Starship Asterisk*

After reading the article I posted I started thinking; if an object, even a neutron star, was pulled into a Black Hole, would the mass (or some of the mass) of the object be assimilated into the Black Hole or would all the entering mass be converted and ejected as high energy particles at the event ...

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=00077EDE-A2AE-1345-A2AE83414B7F0000 To answer the question if stars collide: SCIENCE NEWS October 07, 2005 Gamma-Ray Mystery Solved A 30-year-old puzzle about the origin of short bursts of high-radiation energy in the cosmos has been solved...

Higher mass density, yes. More mass, no. There is an upper pressure/density limit a star can reach before fission starts. Any matter not under the pressure threshold will be blown out as solar wind. There are numerous factors to determine the final size of a star; rate of compression, gas temperatur...

What about NASA image of the day?
http://www1.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html

Or Space.com Image of the Day
http://www.space.com/imageoftheday/imag ... 30925.html

Or NASA's Hubble site
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/

They all have wonderful images.

For the record, a quark actually measures 0.000000000000000001 meters.

I'll probably receive negative feedback on this but those numbers aren't necessarily accurate to anything other than the perception of time in our little corner of the universe. There recently has been new galaxies found at a distance putting them at almost 12 billion years old but their measured pr...

There are far more practical ways of harvesting energy than an 8 year one way trip to Titan for methane, then an oxidizer would also be needed answering you second question, free oxygen is in short suppy in that corner of the universe. Good try, I once thought of turning Io and it's molten sulfer in...

I did not intend to state that "all" of the speed from the neutron star came from gravitational acceleration. Objects close to galactic center move much faster than the outer stars. A near collision between a neutron star and a black hole, the neutron star could rob a large amount of K-ene...

The math without understanding isn't much help, let me try and help show the "big picture". Jupiter has a diameter of 142,984 km and a mass 318 X Earth, because of the large distance from the planet core (or center point of gravity) and the wide vector angles of gravitational pull (because...

Please don't me make me do the math. We are not talking about an orbit, for example in the case of the Voyager probes, the probes robbed Jupiter of its orbital speed by using Jupiter's gravity to change voyager's angular path. In doing so, the probe spent more time accelerating towards the planet th...

Well put!

"Taken together with the speed of the probe, which was 10km/sec, the until about 4 sec part contradicts the few meters from the surface part, since 4 seconds from impact the probe was 40km away from the surface, no?" I see your point, the next questions to ask are - what was the exposure t...

The photo is a computer compiled image using image data from various photos, some taken up to 500km away and others within a few meter. That's why the greatest detail of the photo is just above the impact site.

Some of it had to do with the speeds of an elliptical orbit and the micro collision that take place during aphelion (slower orbital speeds) and perihelion (faster orbital speeds). Over all, micro impacts (mostly from the solar winds) have a negative effect on the speed of an orbiting body; the colli...

I believe it is much more likely that it was a gravitational slingshot than acceleration from an explosion. Also, its total kinetic energy tells me it involved more than one star system.

I hope it's not heading for us!

In theory, stars near the galactic center can be accelerate to 0.1 the speed of light as they are pulled toward a super massive black hole residing at the galactic center. Star density increases at some factor of 1/πR. Gaseous stars are torn apart under the forces creating supper-heated nebulae, I d...

You question needs to be a little more . . . not so vague. If you are wondering if one of the near-by stars went super nova, would it vaporize the Earth - most likely not, nor would it strip away the atmosphere. It could be equivalent to a big solar flare, in my opinion, the worst case it would tear...

I would have to disagree - in a way. Near the center of galaxies stars are moving very fast in relatively close proximity interfering with each other's orbits. Collisions happen but are rarely observed, washed out by the intense energy of the galactic core and by outer atmospheres mutually being tor...

You are right, I don't remember ever reading this - I feel smarter today. "Venus' rotation is somewhat unusual in that it is both very slow (243 Earth days per Venus day, slightly longer than Venus' year) and retrograde. In addition, the periods of Venus' rotation and of its orbit are synchroni...

It would not necessarily collapse during formation, the crystalline inner wall lining is simply a precipitate left behind do to evaporation, if the exterior substrate was strong enough to handle the rate of evaporation of the interior materials, and it could work. But they usually form in H2O.

I believe they ment that the same face of Venus always faces the sun as the Moon's face does with the Earth.

If you like math, calculate the escape velocities of Mars and Venus and then the kinetic energy of CO2 at the temperatures and pressures of both planets - you'll have your answer. For more fun, try it again with the molar mass of hydrogen.

Here are some simplified answers to your questions, if you require greater detail just ask. Q. Does the term "Universe" include everything that exists regardless of whether man can photograph it or not? A. Yes, the universe is all energy, matter, and the spaces between Q. Does the universe...

To Nedkelly's question about larger pools covered with dust:

Look at APOD Feb 28 2005 and see what you think.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050228.html

You would see the increased blurring of the outer stars only if you has an exposure of a million years or so.