Starship Asterisk*

btw, here's my best guess of the relationship between the radio and visual images, conflating the radio images posted here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:M87_VLA_VLBA_radio_astronomy.jpg http://seds.org/messier/more/m087_nrao.html http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/M87rad.jpg and this is just a gue...

what is the diffuse cloud of point light sources around the M87 galaxy? are they very faint stars in our galaxy whose luminance has been boosted by processing the contrast of the M87 image and the area around it? if not, at the virgo distance they would have to be dwarf galaxies or massive globular ...

postscript ... carbon dating of the parchment means nothing other than the *earliest* date at which the *parchment* could be produced. parchment was regularly scraped, washed and reused in the period, as it was somewhat expensive to manufacture. this sometimes resulted in a *palimpsest*, if the prev...

it's a hoax artifact. the circumstances under which it was sold, the superficial, almost hasty quality of the text and diagrams, the lack of any recognizable external domain for the illustrations, the lack of decipherable structure in the text (in an age of codebreaking computers and advanced lingui...

actually, messier wrote in 1784 that M88 was a "nebula without star", not "a spiral nebula without stars". the spiral form of galaxies wasn't resolved until William Herschel and Lord Rosse (William Parsons) observed galaxies with their 50" or 72" alt-az reflecting teles...

visually, probably the ugliest image ever posted on APOD.

this is a beautiful post. i've always felt dissatisfied with andromeda images -- the nucleus always seems overexposed, the arms seem crooked somehow, and all the galaxy stars get in the way -- but pugh got the balance of color and luminance just right. the spiral structure is clear, the nucleus isn'...

What could stop expansion? Or slow it down? Or speed it up? the underlying cause of the expansion is unknown, so anything that might affect it cannot be talked about. Where is the new space time coming from? you seem to imagine space as a quantity, such as a quantity of matter, so that to increase ...

Why do you keep asking these same questions, or ones so similar it makes no difference. Do you not like the answers? I hope you are not acting as a proxy for sputnick. He used to do the same thing. One more time, here's my version. bystander, i don't envy you your task, but i want to make a general...

checked in for an answer to my questions about variations in the galaxy population and optical "magnification" of deep space images. didn't see one ... is that a dead question or should i check back for a response?

as far as I know, nothing in the standard model requires a singularity. Expansion ... what causes it? We don't know. ... Dark matter? ... We can not directly observe it and, therefore, do not know what it is, but ... we can calculate how much of there needs to be. Call it whatever you want to, but ...

I thought the universe ceased to be opaque a few hundred thousand years after it began. So as I see it our remarkable point in history (though we've only occupied it recently) has lasted 13.3 billion years so far. Or does this lofty inspirational statement have a meaning I'm missing? save the sarca...

Of course, but I was thinking more about one that had come to a sort of stable state with the two cores still intact. occam recommends that you go with something simple until the data force you to contrive something more complicated. the image is pretty fuzzy, and the galaxies are pretty far away, ...

Dark Matter, Dark Energy? You can call them anything you want to, but you still have to account for their influence on the visible universe. Like it or not, the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter Model of Big Bang Cosmology remains as the best model to explain what we currently know about the universe. i comp...

Check this out. This is at the top of the deep field image. It's probably just two objects overlapping, but wouldn't it be interesting if there was a spiral galaxy with two distinct cores? Someone will probably come along and tell me it's not possible. colliding galaxies, galaxies fusing through mu...

i have two rather technical questions about deep space imagery in general. * galactic density. as we image galaxies farther back in time, we see the galactic distribution during those eras. presumably, at the distance of the microwave background, we see no galaxies, because they had not formed yet. ...

In the attached image, I took a flashlight and a scanner with two clear windows, much like a 2-pane window, and shined a flashlight through it and took a picture in the same orientation as the sun, window, and camera in the picture. What you will notice is the the reflected images go to the RIGHT, ...

From the glossary of the book "Color and light in nature" by D. Lynch and W. Livingston (Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2001), p.266: " multiple suns (moons) unexplained occurrences of multiple images of the sun". I would like to know what was in this book. Are they...

I would have to argue against the double-pane window arguments due to the cloud formations in the photo. If the multiple suns were an artifact of internal reflection, whether from the interior of the lens or from window panes, the additional suns would appear "on top" of the background an...

The reflection is 10% smaller. Does that rule out plate glass? no. i'd guess the glass is shatterproof, which means there is a layer of soft or flexible plastic between two sheets of glass. we don't know the optical properties of this layer, but the light imaging the reflection had to pass through ...

this is an internal reflection in multilayer architectural glass, either shatterproof or thermal layered, or both. the images are far too stable and invariant to be atmospheric, and the fact that the person was inside a room, rather than outdoors, pretty much clinches it. for this to be an atmospher...