Starship Asterisk*

Some interesting info there about metallic hydrogen. But Jupiter has quite a lot of helium as well; up to 1/4 by mass in the interior, according to Wikipedia. Is there any info on how this would affect the metallic hydrogen — does it mix, or would it be forced out in the deeper, denser layers? I can...

Fascinating to see the small-scale structure of these clouds. Well, "small" in relative terms — the swirls that are barely big enough to see in the central white zone must be about the same size as similar weather patterns seen on Earth.

BobStein-VisiBone wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2020 12:22 pm A much better animation of the contact (101MB):

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a ... _37x_2.gif

Impressive; looks like the gas blast made a crater a good few feet across. I wonder how easy it will be to spot once OSIRIS-REx gets back to a higher orbit.

Would it be safe to assume that this rubble has the same source as material that lands on Earth as meteorites? I was wondering what could be inferred just from comparing the appearance of these chunks with stuff that's been cooked by entering the atmosphere. Could we guesstimate which bits might be ...

No planets for you, GW Orionis. The eccentric orbit of the third star is really messing things up. It might be more the size of GW Ori C's orbit that affects planet formation. If it were closer to A and B, or significantly further away, then there might be room for planets-as-we-know-them to form. ...

Even the respected "Sky at Night" prog on BBC TV last night raised no contradictions. Just, "there's no way that phosphine can form without life!" What they actually said was "There's no way we know of that this amount of phosphine can form without life". The amount de...

The whole subject of sub stellar mass objects is extremely interesting to me. Heck, it's ALL interesting: the range of planet-like objects, the range of star-like objects, and stellar evolution. Hmm - you never hear much about planetary evolution. Why not? I guess because we only have 8 or so examp...

orin stepanek wrote: ↑Fri Aug 14, 2020 12:21 pm Crazy thing about nebulas; You can look at them and imagine a face or 2; then look at them later and see something else!

I blame those pesky Klingons and their dubious industrial safety record in moon mining...

I need to be drunk enough to watch this and appreciate it properly.

What lies at the nebula's center is unknown, with one hypothesis holding it to be a close binary star system where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star. I'm curious about this bit. If the star is a close binary, shouldn't that show up with doppler shift splitting of the l...

Looks to me like a mid-kaboom shot of the giant robot that gets blowed up real good by the hero in the final reel. Complete with bits of debris flying in all directions.

I ate some potatoes for supper tonight. With mince. Om nom nom.

Doubt if I could have got an Arrokoth-sized potato into the pan to cook it, though...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF6J7P2cpn8 I thought I had already posted this video, but apparently not. I like seeing how stars move inside a cluster and how the stars evolve over time. Interesting. Any guesses what the simulation did about 30 seconds in, when a bright giant and a smaller star w...

Looks like it's being sucked up through a very big straw. Can anyone else hear a deep "schlurrrrrrrp!!!" noise...?

FWIW, "coalescing into a super star" generally isn't a thing colliding stars do. Instead, they tend to go boom. Very boom. All the boom. Loved this description. :D Maybe it's a reference, too. It sounds familiar, but I don't recognize it. I'm a big fan of both Babylon 5 (in particular the...

We can read Dr. Asimov's lovely "Nightfall" and we can dream but we'll never see . I just realised — the planet in Nightfall was in the middle of a big globular cluster. But the people there didn't know, because with (I think) six suns, it was never night. Until suddenly it was... :idea: ...

Can you explain; Why with such a huge number of stars within very close proximity, has gravity not coalesced them into a super star. Thanks As a wise man* once said, “Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long wa...

I find it intriguing that there seem to be a lot of these Hot Giant Worlds. Is it vaguely possible that this is an artificial situation? That they were engineered? That some sort of hot silicon or plasma-based lifeform needs to be so close to their home star that they deliberately manoeuvred so man...

This reminds me of the time I happened to be out in the back garden at dawn, and I saw the ISS coming up over the horizon. Very bright, much brighter than it usually looks in an evening pass, and I think a bit brighter than an Iridium flare.

http://pixinsight.com/gallery/NGC7331-CAHA/NGC7331_900.jpg NGC 7331 and the Deer Lick Group. Vicent Peris (OAUV / PTeam), Gilles Bergond, Calar Alto Observatory. My favorite portrait of NGC 7331 (and the Deer Lick Group of background galaxies) is the one at right, however. With my peculiar sense of...

Can someone explain x-ray irradiance and why smaller K and M stars give off more than the sun? I remember black body curves and don't understand why a smaller star would give off more. Thanks! One important distinction would be if that figure is for the absolute X-ray output of the star, or the ave...

starsurfer wrote: ↑Sat Jan 25, 2020 1:25 pm Try finding it in this widefield image by Rogelio Bernal Andreo.

Slightly becroggled at seeing UGC 2885 so tiny in that California Nebula image... and in the APOD there are just as tiny galaxies in the far distance. Douglas Adams was right — space is big. Really big.

I have a similar question to ptahhotep: for so many galaxies to be in this line of sight, are they in another cluster? and/or along one of the strings even of the Local Group, or at least the Virgo Supercluster? I was thinking the picture is "zoomed in" enough for us to start seeing far b...

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2020 10:40 pm Yes. Mostly Jupiter. No naturally occurring system with more than two bodies will produce "perfect" Keplerian orbits.

Until someone manages to solve the general 3-body and n-body problems.

Not quite. It's not a century in either direction, it's the 21st century. That is, from 2001-2100. And you'll note it's not all that eccentric in behavior, as the variations in perihelion and aphelion distance are extremely small in comparison with the mean distances. Would these variations be due ...