Starship Asterisk*

I think the question is why are spiral galaxies not all oriented in parallel planes. We cannot see the entire universe from earth, but we can see a spherical portion of the universe from our vantage point with a radius of about 12.7 billion light years. Imagine if we did a survey of all the visible ...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071003.html Wow!! It looks like the coronal mass ejection occurs in three waves. The first wave almost carries the comet tail away, the second wave knocks the tail off completely. By the time the third, smaller wave passes, the tail has grown back. It really makes...

Hey I thought a kilogram was the weight of a liter of water under certain precise conditions (temp, pressure). I didn't know the definition was dependent on a musty old block of platinum locked up in France.

Also the news article said it contained Iridium too. Doesn't that decay?

It sure would be interesting to compare seismic records and tectonics from another planet about the size of Earth without a moon... ...say Venus for example Yeah, I agree....... Am I correct in stating the our Moon is the only Moon in the Solar System that is thought to have formed from a collision...

The impacting body didn't literally scoop out the Pacific but indeed melted the whole planet. But it was this impact that left the planet "out of balance" and it has been trying to rebound from this event ever since. So with this theory it would seem that all earthquakes today are actuall...

http://www.nealadams.com/nmu.html Look at clips #0, #11, and #12 on the link. Neal Adams proposed that the east coast of Africa fits up against the west coast of India. Then he has Australia and Antartica joining together and fitting against the eastern margins of Asia, which also has a major trans...

It could lend credence to the expanding universe theory, "Everything expands exponentially." Supposedly space is expanding, not matter. But if the space within matter subatomically is expanding, both the space between celestial objects and the celestial objects themselves would be expandi...

Hey, Dr. Skep, I am intrigued and skeptical about time proceeding in quantum bits that cannot be subdivided. If that were true, then photons moving at the the speed of light (300 million meters per second) would not move smoothly through space, but would jump a small distance during each minimual ti...

I read the Wikipedia article (it's worth a look and a good solid critique; I don't believe every Wiki I see) which states the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, and the radius of our sphere of the universe at 46.5 billion light years. I'll accept those figures for the sake of discussion. I t...

Hi Pyjam. Welcome. Assume a beam of light travelled in a straight line in a vacuum for 12.7 billion years from the quasars position in space (way back then) to our position in space (right now). With those assumptions, one can say that the those two points in spacetime were separated by 12.7 billion...

Hi Noel, I would like to debate your statement that "There is no sense to a 'where is it now, really' concept". Because, apply what you said about the quasar to the Mars Rover, which is so far away we have to wait hours to communication with it at light speed. I have a definite sense that ...

Regarding Brian's suggestion that the hole in the universe is actually the center of the universe, I would have thought the the big bang would have eventually resulted in enough turbulence and diffusion, that after 13.7 billion years, some galaxies would eventually fill in the void, or at the very l...

Aye, but those objects that are 20Gly from each other won't be able to see each other. Unless........ Unless they are the same object! The quasar map link rigelan posted shows a lot of mirror symmetries. This suggests the possibility that if you look at two really distant objects in opposite direct...

I do not know the answer, but I agree with Javachip. It is an important question because if 10Gly objects are uniformly distributed around us, the "diameter" of the universe would be over 20Gly. This would be a counterintuitive finding (at least for me) as the universe is only 13.7 Gy old....

Forgive me if my thinking is excessively linear, but here is a cosmological problem that defies logic. Let us assume that our portion of the known universe is 13.7 billion years old, and it started out at a point and expanded to it's current shape and size over the past 13.7 billion years. Now let u...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070316.html It appears that the Saturns don't quite line up in a straight line. I am holding a straight edge (printer paper) right up to the flat screen monitor. Could it be "camera giggle"? Or perhaps lunar gravitational distortion? Maybe at this magnif...

I could have sworn that today's APOD was an aerial view of Boston Harbor, rather than of a methane bay on Titan. I really did a double (actually triple) take. Compare! I found Back Bay, Goverment Center, Logan Airport, and a few harbor islands on Titan! (Yeah I know, it's a little distorted, and I s...