Starship Asterisk*

I vote APOD for Top-Ten Website in our Universe!!!

Reading these excellent thoughts almost made me forget that everything we're sensing from NGC 6240 happened 400 million years ago. Maybe the merger actually happened by now. As with all mergers, I'm sure there are disgruntled customers.

Nice info on the center of NGC 6240. Also, the previous comment about the numerous star-forming regions that are likely produced by the merge process.....and the speculation that inhabited solar systems would not be affected by the merger......can't help but wonder what other fascinating things coul...

Maybe a hominid civilization manipulating their planetary nebula to point at the Sun in the shape of a hominid???

This is awesome stuff! I know I'm a little behind, but I just finished Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" and now I've started on "The Universe in a Nutshell". I highly recommend them, especially for non-scientists like me. He is the man!!! I hope he is recuperating! Brett Walte...

Thanks Art and Chris!

Brett

By the way, this is a pretty nifty tool. I don't know how valid it is, though --> http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/universe.html

Does anybody know if gamma ray bursts come from any particular direction -or- if you tried to plot them on a star chart, would they be fairly randomly distributed? I tried to look this up, but could only find the coordinates of 2 of them.

In case you are oblivious as I am sometimes, you may have missed the link to the original article: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2009/pr200911.html