Starship Asterisk*

That's by no means out of the question. The early universe was a pretty dense and very energetic place but we think that part of the initial formation of galaxies was around black holes (the "black hole came first" hypothesis). While a supernova does cause giant molecular clouds to collaps...

We also think that you aren't an amorphous silicoid blob with a naturally evolved modem but nobody has actually looked.

Anyone can take the next one, then.

Even out at the distance of Voyager 1, there just won't be enough parallax. You'd need a sister telescope upwards of a light year away.

It is likely that there were other planets formed early in the development of the Solar System. This was a chaotic environment, with planets perturbing each other, transferring angular momentum, shifting orbital radii, changing position, and being flung out of the Solar System entirely. I think the...

Well done. Care to post how you found it?

"Obliteration" is a lot more difficult than you might think. You basically need to take every atom with in it and give them enough energy to defeat gravity and reach infinity: Gravitational binding energy. This can be estimated without scary mathematics by assuming an object is a uniformly...

I'm saying nothing of the kind, only that we know extremely little about how Pop III stars behaved. Nucleosynthesis was done by these stars, whether they actually could support themselves for any amount of time or whether they could not. The end result would be a supernova and it's well known how su...

mark swain wrote: Pardon me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way


I always thought is was 100,000 light years across.

Mark

Sorry for laughing at you like I am now... But tell me how radius relates to diameter?

Why did not other secondary planets occur at other Lagrangian points - especially Jupiter and Saturn? Why have not the asteriods at Jupiter's Lagrangian points been perturbed and collided with Jupiter? The 60 degree fore and aft Lagrange points are stable only when the object in it is of insignific...

A clockwise spiral is just an anti-clockwise spiral seen from the other side. And an anti-clockwise spiral is a clockwise spiral seen from the other side.

They're equivalent and depend entirely on which direction you're looking from. Hence there can be no preference for either.

Not that one.

The Cosmological Principle: Not always your friend.

As usual, the APOD this image comes from is the answer. I'll run it for 3 days and then start posting clues if nobody's solved it in the meantime.

Yes, that was dumb luck that the image sequence had a satellite passing it, otherwise I don't think anyone would have got it!

Gotcha. (Dumb luck this time)

The second crop is almost unmistakably a lens flare. Which sort of helps narrow it down. Back to the search box!

This is a good one. I'm yet to get it and I've been looking for a while now.

A winner is you.

Nope, sorry

This time I'm taking the image from the high-res version.

You don't need to tell me what it is, just the APOD it came from. Or any one of them, for APODs which have been repeated.

Well I initially searched (using APOD's own search) for space probe flybys, which got me nowhere. I used terms "CONTOUR", "cassini" (big mistake), "streak", "flyby" and "probe". Then I tried "satellite", which again got nowhere. The only ot...

You sneaky barsoom! I'm very impressed.

Well I'm approaching this one by figuring out what that streak is at the bottom.

Very good, you win.

I'd actually taken it from but it's a repeat anyway.

Which APOD is this rather attractive crop taken from?