Starship Asterisk*

Some very distant galaxies at 12.8 billion ly away were a vibrant greenish blue color. What color would they look like without the redshift for an observer who was right there in the galaxy? In the ultraviolet? Or even in the x-ray color? At a guess I would say the were very bright in UV, ie. under...

After decades of complaining, I finally saw my first UFO in the night sky! I was stoked!

The next night, I realized it was just a firefly.

I'm sure it is explained somewhere in the links, but do the LIGO facilities need to be aimed and focused in a particular portion of the sky, like a regular telescope? I imagine they must. No, they're entirely stationary installations (well, as stationary as anything situated on a spinning rock whiz...

Something like this could happen very nearby and not pose any risk from the gravitational radiation. I'm not sure if a black hole merger also produces enough electromagnetic radiation to be dangerous for some distance, but I think that would be a larger concern than the gravitational waves. I was j...

The Sun would be entirely opaque to a GRB, so yeah, we'd be fine under those circumstances. Now, if we were much, much further from the Sun, it would act as a gravitational lens and make the GRB's effects significantly worse. No, I don't think the Sun's gravitational field could change the nature o...

Neutrinos Can Pass through A Light year of solid steal without their speed being impeded... Which is why we saw them three hours before the Super Nova's Photons... And yet they managed to hit a detector here on Earth significantly smaller than a light year. You have never made much sense and I don'...

For the sake of argument, if we imagine WR104 fires its jets at us directly, sometime in the next few years, say, and if we further imagine that it does so only within the precise window of a few hours around 22-23 December (when WR104 passes behind the Sun), would the Sun protect us? Either way, i...

tlc2357 wrote:There is another, similar faint smudge to the one mentioned at 8 o'clock two diameters out.

Darn, I've been ninja'd.

Someone was asking for ELVES; here's a video that has some ELVES images and video sequences. I guess they're so short-lived people have a hard time getting a good image of them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18CohZfw2DU

Anyone else here playing KSP? Building rockets from stuff that was found at the side of the road, and sending brave Kerbins into space! We hope...

http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/

It's silly explosive fun.

(I'm not affiliated with the devs, just a player)

tytower1 wrote:Its obvious of course
Its the nut that hold saturn in place with it's bolt

Now all we have to do is find a big enough spanner and loosen it.

We picked up Saturn as a flat-pack planet at Ikea. I'm just not sure where we put that Allen key after we were done assembling it...

Was just a jet contrail anyway...

That 'jet' from the background spiral galaxy, on a closer look, actually appears to be originating from the bright compact object just 'below' the spiral galaxy.

I always hate the stupid "playing God" chestnut that's always pulled out against performing certain types of science. It's bad enough that people do that in science fiction all the time... XD

yasgur wrote:I'm new to the forum, so I beg your pardon if this type of question has been asked to death, but why do the background stars in the two shots exhibit a color change?

At a guess, I'd say the Feb 16 photo is slightly blurred due to atmospheric conditions.

A hard-sf-themed RP forum could be rather interesting, I'd think.

A quick google of "star trek RP forum" turns up a metric buttload of Star Trek-themed roleplaying forums, which are kind-of, sort-of the same idea.

http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html

No more stars, All the light is fading, at the end of time, in the universe. A Google years has past. 1 How does A 36 billion solar mass black hole die? Going by current theory, it would 'die' by evaporating via Hawking radiation. But this would only begin once the universe had expanded enough to r...

If you're standing facing north, and look down at the ground, north is at the 'top' of your field of view, and east is to your right. Now if you look straight up at the sky (still facing north), north is now at the 'bottom' of your field of view, with east still to your right. If you wanted to corre...

Isn't this kind of like saying that you can throw a 'no-apple' faster than an apple? The absence of a thing isn't a thing itself...

Besides, there's no such thing as no-light. Thanks to the Uncertainty Principle, there's light everywhere.

By your logic, there is no proof that electrons exist, either. Most of what we observe in nature we observe indirectly. And the observations of black holes are extensive. The observations are of effects which may be caused by something. There is no proof whatsoever that Black Holes are causing the ...

northstar wrote:What if the particle (photon) were actually two particles (on-photon and off-photon) whose energies interact with each other to create a wave, but with the two particles registering as one particle?

You still get interference fringes if you use three slits instead of two in the experiment...

Oh, I believe y'all. It's just that, despite my efforts, I remain disappointed and unconvinced in the evidential sense. And how many other untested abilities might my brain be missing? A clever trick I found which allowed me to see these for the first time was to use background reflections. Origina...

What's that little pink cloud below and somewhat to the left of Jupiter? I was thinking it was an ordinary cloud being illuminated by ground lights or something, but there are other clouds near it that are dark. Or is it an astronomical object?