Starship Asterisk*

"It is good to renew one's wonder," said the philosopher. "Space travel has again made children of us all."

Uh, OK. Maybe I'm imagining too much force behind that accelerating dissipation of the universe. Maybe it's more like a net effect than a burgeoning runaway freight train effect. Plenty of time and opportunity for gravity to attract things together as you'd expect, with the dissipating acceleration ...

What makes the galaxies move toward a "center" ? Doesn't gravity become a minor player over these distances, due to dark energy, dark matter and space expansion ? Intuitively, you'd think gravity is acting to bring things together, but hasn't that been proven to not be the case, over large...

My next candidate for FTL phenomena was going to be the 'searchlight' beams of energy flying out of the poles of rapidly-spinning pulsars and magnetars, etc. One pulsar has been clocked at 716 revolutions per second. Somewhere along the length of its energy stream, and from there outward, it is swe...

OK - now how about entanglement ? Wasn't it demonstrated in a lab on one of the Canary Islands ? I'm trying to enumerate things that are generally known to travel faster than light. What do they know that we don't know ? Wikipedia has a good list . The important point about quantum entanglement, an...

Isn't inflation supposedly something that initially spread out faster than light ? Yes. Einstein's special theory of relativity says that nothing can move through space faster than the speed of light. But during the moment of inflation space seems to have expanded faster than the light that was tra...

Isn't inflation supposedly something that initially spread out faster than light ?

I think you're confusing dark matter with dark energy. Dark matter doesn't demonstrate any unusual forces. I didn't mean to suggest that dark matter demonstrates unusual forces, just unusual indetectibility. The nearest alternate, and more accurate, term is dark gravity. Dark because the matter tha...

Just asking you people who seem to have a better overall knowledge of the flow of current investigations: Is the idea of multiple universes still too far-out to be incorporated into serious theoretical work ? I have thought that it's possible that all the hoopla about the search for dark matter may ...

LOVE IT
Time will tell. And I wish I could be there for the telling !

Wow, thanks for the great, focused, subject-specific research and graphics (that I should've done for myself :oops: ) I get interested in this stuff, then get distracted, then come back and try to pick up where I left off, and maybe a little noise creeps into my knowledge base ! I didn't mean to sug...

Got it, and thanks. Main Sequence refers to H to He conversion, which can initiate at red dwarf levels or blue supergiant, etc levels. I've spent many a lunch hour following the links in APOD writeups, but some basics seem to get lost on me in the rush. I'd thought that red dwarfs were always just t...

Aren't there certain conditions under which a star collapses but doesn't lose enough mass to change the orbits of its planets ? Is that true of a red dwarf ? Or will things get rearranged in that star system when the star goes dwarf, as in some planets flying away and others finding new, closer orbi...

Thanks for the insights ! I flew the radius of the solar system in that link you provided - I think it brings home the meaning of distance in a more "tangible" (i.e. finger on the right arrow key) way than most. The comments along the way were entertaining and mind-expanding. Now I'll go r...

I guess I got caught up in the "blocking in" of the question of exoplanets in greenzones. It's one thing to assay the relative populations of star types in the Milky Way, and another for the universe at large. I read someplace that, for Jupiter to have gravitationally collapsed and begun f...

There's been an "are we alone week" running on cable this week, that got me thinking, and I had a couple questions that maybe someone on here can help me with. In one documentary, it was stated that, in our galaxy, red dwarfs outnumber main sequence stars by 3 to 1, so they represent numer...