Starship Asterisk*

I am fairly sure that this was one of the wallpapers on one of Seven's screens in her Astrometrics Laboratory aboard the Starship "Voyager" for years. This has always seemed a little strange to me, that she would prefer a four-century old, low-resolution image from the Alpha Quadrant rathe...

Being the resident asker of dumb questions compels me to ask. What’s the “pink donut” left of center, just above the large spiky star? Hey, that's my job, friend. But, to answer the question, the pinkish toroid is a better, larger, safer Ringworld that NASA/JAXA/ESA/JPL forgot to redact when they c...

What is masked out in the upper right corner of the image? I remember wondering this the first time around but now there is this chance to ask, thanks! That was just the shape of the camera's field of view, caused by the cut-out bit being used for other instruments. It's expensive to haul things in...

Reddening is a tricky thing in astronomy, because it's not reliably detectable. That's because it's not true reddening (as with redshift) where sources get shifted in wavelength- something that is obvious spectroscopically, but just a change in the balance of a range of wavelengths. It's a great, b...

Why would Ellipticals have interior discs of gas? Surely that's a trick Spirals are best known for? Could there be a disc-forming bit of physics that is only apparent over smooth, large-scale regions with little mass density such as galaxies? Something magneto-hydro-dynamic or hydrogen-bondy? Some ...

Could the whitening of the background spirals be due to "special" gases and dusts that selectively absorb red and perhaps infrared? Methane andsuch, like the airs of Neptune and Uranus? That would be cool, too. Thank you, lady, that was an awful lot of work to do to answer what was an off...

Another technique, using naturally occurring water masers in gas clouds orbiting around black holes, provides higher precision, but these masers are very rare and are associated almost exclusively with spiral galaxies having smaller black holes. The ALMA team recently pioneered a new method to stud...

Like other spiral galaxies , including our own Milky Way, NGC 1300 is thought to have a supermassive central black hole . Is NGC1300 just too far away for our machinery to resolve the core sufficiently to ascertain the existence of its super-massive singularity or to see the dancing stars around it...

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61cfMssTnGL.jpg Today's APOD is the kind of coloring book that bores me, so I will just quickly and magically give it color by posting a version of the picture of it in full color instead. There, that looks nice, doesn't it? Ann Ah, thank you, that i...

There's always the option to simply not talk about things you know very little or nothing about, then. Especially if the only purpose is to spread further negativity in an already negative world. Just saying. You have no idea what I know little about, nor do you know what I know much about. To assu...

Furthermore, the work has no accepted name -- can you think of a good one ? There can be only one name for this work: "Dying To Know." . On seeing it, my first thought was that the artist didn't understand the theory of the Celestial Spheres and the universe as a mechanism. He has all of ...

Am I missing things? To each their own, but some art is properly enjoyed with history lessons. Nocturnes are a rare kind of painting, and van Gogh... is van Gogh. Thank you for being so understanding. I do do the Art History thing if the art is, in my opinion, worth my efforts and time. Vincent's i...

They are all in orbit. They don't coalesce for the same reason our solar system doesn't. Though, like elliptical galaxies and utterly unlike the Solar System, a Galactic Cluster's components seem to move more like a bee swarm than a sensible planetary system. Stars orbit in 3D, sometimes in exceedi...

Got a planetarium nearby? Nope. Sorry. You realize that you're just purposely making yourself feel bad, don't you? Actually, based on your last statement, I'm thinking you understood this already. An interesting take on it. Maybe true, too. I'm not sure I can explain myself, but what I feel I've co...

But at 2.5 million light-years from Earth the big beautiful spiral galaxy really is a little out of reach as a destination. Don't worry, though. Just wait 5 billion years and the Andromeda Galaxy will come to you . Nighttime Sky View of Future Galaxy Merger: 7 Billion Years From which planet? Won’t...

... Don't worry, though. Just wait 5 billion years and the Andromeda Galaxy will come to you . ... I keep seeing this assertion but I don't like it. I don't know why but I'm very dubious about it. Are we sure that our big bully of a neighbour is coming here? Are we certain she's part of the Milky W...

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_200313.jpg Starry Night by Jean-Francois Millet Explanation: ... "If only you knew how beautiful the night is ... the calm and grandeur of it are so awesome that I find that I actually feel overwhelmed." Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh was an admirer of...

I am a mathematician and would like to estimate/compute the brightness in the interior/middle of a globular cluster, given eht number of 'normal' stars of teh entire cluster, e.g. M13. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2003/Messier13_HelmColes.jpg I am very much a non-mathematician, so I can't help ...

Can you explain; Why with such a huge number of stars within very close proximity, has gravity not coalesced them into a super star. Thanks They are all in orbit. They don't coalesce for the same reason our solar system doesn't. Though, like elliptical galaxies and utterly unlike the Solar System, ...

The remarkable range of brightness recorded in this image follows stars into the dense cluster core and reveals three subtle dark lanes forming the apparent shape of a propeller just below and slightly left of center. Distant background galaxies in the medium-wide field of view include NGC 6207 at ...

I find it intriguing that there seem to be a lot of these Hot Giant Worlds. Is it vaguely possible that this is an artificial situation? That they were engineered? That some sort of hot silicon or plasma-based lifeform needs to be so close to their home star that they deliberately manoeuvred so man...

The remarkable range of brightness recorded in this image follows stars into the dense cluster core and reveals three subtle dark lanes forming the apparent shape of a propeller just below and slightly left of center. Distant background galaxies in the medium-wide field of view include NGC 6207 at ...

It would be cool to send some probes just to see. Sure... if our civilization was stable enough to engage in projects that wouldn't return results for fifty or a hundred thousand years! There's no need to be selfish. We don't need our civilisation to be stable nor even our species to exist; all we ...

I thought V838-Mon, "The V-Monster", was far too young, hot and big to have viable planets?

They shouldn't have had time to coalesce from the fluffy cloud, yet and The V-Monster probably won't live long enough to let them.

I wonder if the material would all spiral in after that, or for some time make a RING... :?: :---[===] * Even dull, unexciting, boring, stable old Sol has a ring, and a poor excuse for a Dyson Shell. If NegsTenby ever formed one so close to its sun that it was entirely within the corona that ring w...