Starship Asterisk*

The explanation's link to 1054 AD's first paragraph says this: On July 4, 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers noted a "guest star" in the constellation Taurus; Simon Mitton lists 5 independent preserved Far-East records of this event (one of 75 authentic guest stars - novae and supernovae, excl...

I thought; dang, I don't have any! Then I thought; oh, I spend about half a day on the computer; sports, games, DVDs, APOD! Then I have my garden, and we walk the dog! Oh the dog is a hobby in her own right; she is kind of a lazy thing, so I like to mess with her a little! I taught her how to wink,...

Parker’s Solar Wind astrobites | Daily Paper Summaries | 2020 Sep 03 Nearly 70 years ago, Eugene Parker , a young professor at the University of Chicago, discovered something that would change out understanding of all stars, including our own Sun. The solar wind is a continuous stream of particles ...

Was this GW event also detected by other em radiation telescopes? Follow the links :wink: https://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=40963 https://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=40714 Black Hole Collision May Have Exploded with Light California Institute of Technology | 2020 Jun 25 Possible Flare...

Has there previously been a thread here on members' hobbies? If so I haven't found it, so this post can start one or perhaps be appended to an earlier one if it exists. I have two. Astronomy of course, or I wouldn't be a member of Starship Asterisk*. But astronomy is such a vast field that a persons...

LIGO/Virgo’s Newest Merger Defies Mass Expectations NOVA | American Astronomical Society | 2020 Sep 02 Been waiting for new signals to be parsed from LIGO/Virgo’s third observing run data? Wait no longer! The latest detection announced in Physical Review Letters and ApJ Letters is big news — both f...

Let's see. Here we have a mapped color image of a nebula that is 8,000 light-years distant but still large enough in the sky to cover the full Moon. Sounds big. This thing must have a powerful stellar engine driving it. What is said about the stellar engine? APOD Robot wrote: Open star cluster NGC ...

heehaw wrote: ↑Thu Sep 03, 2020 8:51 am I notice, not one word about the dark matter (which is MOST of the matter)!

Not that I doubt DMs really, but it’s easy to ignore or forget something that’s invisible and that has so far defied all attempts to physically explain. MOND might be ill, but it ain’t dead yet.

From the Northwestern U. report above by bystander, fourth citation below quotation: An international research collaboration including Northwestern University astronomers has witnessed the birth of an “intermediate-mass” black hole. This is the first conclusive discovery of an intermediate-mass blac...

I fear this is a dumb question, but I'd rather look dumb by asking than to stay dumb by not asking, so ... This hypothesis lacks direct empirical evidence but has generally been accepted from indirect evidence. What exactly is the difference between 'direct empirical evidence' and 'indirect evidence...

This mineral deposit dome on Ceres reminds me of something similar here on Earth: The immense mound of mineral deposits at Mammoth hot springs in Yellowstone National Park, USA. On Ceres the cause was the impact that created Occator crater. At Mammoth the cause is the hot spot deep in the Earth caus...

Neil deGrasse Tyson recommends that we "question everything ", so when The gravitational influence of a supermassive black hole is not very significant once you are just a few light years away from it. it makes me wonder. The relative unimportance of supermassive black holes is an opinion...

This system fits the old adage 'truth is stranger than fiction.'

ps that's me trying to say "go easy on whoever made this image they did the best they could with what they had" Roger on that geck. After looking at several of the links in the explanation I noticed that this very same image is featured on NASA webpages. (hey Orin, if you really like it y...

Neil deGrasse Tyson recommends that we "question everything ", so when The gravitational influence of a supermassive black hole is not very significant once you are just a few light years away from it. it makes me wonder. The relative unimportance of supermassive black holes is an opinion ...

Today's APOD is a fascianting portrait of one of the most remarkable sites of high-mass star formation in our galaxy. Can't stand the colors, though. There is no way that the star near the bottom of the image, which is deeper embedded in nebulosity that the cluster "above" it, should look...

neufer wrote: ↑Sun Aug 30, 2020 12:50 pm

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

While JohnD's befuddlement might remain, at least my being drawn into Idaho's ergosphere is fully explained. (Northern Idaho, I want to go to there. Must plan trip. Soon.)

Bruce

The importance of the Trapezium was highlighted by this sentence in the explanation: Orion's valley ends in a cavity carved by the energetic winds and radiation of the massive central stars of the Trapezium star cluster . The link in that quote leads to an APOD from three years ago, called "At ...

Yes this is a nice video. I don't want to come off sounding like a hater here, but there are a few issues that keep me from liking it completely. I like the zoom in beginning, but then there seem to be a bit too many hard and flat boundaries between cloud and empty space. Straight edges to clouds ap...

This means that Andromeda’s halo is already bumping into the halo of our own galaxy.

Hang on y'all. The "collision" has already begun.

The 2020 Atlantic Hurricane season doesn't even peak until September 10th, and Texas has already been affected by two. Granted, Texas has a long coastline, but there have been years when the entire US coastline wasn't hit by a single hurricane. Well, that used to happen occasionally. Don't bet on it...

Thanks neufer, and especially for your always very well-formatted posts, even if sometimes I have to try real hard to follow your occasionally non-sequitur train of thought :) It is my primary goal to drag *Asternauts into my large Egosphere and set their head a spinning. The truth is revealed :!:

H0w Low Can You Go? Limiting Early Dark Energy with Large-scale Structure astrobites | Daily Paper Summaries | 2020 Aug 21 The Hubble constant (H0) has quickly become a star in the world of forced astronomical acronyms (H0LiCOW, SH0ES), and for good reason. Measuring H0 quantifies the expansion of ...

Relativistic jets may provide evidence for the reality of frame-dragging. Gravitomagnetic forces produced by the Lense–Thirring effect (frame dragging) within the ergosphere of rotating black holes combined with the energy extraction mechanism by Penrose have been used to explain the observed prope...

The face of a sea lion. Beautiful, unless you're a small fish.