Starship Asterisk*

Aichip...brilliant answers one and all. Thanks for your time and effort :) I'd not realised the red and blue in the CMBR might simply have been shift colours in the structure...teach me to look/read more carefully! I know that inflation is supposed to work like the skin of a dimensional balloon to e...

Given that there is no empirical evidence because all of space/time would fall in on itself at that point, i like theories that try to add in a bit of pre-universe state accidental point collision between vast dimensional energy membranes => big bang/ energy leak => hot rapidly inflating plasma soup...

The dusk disk is ringing! WOW,
...love to have that shifted into audible frequencies so we could hear it

Space is so cool!!!

...that said, brown dwarves don't sound so good, now do they

Downwind in the gravity well??? :) If anything that'd work the other way round, the gravity well wanting to pull ejecta in toward itself? That'd make Mars our progenitor, hence it's cold and dead now... and venus our future offspring? ...temperature resistant (thermal vent type)microbes first, terra...

great post Harry, Wow, 2 accretion disks! Is that because of the supposed gas giant? Very cool! I totally agree with Orin, planets everywhere...accretion disks are a natural part of the process of star formation. But life sustaining planets? That's a much more difficult proposition, but in a univers...

Aichip, i don't really understand your point of uniform CMBR if our galaxy were to stop orbiting? More uniform than it is now? Are you saying that our relative motion against the background is causing some kind of speed blur that makes it look less uniform than it really is? ...THAT makes my head hu...

I'm wondering if some of the APOD prints are in real color. Whether or not most of the renderings are really great. Orin Most of the image we see anywhere around us, from TV to billboards, the web to the daily papers, has been enhanced somehow...boosted colour/contrast, sharpened/smoothed out compl...

damn your smarty pants!

... nicely pointed out

If we could see UV, it'd safe to assume we'd evolved that ability and therefore would be unlikely to go blind at 'seeing all those colours'...?


I think therefore i am anthropic

Life, I know what you mean...sometimes you wonder if what we're seeing is at all similar what it would be like to gaze upon the real thing. That said, snowflakes are pretty enough to our eyes, but it takes a microscope to see the uniqueness of their amazing fine structure. False colour pictures allo...

Thnx EC...

It's really WOW because of all the amazing images posted on APOD though...

A.P.O.D. bringing all the WOWness of the universe out there to our monitors each morning!

Best
H

Much as i love the idea of cyclical Big-Bang-Big-Crushes, it seems the universe is one big energy dissipation mechanism; we see it everywhere, including life itself. That there was some event (whether vast energy branes colliding or the finger of some alien scientist accidentally brushing dandruff i...

If there are any scientists in need of visualisations to post on APOD, give me a shout I'm looking to bulk up my portfolio, love the idea of creating science/ space visualisations and so would be happy to help out...no charge, honest! You can see my work on APOD's 11th birthday collage - 16th June a...

Thnx for the kind words above... Although i might not normally go for something of this nature, Robert asked specifically for a collage and it was easy to make a great image out of so many incredible pix from APOD over the last year. Sketched 3 different collages, but Robert went for the 1st one i s...

Did anyone ever point EGRET at Earth? Sure, we have an atmosphere to protect against cosmic rays, but with all the holes in it i'm wondering if i shouldn't have been wearing lead shorts after seeing that picture... Still, maybe it'd only see a few dozen 'hot' astronauts wondering round, the odd KFC ...