Starship Asterisk*

...how many "people" I am looking at Ahh, the old Fermi Paradox vs Drake Equation ploy! Intelligent critters showed up after some five major extinction events occurring at serendipitous periods of Earth's history. It is difficult to detect all such events because the majority of diversity...

plumes of hot gas extending into a halo

The halo is not unresolved stars, but is hot gas from the core?

Is that the technique they use in those chestnut carts that appear on the sidewalks of New York City every winter which inspired the opening line to the "Christmas Song"?

We'd better find someplace else very soon, considering the rate at which we are making this planet uninhabitable.

APOD Job Security: Discovery of such wonders will never cease. How do you choose a thesis topic when there is so much 'there' there?

Ha! I knew it! Why, there it is in plain sight! Sew! who is making book on the crash? What are the odds posted in that Las Vegas Casino that takes all bets? [Maria! Maria! I just met a flow named Maria! *ouch* I promise, no more show tunes; let go of my arm.] (Apologies to the cast of "Westside...

I wonder if we can detect the movement of the clouds over short periods of time. If we pointed Hubbel at the same coordinates in a year or two, would the two images be identical? I suspect they would be, considering the enormous distances involved, where a millimeter on the printed image is a bazzil...

[Retired University of Arizona employees and/or alumni do not have access to the University Library resources. All I can read is the abstract.] The full-size image is fascinating. There is not atmosphere, so the only forces on volcanic plumes are the ejection and gravity. Interesting patterns for fl...

I knew of the Ort Cloud, what I learned in this article is that the cloud orbits the Sun. How? I kind-of thought they were relatively stationary objects gravity-bound to the Sun. Does each object in the Ort Clout have a different orbit; parabolic or circular? What paths do they take? One graphic I c...

My money was on the 2012 VP113 discovery instead of the ringed asteroid out past Saturn.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26737376

Odd, how they withheld all information until the press conference in Brazil.

Have they tried a cortisone ointment on that?

Polaris appears stationary. Is that because of the short exposure time? Longer such exposures show Polaris circling a point above Earth's rotational axis. Perhaps the 13Kyr precession has put Polaris back in its place above our Celestial North Pole?

http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Arp/Figures/big_arp336.jpeg I concur! This is indeed a peculiar galaxy. http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/help/faq3.html#3a - Never heard of "Galactic Extinction" before. Lots of papers to read. I presume galactic extinction is not at all like dinosaur species ...

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/ Boy, when I'm wrong, I really get it wrong, something that is self-evident to the casual observer. I did not know that in 1998 Hubble observations showed that things were accelerating a lot slower a long, long time ago in a land f...

Why not just call it a mystery? FMTM - Mystery To Me. How did they count every single star in a nearby galaxy, including the black holes, supernovae remnants and all? Without a clue as to what is inside a galactic center, how do we know there is insufficient force to keep a galaxy from flying apart?...

Holey Mars, Batman, a Martian pub!

Thanks to reading APODs, I can now point out a couple of globular clusters right of center.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VezW1PtDq5E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1YVwGCgik
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbRQO4LDLYM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCJ5E8AnlWk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2fbOAyNOpM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvhq3V8ZhTA

[Delete this before reading it.] Why did the space chicken cross the nebula?

I did not know that those beasties were above the solar surface in the photosphere, like a layer of clouds, or that different gasses could change layers. The granulation around a sunspot in the photosphere suggests that there may be another layer below that. Somewhere among the related sites listed ...

For your wallpaper, I suggest the full-sized image: http://stargazer-observatory.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/NGC7331.jpg Wow! The sense of depth and all of those background galaxies, some no larger than the width of a nearby star, gives one pause. I could stare at that all day. PS. There are inde...

NuSTAR Shows Off

http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/news/129/ ... ews-detail

Is there any other way to explain those radio pulses than a spinning neutron star? I would have thought that the jet streaming off to the right would indicate the axis of rotation. Since the jet traces a spiral pattern, perhaps that was the early axis of rotation that deteriorated into what we now d...

Umm...scratch that one from my bucket list!

Aha! It's not as simple as I was led to believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis That wiki article shows a picture of the innards of a red giant just prior to supernova. There be sulfur in the silicon shell. (I'd go back to school and sit in on some physics lectures, but I've f...