Starship Asterisk*

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091029.html

Does seeing that the Zodiacal Light and the Milky Way band are almost parallel in this photo mean that the Solar System is moving around the Galaxy edgewise?

No one can argue AGW with the alarmists because it is their faith, their religion, and religion does not subject itself to science or logic. But unlike the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the alarmists have no tolerance for any other faiths or religions. All nonbelievers must be destroyed or the world will bu...

aristarchusinexile wrote: Well, don't you think apod should clearly identify the composites so we'll know they're not genuine, like this one for instance?
I mean, I don't like guesswork.

Well, it is obviously a composite, so why point out the obvious in the explanation? No guesswork needed!

Gary

:roll: :roll: [insult removed - makc]... non-scientists who have selfish reasons for not wanting to believe that human activities are contributing to the climate change beyond what occurs naturally (solar radiation, orbital dynamics, geological activities, etc). Those selfish reasons are mostly econ...

aristarchusinexile wrote: The forum's currently accepted model of what science is must not be observed as such by most people,..

Unfortunately "most people" are scientific illiterate, therefore they don't know what real science requires.

Gary

What struck me as interesting is that the text identifies the big dipper as not a cluster, when recent research shows all but the endmost stars are moving in the same direction. Would that make it "mostly a cluster?" I would consider the Big Dipper to be an open cluster, since five of the...

More picky comments. I have never visited Athens and so have no idea of the temple's orientation with respect to the sun, but methinks that the photographer could have picked the more appropriate sides of the temple when making the composite picture. The sun is on the other side of the temple, so th...

"...The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is about 400 light years away, and only 13 light years across. ..." It must be a difficult task finding all those stars that belong to the cluster and are not foreground or background stars. Do they use the parallax method to measure the distances...

sfcraiger wrote:how do those clouds form?

By mutual gravitational attraction of the dust particles and gas molecules, assisted by the galactic magnetic fields, stellar winds, and expanding supernova remnants.

Gary

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap081101.html Is it me or do the hydrogen and oxygen bands appear to be electrical in nature? It may be just an illusion; but it looks very similar to lightning. While I don't believe an electrical charge could be or last that long; the appearance is very intriguing. 8) Or...

The APOD blab says the blue-green parts of the nebula are from oxygen. That puzzles me as the nebula was due to the ejected outer layer of the star, which was mostly hydrogen. There shouldn't be any oxygen in that layer as there was not enough heat and pressure for fusion to create any. The only pla...

Prof. Gerald Deemer: The disease of hunger, like most diseases, well, it spreads. There are 2 billion people in the world today. In 1975 there'll be 3 billion. In the year 2000, there'll be 3,625,000,000. The world may not be able to produce enough food to feed all these people. Now perhaps you'll ...

How is the Mach number calculated? I assumed (obviously incorrectly) that the Mach number is based on the atmospheric pressure on Earth! The Mach number is just the ratio of the velocity of an object in some medium and the speed of sound in that medium. The speed of sound in vacuum or even rarefied...

In the arXiv abstract that this APOD's explanation is based on, it mentions that the speed of the system is "a Mach number of M~1.4 or speed of v~1200 km s^-1" How is the Mach number calculated? I assumed (obviously incorrectly) that the Mach number is based on the atmospheric pressure on ...

... It is a "blue supergiant," ... With an original mass around 17 times that of the Sun, *RIGEL* is in the process of dying, and is most likely fusing internal helium into carbon and oxygen. The star seems fated to explode, though it might just make it under the wire as a rare heavy oxyg...

... The scientists haven't found all the answers yet , but yet the religious nuts insist that what the scientists know so far proves they are wrong, like for example the gaps in fossil records. Gary Hi Gary, I think from reading your comment that you may be calling me a religious nut… if so, I am o...

I would expect the pulsar to be at the center of the SN remnant. Any idea why it is so much off-center? Supernova explosions can be asymmetrical, often imparting a "kick" that sends the pulsar flying off in one direction. Based on the remnant's age of about 10,000 years and the pulsar's d...

Yeah right .. like lots of questions unanswered eh! Like what caused the bang? What was the stuff before the bang? Maybe we are all inside the combustion chamber of a moped ridden by a sasquatch. Crackpot idea maybe .. but just as logical as 'Sudden Big Bang Creates Universe' (Extra Extra read all ...

Planetary nebulas are the outward expanding gas and dust from a supernova explosion. Nebulas like the Lagoon are the gravitationally collapsing clouds of material from multiple past stellar explosions. If you could trace the Lagoon backwards (which is impossible, because the local turbulence has de...

While in college (decades ago), I once wrote a computer program using the Special Theory of Relativity, to compute and list the changes (to an outside observer) in a spacecraft's physical attributes as it accelerated constantly at 1g until it reached 99.9% of the speed of light. It would take the sp...

Still, we go to and from space regularly. It's not the problem, and waiting for anti gravity is not the way, since there is nothing to indicate that it is anywhere close to happening. I don't think that you would be so dismissive of the risk of continually using chemical rockets if we have more acc...

Actually gravity is not what is preventing long term space travel. It's not a huge problem to go into space. It's the unimaginable huge distances that prevent it the long trips and the energy needed to accelerate to close to light speed, and even at that speed, it is some very long trips. Artificia...

The series of photos of the partial lunar eclipse was taken in Athens, Greece, This made me wonder if the ancient Athenians and observers in other ancient civilizations also noticed the curvature of the shadow on the moon as it passed through the shadow. Would they have deduced that the shadow was c...

Nevertheless your thoughts triggered a philosophical question. On earth, the moon, Venus, Mercury, Mars and the moons of the gas giants Silicon seems to the the abundant element. Si is one of the elements in the nuclear fusion chain of stars. Fe (Iron) is the last one. So there must be somewhat mor...

Many people have proposed that stars form layers like onions as opposed to a generalized mixing of gasses. Perhaps the Oxygen might be just that particular layer of the star that was previously shed From the wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution ) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...