mars' surface atmospheric pressure be equivalent to? Also, what is the average temperature at that altitude compared with the surface temperature at the Phoenix site?

Gary

Measurements by the team of researchers who studied this galaxy and its rings had difficulty finding any traces of stellar activity. The rings appear to be comprised mostly of dust. Not really. If they were mostly dust, they would not be visible in the photograph, being too far from NGC 5907 to ref...

The whole point of using the balloon analogy was to explain to a layman how to visualize the universe with respect to the big bang and the expansion of space. The layman has difficulties visualizing a 4-D expanding universe that does not have a center. So, we tell the layman to imagine himself as a ...

Thanks Chris. It's going to take a while for me to get my mind around all that, but eventually, I hope, I will. -George Take a balloon. To us earthlings, the balloon is a three dimensional object with a two dimensional surface. Ignoring the stem, the surface of the balloon has no center and no edge...

Strange to see: the ideas of sir James Jeans, i.e. the planets in our solar system were generated by a passing star, were dismissed as obsolete later in 1930-1950: too improbable. Nowadays the same interaction between stars leads to a new type of stars. Strange indeed. I remembered seeing this in a...

Orin - I think the counter-revolving galaxies will slow each others' rotation and their merge will create a globular galaxy. This photo http://spdext.estec.esa.nl:81/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=42670 in my opinion being merged, stopped-revolution galaxies whose stellar wind will drive ...

An elliptical galaxy just means it's deformed into an elliptical shape. I believe this is typically because the orbits are more eccentric, but it's also possible that outside influences like a close pass by another galaxy can stretch a galaxy into an ellipse. I am not sure about that. I think that ...

Hi, astrolabe, Glad you decided not to leave the APOD discussion forum after all. I apologize if my disagreement with Harry had disillusioned you earlier. In order to judge the validity of the discussions in this forum, I either go to the online texts provided by the astronomy departments at various...

Someone wrote (I forgot who and where): "The Problem with the English language is that it is as pure as a crib-house w****. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.&q...

Looking at the dust lanes on the sides and the far side of the disc, it seems to me that the starlight from the bulge is reflected off the dust lanes. Is that what I see, or are the "reflections" just pockets of bright stars embedded in the dust lanes?