Starship Asterisk*

Speculation is natural and a good start for later stages of theory. Perhaps, periodically, it flips from inverse to an un-inverse . :idea: It has a nice symmetry though one too many “n’s”. :wink: Consensus is one of the most important parts of science and the scientific method, though. Speculation ...

I read a news: Bruno Bento, researcher at the departament of mathematical scienses at the University of Liverpool, England, states that," perhaps, ( in the Universe), there was not even a beginning" Proposes an infinite past and sees the Big Bang as one more event " in a cosmos that ...

Not sure if this is a correct way to put it but solar wind is the corona spreading ever further out into space, so even we here on Earth are in a sense bathing in the Sun's corona! Luckily it has cooled down on the way. While the density of the coronal material (the solar wind) is much reduced by t...

How far out do the petals of the corona extend? They seem huge. Not sure if this is a correct way to put it but solar wind is the corona spreading ever further out into space, so even we here on Earth are in a sense bathing in the Sun's corona! Luckily it has cooled down on the way. While the densi...

I read a news: Bruno Bento, researcher at the departament of mathematical scienses at the University of Liverpool, England, states that," perhaps, ( in the Universe), there was not even a beginning" Proposes an infinite past and sees the Big Bang as one more event " in a cosmos that ...

So the accretion disk "looks" the same from any POV, yet the geometry of it (and presumably the matching magnetic field that we see here) would look different? Are different, despite the appearance after all the directions light travels have been distorted. That's my understanding. Ok. My...

Ok. What's confusing here then is that assuming this imaging of the magnetic field lines would look the same from any angle - and it looks pretty non randomly flowing here! - then what does that say about the magnetic field as a whole? Too bad we don't have a near by BH to send a probe to to find o...

So if the accretion disk can be seen perpendicularly to the line of sight from any angle (as other posts of videos point out), and we're viewing the magnetic field lines in the accretion disk in this APOD image in that same perpendicular/face-on way, what is the overall form of the magnetic field o...

I have nothing to say about the magnetic lines in today's APOD, but there is a video that explains why the black hole images (minus the magnetic lines) look the way they do. Minor nit. The lines indicate polarization of electromagnetic radiation. This is most likely a proxy for magnetic fields. So ...

Ann wrote: ↑Mon Apr 01, 2024 3:24 pm I have nothing to say about the magnetic lines in today's APOD, but there is a video that explains why the black hole images (minus the magnetic lines) look the way they do.

Minor nit. The lines indicate polarization of electromagnetic radiation. This is most likely a proxy for magnetic fields.

If this is the accretion disk, wouldn't it be parallel to the galaxy and since we are in the galaxy, wouldn't this view be impossible to see? So then in contrast to what they say, this is not a photo. Am I wrong? There is no requirement that a galaxy's central black hole must share its axis of rota...

Tycho Brahe was certainly a nobleman, but he had no 'de' or 'von' or 'af' in his name. :!: Best regards from his grand-10-nephew Steen Thomsen While not common today, and not used during most of his life, the form Tycho de Brahe starts showing up in the late 1500s and the following centuries. So wh...

"before humanity had better instruments...". The Antikythera mechanism predates the 1500's by nearly 1,700 years. Likewise, the knowledge of the solar system to produce the mechanism itself would probably add a couple or more centuries. The Antikythera mechanism is a predictive device. It...

I'd love to do the red cabbage experiment, but I don't much like cabbage, particularly not if it's been boiled. So to do the experiment, I would have to buy a head of cabbage, boil it and then throw it away. Feels like food waste. Maybe I'll do it anyway. The solution is goats. Ours will happily go...

M31, Andromeda, has over 500 Global Clusters, GCs. M87, according to a paper by John Huchra of Harvard, has approximately 20,000 GCs. No suggestion of them being leftover cores. I'll stick by my statement that there are too many GCs for them to originate by the stripping method imputed in the origi...

Some astronomers think there is a black hole in omega Centauri. Five others think that if that is so, it could be the center of a small galaxy stripped of its peripheral stars. They look in that area of the sky, and find 309 stars that seem to be of the same age as omega Centauri, in an arc pointed...

I think that if you see a color photo whose color balance seems surprising, chances are that it is the picture that is different, not the natural phenomenon that has taken on a strange hue. Very true... but possibly excepting flowers! The color of the petals of pink/red/blue/purple flowers is creat...

Well, doesn't it say that Omega Centauri is - or very well could be - the remnant core of a cannibalized galaxy? And aren't you arguing that it's not? I am not. I'm suggesting that "leftover galaxy core" is a lousy term for it, and that it isn't even a globular cluster, except visually. M...

What of this paper then - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-019-0751-x What of it? Well, doesn't it say that Omega Centauri is - or very well could be - the remnant core of a cannibalized galaxy? And aren't you arguing that it's not? I am not. I'm suggesting that "leftover galaxy core&quo...

I take it that there is some evidence that Omega Centauri is? Ann I would not characterize the remnant of a collision as a "leftover galaxy core"! In any case, the hypothesis that Omega Centauri isn't a "true" globular cluster, but rather something left from a collision, is base...

Globular clusters are leftover galaxy cores? The 2010 count of them was 157. We see large numbers of them in the Andromeda galaxy, and other galaxies. So, based on that number crunching, clusters are two or three orders of magnitude more common than galaxies. There is no evidence that globular clus...

I've asked this before re the Hercules cluster: do astronomers know the approximate distance between the closest stars to each other here? They seem to know the approximate number of stars, and the size and distance of the structure. I'm assuming things are not homogeneous tho: some stars are relat...

Globular clusters are leftover galaxy cores? The 2010 count of them was 157. We see large numbers of them in the Andromeda galaxy, and other galaxies. So, based on that number crunching, clusters are two or three orders of magnitude more common than galaxies. There is no evidence that globular clus...

Is gravitational attraction causing the stars to move toward the center of the cluster? If not, why not? For the same reason that the gravitational attraction of the Sun isn't causing the Earth and other planets to move towards the center of the Solar System. They're in orbit. (Of course, we can un...

Indeed, Chris, elliptical galaxies don't form stars (broadly speaking). What I'm asking is why the central parts of (dense) galaxy clusters are so dominated by ellipticals. There must be a process that causes the central members of galaxy clusters to lose their gas and their arms. It may be as simp...