Starship Asterisk*

A good way to make the general public pay attention to astronomy-related news is to hint that astronomers have found life elsewhere. According to this kind of news reporting, the best way to create an interesting news item is to ask atronomers to present proof that life is not there on another plane...

Wow! Now the picture looks so much better.

Ann

I think I have read about a distant quasar whose light has passed through a massive cluster of galaxies (or something) in four different ways, so that we on the Earth see four dfferent quasars close together, when in reality these four points of light emanate form the same source. Interestingly, whe...

You're welcome, Rob. And thanks for your explanations and your input, Chris and alter-ego. In hindsight, I realize that I should have asked Cecilia Jarlskog if inflation isn't necessary to smooth out the irregularities produced by the Big Bang, so that those major irregularities would have been ther...

Well, for me the choice was easy. I apparently lack the equipment to see the Mars image, so I can't vote for that. And while I do find some infrared images stunning, I often find such pictures blurry and short on detail. There isn't too much you can see in that infrared image of NGC 6744, compared w...

Alter ego wrote: The two regions of interest, that I think you are referring to, are NGC 6357 (War and Peace Nebula), nearer the galactic center, and NGC 6334 (Cat's Paw Nebula). Both are in the constellation Scorpius, and NGC 6357 is also home to Pismis 24, an open star cluster containing some of t...

Rob said: My take on what I've read about the subject is that our math only describes what happened after the expansion began Well, that's exactly it. Cecilia Jarlskog and Ulf Danielsson, two Swedish professors of astrophysics, both said at lectures where I was present that it was inflation that sta...

Chris said: Are you sure that's what she said? Well, she actually didn't say that she believed it - she stated it as if it was a fact. And since I was at the lecture, and since I was very surprised at her claim, I asked her if it was really true that inflation came before the Big Bang. She said yes,...

A few months ago, I listened to a lecture by a Swedish astrophysicist (a woman at that :wink: ). While her lecture didn't primarily deal with the Big Bang, she said, nevertheless, that she believed that inflation happened before the Big Bang. In her opinon, inflation was probably set off by a quantu...

That's a beautiful image, Miguel. Thank you! Please note "the Lady in the Moon". Her face covers much of the full Moon. We see her in profile, looking left. Her face is light-colored, but her profile is outlined as if with a dark pen of some sort. Her hair is also dark. http://www.netaxs.c...

The M13 globular and airplane trail is a lot of serendipitous fun. I, of course, note that the "white lights" of the airplane are redder than the overall color of the globular. My second favorite of the pictures here must be the Yosemite image. The stark beauty of that image is almost othe...

Case wrote: Pioneer 11 is now estimated to be following an escape trajectory from the solar system. Pioneer 11 will pass near the star Lambda (λ) Aquilae in about 4 million years time. Wow, Pioneer 11 will sail past Lambda Aquilae! I'm impressed. Lambda Aquilae is a B9V type star, about twice as hot...

Chris wrote: It may contain hydrogen in other states of ionization, or neutral. Those would not show up as red in this image. Yes, there are other states of ionization for hydrogen than hydrogen alpha. There is hydrogen beta, for example, a higher state of ionization, which produces a blue-green lig...

A very interesting post, Bystander. Personally I'm highly skeptical of attempts to "antropomorphize" the universe, or to prove that other planetary bodies are so much like the Earth (even though they obviously aren't like the Earth) that they must be like the Earth in such a way that they ...

It might be interesting to compare Thor's Helmet, a "pre-explosion" nebula, with the Crab Nebula, a "post-explosion" nebula. In the Crab, any bubble surrounding the massive star has been blown to smithereens, but it is possible that magnetism within the nebula is keeping the fila...

To make sense of the image, I must try to make sense of its colors, as usual. The color balance seems slightly shifted to the red, apart from the fact that the blue color of the helmet is so obvious. But some of the stars look very orange, while none of the stars look strikingly blue. Nevertheless, ...

Since I always insist that the Sun is white, I probably shouldn't like the Sun picture. But I do. There is a wonderful sense of unreality about it. Or maybe this is what the Sun's "avatar" would look like if it was born again as a non-luminous entity in another reality. Here the Sun looks ...

BMAONE23 said: When I look at this image, It appears to me that the Reddish tentacles are traversing along the back side of the galaxy and that the purple-blue tentacles are wrapping around the front. Could they be caused by interaction between magnetic fields and the dark matter halo? I'll offer no...

Thanks, BMAONE23! I'll try to remember it. The distance in kilometer to Alpha Centauri is approximately 400 followed by twelve zeros!

Ann

Perseus A,NGC 1275, is like a version of NGC 5128, also known as Centaurus A. In both cases we are talking about a hapless spiral galaxy falling straight into colossal elliptical galaxy and setting off all kinds of stellar fireworks. http://www.laughtergenealogy.com/bin/space/centaurus-a2.jpg Centau...

Nice! NGC 1275 is a favorite galaxy of mine. Do you realize that those tentacles of gas and stars extending from this galaxy make it ever so slightly like a galaxy-size version of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic cloud?



Ann

As a true-color astronomy nerd, I find it a bit depressing that almost all major new astronomy projects seem to deal with infrared astronomy, which can only ever produce false-color images. Of course I, too, realize that infrared astronomy is incredibly important, because infrared telescopes can see...

One more thing about the color of M13. I'm not asking anyone to share my sense of aesthetics, but do you realize that M13 has the same overall color as the Sun? Its integrated color index is 0.67, almost exactly the same as the Sun's. And if the Sun is white, as I insist it is, then it is no wonder ...

Well, we know that there are a lot of supernova remnants near the center of the Milky Way. There are also two very massive clusters there, the Quintuplet and Arches clusters. And if M 82 can blow twin bubbles this size from supernovae alone, is it so surprising that our own galaxy can produce enough...

Speaking of the mass of the Earth, I have managed to learn that the mass of the Sun is about 300,000 times the mass of the Earth, but I have never managed to learn a number for the mass of the Earth. How much is it in metric tons? Speaking of large numbers, I can't seem to learn the distance to Apha...