Starship Asterisk*

dwarf galaxy NGC 1531 (right of center), Was this written by someone looking at a rotated picture? What I assume is NGC1531 is above the larger spiral's core, right in the middle of the picture. An interesting kink in the inner spiral arm — it's really been yanked up hard by the dwarf galaxy's grav...

Any ideas how accurate the artist's impression might be? That thing's too non-round IMHO to be a star, unless one just on the verge of popping its cork. I know the Wiki page mentions the possibility of massive convection cells on the outer photosphere, but this seems a bit much. Also intriguing abou...

Gonna hit or gonna miss! Over a 100 years for solutions! :shock: this is a pretty good sized chunk of rock! More like a good sized pile of rocks. <nod> It's especially obvious in the video if you full-screen it — there are a few big and a few medium sized chunks sticking out, but most of the surfac...

MarkBour wrote: ↑Wed Dec 18, 2019 8:01 pm Wouldn't Hawking radiation apply to these bodies just as well as it would to a black hole?

Can you get Hawking radiation if there isn't an actual event horizon?

12,000 RPM!! Amazing. Where did the energy to spin them up come from? The rotational energy was already there, in the star that existed before the supernova. When the neutron star formed, this energy was concentrated, spinning the compressed core faster and faster with no limit until neutron pressu...

Do we know if Neutron Stars have any sort of lifespan? :shock: A lot depends on circumstances. A solo neutron star, not part of a binary system or any surviving planets, will just get steadily cooler and rotate slower over a very, very, very long timescale (the very first neutron stars formed are p...

Okay, now that we have a confirmed interstellar comet, there are a few questions that have intrigued me; what sort of system could it have come from? Was it ejected from its original system very early, during planetary migration, or is it older? Could this be its first close solar encounter, or has ...

https://hubblesite.org/uploads/image_file/image_attachment/27222/web.jpg The gaseous halo of Andromeda. Higher resolution here . The light from background quasars are used to probe the size of the Andromeda halo. Something I just realised looking at this diagram. If the Milky Way has a similar gase...

Not sure how usual this is — I don't see many deep background galaxies, apart from a few small edge-on spirals and ellipticals off in the top left corner. I always thought it was difficult to point a telescope in a random direction and not catch a lot of veryverylongwayaway stuff (as in the various ...

Looks like the climactic scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark is taking place just over the horizon...

Is this the area where there's a contact binary that's supposed to go supernova in 5 years or less? KIC 9832227 . It's in the same constellation (Cygnus), but farther away than the Veil. <wiki-wiki-wiki> Good grief, an orbital period of eleven hours?!??! That's fast enough to actually see them goin...

Actually, I first wonder what the density of the gasses are; it all may be quite tenuous, even in those spots It is — the density even in the brighter patches isn't actually much more than the average near-vacuum you'd find in interstellar space. The main reasons we can see these nebulae at all is ...

Note that "12 light years" only refers to the small piece in today's picture — according to the Wiki page, the whole thing is about 77 light years across. It's biiiiig...

There is no "camera lens" as such. These artifacts are internal reflections of the primary mirror shadowed by the secondary, which is why they look like donuts. Most likely they are internal reflections in filters, but there are other possible surfaces they could also be from. <headdesk> ...

Something that I noticed when I had a chance to look at this APOD image on a larger display cinched the case that this is an artifact. If you also look at the very bright foreground star on the left edge of the galaxy you can see another (although dimmer) double ring effect. And if you draw lines t...

It really brings out the large-scale size of the universe when we can see dozens of tiny splotches of far background galaxies, and the one we're looking at is 300 million light-years away.

neufer wrote: ↑Tue Nov 19, 2019 11:03 am

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

πr not square.

πr round.

(You don't want to know how long I've been waiting for a halfway decent opportunity to use that line...)

Something I've always wondered in large-scale galaxy images like this; are the groups of blue specks we see individual hot blue stars, or complete compact clusters of hot blue stars? There was an APOD some time back featuring a massive multi-megapixel image of the Andromeda galaxy, and I was never s...

Why is there so little rubble around all these craters? the amount of stuff kicked up from 180km's worth of crater, i'd have thought there'd be mountains of the stuff. I guess some gets kicked into space and some is just vaporised, but still. I watched a documentary recently about asteroid impacts;...

Isn't Apollo 4 the launch that's almost always used in films and TV to depict "great big rocket go thataway"? IIRC the black patterns were different for every Saturn V, and there's also the S-IC/Interstage separation, filmed by cameras on the S-II that were ejected and recovered. A very ni...

I'm fascinated by OGC 1403..the cosmic sunnyside up space egg.The central bulge appears massive.(unless that is a foreground star).Would love to see a clearer picture some day. I dunno, I can see another couple of possibilities here. It could be two similar spiral-ish galaxies in mid face-to-face c...

These structures form as the moon is passing, and do not persist. They are not structures that have been in place for a long period of time. They result because the orbit isn't perfectly circular and isn't perfectly in the plane of the rings. I was talking about the ridge features on Daphnis, not t...

Interestingly the ridges show different angles. Looks like this moons orbit and axis changed a lot. It's probably tidally locked to Saturn (just checked the Wiki page, yes it is) and I don't think there's anything in the theory that says this has to be a smooth progression down to zero. It's likely...

If Mars is one pixel, why is the comet so many pixels. ?? That doesn't quite add up.. Even my pocket camera can do better than that. & surely this is telescopic view ? What you see of the comet's head is a big cloud of dust and gas (usually at least thousands of miles across) ejected from the a...

BDanielMayfield wrote: ↑Tue Oct 29, 2019 9:05 pm

daddyo wrote: ↑Tue Oct 29, 2019 6:28 pm Here's how an architect would get to Mars

A bridge way, way too far.

A Transspacial Tunnel, Hurrah!