Starship Asterisk*

I was staring at glare reflecting off a white plate under my flower pot, studying the diffraction it pattern presented to my retina when I realized that there were many concentric rings (more than I could reasonably be expected to count individually) and that they were constricting and expanding, p...

Are not ALL Supernovae "thermonuclear"? No. Supernovae of type Ia are, since they result in binary systems where a white dwarf "sucks" material from its companion until its mass is large enough to ignite nuclear fusion again. On the other hand, type II supernovae result from the...

So, would this mean that if more websites say intelligent design is true than sites saying it's false, Google considers intelligent design to be true

A problem I see with this theory is that the universe is demonstrably aging. We can see the progression of the formation of elements in the stars of distant galaxies in the concentration of iron atoms. If the universe is infinitely old, it seems to me there should be a lot more iron than there is. ...

See discussion here.

RobertDukes wrote:is it true?

Yes, but only if you don't confuse these UFOs with flying saucers.

Consider the following hypotheses and ask yourself which of them are likely to receive the most attention (let's assume that all of them were put forth by scientists): 1) Wormholes can exist/ Wormholes can't exist. 2) It is possible to travel through a wormhole / It isn't possible to travel through...

Like Chris, I am not terribly excited about this. There are dozens of papers per week that deal with quantum gravity and cosmology, with all kinds of results. I don't mind that people spend their time working on this. But putting out press releases is way to premature. They tend to mislead the layma...

This post is related to the opening post, not to the intervening discussion. BBC News, Scotland A team of Scottish scientists has made light travel slower than the speed of light. They sent photons - individual particles of light - through a special mask. It changed the photons' shape - and slowed ...

The dimensions we have access to- length, high and width- all are accessible with time being fleeting but sensible actor. The forces and force carriers move amongst those dimensions. I have always being nagged (probably posting it many times before) that size itself could be a dimension. I think if...

This APOD looks like a scene right out of a science fiction movie. Great image!

Which brings me back to the Earth. Do we know if the biomass of the Earth has ever - well, in the last three billion years or so - been thousands of times smaller than it is now? Since life started from a few biomolecules and cells, the answer is yes. AFAIK, the composition of Earth's atmosphere wa...

What is the "object" below the Magellanic Clouds? It appears to be in front of the (water) clouds, so it must be something terrestrial?

This discovery is important, because it would have found a massive neutrino source and change the theory of black holes. I agree with you that this is an important finding. But keep in mind that the authors claim evidence, not proof, that high energetic neutrinos originate from the vicinity of the ...

According to the news, Philae had some problems with the landing and they lost contact. I hope all will be well.

Update: #Philae2014 sent an image, so I assume all went well in the end.

Can somebody help put a scale to this photo? The description just states it can resolve details as small as 40 light minutes. But 40 light minutes is ~720 million KM, or just shy of where Jupiter orbits. Does that mean the innermost dark band is approximately where Jupiter would orbit? Here is a pi...

I remember that the science books I read as a child were still discussing if the solar system with its planets was unique. It's amazing that 25 years later, we know hundreds of exoplanets, have measured some of their atmospheres, and are now able to watch them forming.

The bottom left area of the image looks like wave ripples.... :---[===] * I noticed the ripples in the pole regions, too. They are an artifact of the cylindrical projection . It is a mathematical fact that you can't map the surface of a sphere onto a plane without distortions. Usually, these distor...

For more discussion, you can also visit the blog by Peter Woit.

Nitpicker wrote:One of the best selfies ever taken.

Isn't a selfie a self-portrait? So it would require a picture of the spacecraft. Best selfie is this one, IMHO.

Just curious, why are the multitudes of stars among the Milkyway apparently not visible in so many of these otherwise high-resolution, highly-processed images taken from outer space? Adding to what geck has said: This is the same reason why you couldn't see a firefly right next to the sun. You can ...

Roughly, once a particle passes the event horizon, it will continue to travel to the "center" of the black hole. This has always seemed off to me. In reality, I'd expect that a good deal of mass inside the event horizon (maybe all of it) must actually be in relativistic orbits around the ...

Markus, is the singularity simply the spot where the math breaks down? Another way of asking the same question: is there a mass at the center of the black hole which has a diameter > 0, however small it might be? Rob The concept of a singularity of a space-time is mathematically well defined. But t...

re black holes still considered a singularity ? At the "center" of a black hole the theory that describes them, general relativity, breaks down because of a singularity. Everywhere else is fine, in particular at the event horizon, which marks the "point of no return". This is al...

I read about deinococcus radiodurans . It can survive extreme amount of radiation and thrive on nuclear waste. But apparently this more of a side effect, since such high levels of radioactivity don't occur naturally. The wikipedia article claims that the radioactive resistance is due to d. radiodura...