Starship Asterisk*

More fun facts about the Sun: The Sun currently fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, converting 4 million tons of matter into energy every second as a result. Do the math (E=mc 2 ) to see how much energy the Sun emits every second. Warning, it could blow your mind. :sh...

<<The total number of particles carried away from the Sun by the solar wind is about 1.3×10 36 per second. Thus, the total mass loss each year is about (2–3)×10 −14 solar masses, or about 1.3–1.9 Mt/s . This is equivalent to losing a mass equal to the Earth every 150 million years.>> <<Coronal mass...

The Sun's luminosity is measured to be 3.826·10 26 W, so the Sun emits an energy of E = 3.826·10 26 J each second. It is challenging to comprehend a value that large. It might help to drop the exponential notation (or not), just to illustrate it's largeness. The Sun's output is, rounded to four sig...

More fun facts about the Sun: The Sun currently fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, converting 4 million tons of matter into energy every second as a result. Do the math (E=mc 2 ) to see how much energy the Sun emits every second. Warning, it could blow your mind. :sh...

This does not require any math, a simple calculation will do: What does the word math mean to you? Any calculation, no matter how simple or complex involves the manipulation of numbers in accord with the rules of math ematics , which you then proceed to do with skill. But your first statement is a ...

More fun facts about the Sun: The Sun currently fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, converting 4 million tons of matter into energy every second as a result. Do the math (E=mc 2 ) to see how much energy the Sun emits every second. Warning, it could blow your mind. :sho...

Quite right! I was on Apollo 17, and the radio guys at the next console were radio astronomers who were WOWED at the radio silence every time we went behind the Moon. (They were probing the moons surface with radio waves). The retired professor who modestly calls himself “heehaw” has just dropped a...

Grizzly wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2020 5:46 pm Do we know the inclination of the system relative to ours? Are we looking at it roughly from a polar view of the star?

Yes. The article reporting this finding stated that this system is being seen from a nearly polar view .

I admit to being a being who’s a bit bifurcated, but not like the Hulk. More like a very weak, poor emulator of the so called father of the scientific method, Sir Isaac Newton. (He also had to keep his religious beliefs under raps, due to fear of excommunication.)

Bruce

https://i.imgur.com/PjHa3wA.png So I take it that the other dots are confirmed to not be planets of that system then? Background stars or artefacts? Very cool, ESO team! I think that bystander may have posted an article on this (although I couldn't find it just now) on The Communications Center: Br...

Thousands more exoplanets have been discovered in the more than six years that this thread has been dormant. (But now that I'm retired, it can rumble to life again, like a volcano.)

Has anything been learned in the interim that weighs on the question of planetary counts?

Bruce

The system orbiting TYC 8998-760-1 is very different than ours. There are two giant exoplanets orbiting the star. The ESO Very Large Telescope photographed the two planets using its SPHERE instrument, producing the first direct image of multiple planets orbiting a Sun-like star.[1][6] TYC 8998-760-1...

Ann wrote:Today's APOD is a gorgeous image of a splendid spiral galaxy!

Certainly true!

I wouldn't call it a grand design spiral galaxy, though.

Technically accurate perhaps, but, at least IMHO it displays both qualities.

Bruce

Thanks to Hubble and to geckzilla for processing this image. I don't think this image is geckzilla's. Her image on flickr of NGC 6814 doesn't really look like this. That's strange. Today's APOD image clearly gives an acknowledgement to Judy Schmidt (aka geckzilla) in the lower left corner, and so d...

Thanks to Hubble and to geckzilla for processing this image. The explanation's 10 million sun mass estimate for NGC's Supermassive Black Hole isn't quite super enough however. Both the description of this image on the Hubble site page and wikipedia show it at 18 million suns. NGC 6814 is an intermed...

I read in science fiction that radio signals cannot travel through the Moon. That is why the far side of the Moon is free from man made cacophony of radio noise. Quite right! I was on Apollo 17, and the radio guys at the next console were radio astronomers who were WOWED at the radio silence every ...

Crazy thing about nebulas; You can look at them and imagine a face or 2; then look at them later and see something else! :mrgreen: I blame those pesky Klingons and their dubious industrial safety record in moon mining... :wink: Captain Sulu’s tea cup vibrates off, shatters, and he says, “Shields, S...

But doesn't the accelerating expansion of the universe rule out cyclical cosmologies?

Dark Energy is overwhelming (I was going to write trumps, but that word has been ruined for normal usage) the attractive gravitational pull of all the rest of the material in the universe.

But a throne for a member of which alien race? https://images.app.goo.gl/wJRWvXAMxfFHiWem7

The rate that fingernails grow comes up so frequently in science (plate tectonics, moon’s orbital growth, etc.) that it ought to be an official unit of measurement: the Clip.

I am more familiar with the atmospheric belts of Jupiter. What is the region we are seeing? One of the poles? ... At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 5,375 miles (8,650 kilometers) from Jupiter's cloud tops at a latitude of about 50 degrees North. ... Is that a nearly polar vi...

Probably because I haven't fully engaged in photo processing, it's usually just dumb luck that I capture images that I like. From those, it's usually the close-ups that are my favorites. IMG_9552 (2).JPG Birds are hard to get what you want them to do. :lol2: IMG_9533 (2).JPG They are always keeping...

The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. Is this perfectly true? It is certainly true that, to the best of our current understanding, every proton was originally formed in the Big Bang. But Is every Hydrogen atom nuclei a pristine fragment of the BB? No...

Our atmosphere bled off Earth's inital allotment of Helium long ago. All of the Helium on Earth results from the nuclear decay of heavier elements. Helium thus formed is often trapped in deep rock formations. That is why your party balloons are filled with Helium extracted as a by-product of oil dr...

The magazine Sky and Telescope was my go to reference back when I had a scope. Their website is indeed a very nice reference for all sorts of observable objects! After browsing, I've already written down a few that I'd like to try observing. Thanks for the recommendation. Your welcome zeecatman. Th...