Starship Asterisk*

Actually, the echo is in the form of an elipsoid, with V838 Mon at one focus and us (the observer) at the other. This makes sense when you think of the photons (all 14 of them) that traveled past earth before hitting soomething 3 lightyears behind us and bouncing back. Thus, the light echo technical...

Also, you have Saturn's gravity to worry about for any asteroid that drifts into Dione. It's rather unlikely that a random asteroid, traveling in a more or less random direction at a very high speed will just happen to match Dione's orbit around Saturn, AND Saturn's orbit around the sun so that it c...

And to make things even more muddy, we have 360 degrees, with 60 minutes per degree and 60 seconds per minute. This means that every minute, the sun moves 15 minutes across the sky. Or put another way, it moves a minute every 4 seconds.

Galactic Groove wrote:... just as we don't interpret that a new life has been born when a butterfly evolves from one of its phases, it would just be reclassified based on its current state.

...There's a term for it - Stellar Metamorphosis!

I have to admit that the hollow pentagonal rock looked rather interesting, but upon further examination, it looks like nothing more than an ordinary basalt column.



Compare to this:

It does bring an interesting point, though - how small does a body have to be before it's no longer a moon? I mean, whenever they discover a new moon of a planet, it tends to be one of the smallest ones yet (since the bigger ones have already been discovered), first one with a 50 km diameter, then 2...

I'd have to say that this is an example of an off axis quasar. The beams are too straight and perfect to be anything other than light beams. I held a piece of paper up to the monitor and aligned it to the beams - absolutely no curvature at all. Also, they can't be lens flare from some bright source ...

why cant our telescopes use the near earth objects to obstruct the light from a star so we can see its planets :?: Thanks, Lewis In principle, they can. In practice, it won't work. Why? Either because the NEOs move too quickly or the exoplanets are too faint (or both). In more detail: the time you ...

Perhaps some time in its past, Phobos traveled through the tail of a comet? This could explain the layered structure, since as a chunk breaks off from a comet, it would tend to disintigrate and be blown into a sort of narrow wisp by the solar wind, like a filiment. The tail of the comet would be com...

There would be a limit to how small a planet you could pick out by the occulusion method, simply because every star has an active changing surface (some more so that others). Imagine an earth sized planet orbiting a sun sized star. Now, if we could actually resolve the star's disc, we would see the ...

Actually, there's no reason that the image is nessicarily upside down, as the orientation depends on the location of the viewer on the earth's surface. Imagine that where you the event appears near your horizon. Now, imagine someone else standing on the other side of the planet, though far enough fo...