Starship Asterisk*

Excellent video. Surely some of the ideas were derived from the Mars trilogy books.

Chris Peterson wrote: (The region of space that the ISS orbits in has a gas temperature of thousands of degrees, and those gases are denser than what we have in a nebula.)

Chris,
Can you expand on this statement? I thought space was cold. Perhaps my understanding of 'gas temperature' is limited.

Thanks.

Barry wrote:I have several astro targets that I've superimposed the full moon on here:

http://barryetter.zenfolio.com/p1045793279

Cool!

I just spotted this white thingy and I'm wondering what it may be I believe the proper name for them is "white thingy", but they may also be called "white kind of shiny things". Rob Looks like 'Shiny Object' is the correct technical name. Nasa's site: "Curiosity has found n...

Wow. At first glance I thought for sure this was some new man made nano-bot. I've heard of tardigrades before but never seen one like this. What a machine!
The diversity of life is simply amazing.

Thank you for that correction, Wadsworth! But worthwile thinking about the Earth. I am informed - correct this too, please - that an observer falling down an enormous well would feel a reducing gravitational acceleration as they approached the Center of the Earth, and none at all at the centre. Yet...

gravity gets less as you go inside a body, so even if there was an empty space inside it, there would so little gravitational pull that an internal collapse is unlikely. As you go inside a body, the change in gravity is relative to the change in density of the material. So your statement would be t...

Death Star extraterrestrial base Phobos makes its way onto APOD yet again.

Excellent mosaic!
Go humanity!

ronboy wrote:A lunar Halo = What Neil Armstrong "really" said first.

Seeker wrote:I could never see this until I flipped the image 180 degrees. It now makes sense though I don't know why this was not done to begin with years ago.

This makes a world of difference. Our minds aren't used to digesting upside-down dunes.
Flipped 180 deg, it now looks like Mars is bleeding.

Am I the only one that is still unclear as to where the 'intruder' galaxy is?

one defining point of a Black Hole is...it shrinks down to a Singularity. A Star is not a singularity as far as I know. :---[===]* I for one don't buy into the suposed singularity of black holes. But I'm no specialist. I'm not saying they aren't real, something is definitley there, but I don't thin...

Explanation: Described as a "dusty curtain" or " ghostly apparition", mysterious reflection nebula VdB 152 really is very faint. When I read the first sentence of this explanation I thought to myself, from our vantage point this nebula seems to be blocking much more light than i...

Explanation: Described as a "dusty curtain" or " ghostly apparition", mysterious reflection nebula VdB 152 really is very faint. When I read the first sentence of this explanation I thought to myself, from our vantage point this nebula seems to be blocking much more light than i...

Indeed - I see the spires you mention. I find it somewhat odd, though, that there are so few of them - especially in this part of the image. There's something similar, but much smaller, around 2527,1776 - but it just doesn't give the same feel of being away from the surface. There are several more ...

Looking at the full image - in the area around pixel location 1997,1652 - there's something curious, at least to my eye. Zoomed in, it's about 5 pixels (35 ish meters) across, and very sharply demarked. The obvious answer is that it's a small upthrust of some kind, or a large loose boulder - but to...

Boomer12k wrote: Next on Dragonball Z.... Galactic Fusion....

:---[===] *

What hubble has managed to catch in this image is not a galaxy merger, but the coalescence of a spirit bomb.

"The impact energy of about 80 TJ (20 kilotons of TNT) is comparable with that of the Hiroshima bomb blast. It incinerated forests within a 6 km radius."


So it would have made the evening news..

TC4..
How fast was it going, and how much damage could a 30m asteroid do?

Man, it's really weird how all of these science videos are all presented in the format of a hand drawing cartoons. Just a fad or is it the best way to convey science education? Weird? I'd say effective. At the very least, they are effective in getting one to watch and listen to the entire segment. ...

Excellent APoD!

Seeing something like this in person must be amazing..

my first reaction was ... wow, those are damn fine optics. the internal reflections indicate highly sophisticated lens coatings. second reaction was ... this is the classic armslength cellphone self portrait photo format used for about 70% of college freshman facebook avatars. a real mashup of styl...

Can someone calculate just how much mass was ejected? I'm curious how much 'weight' is lost in these large ejections.