Starship Asterisk*

The contrast between the distribution of X-ray sources in M104 and Andromeda is striking indeed! But then again, Andromeda does not have an elliptical component or any sort of large diffuse halo. Okay, well, correction... this is the size of Andromeda's halo: https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/upl...

ThanX Ann for your exciting report. Here is the comparison with the Andromeda galaxy. Jac https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54167663848_f6c838f108_b.jpg original data: NASA/ESA/CSA (JWST/CHANDRA) https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54167656708_62d7f6fe15_b.jpg original data: NASA/ESA (HERSCHEL/SS...

Speaking of yellow blobs, what's this one - just another foreground star, or is it background almost spherical elliptical galaxy? whats this in the sombrero galaxy.jpg it's large, it's visible in IR only. How can it be a star? And for that matter, it doesn't have diffraction spikes either! no stell...

johnnydeep wrote: ↑Tue Nov 26, 2024 10:34 pm Speaking of yellow blobs, what's this one - just another foreground star, or is it background almost spherical elliptical galaxy?


whats this in the sombrero galaxy.jpg

it's large, it's visible in IR only. How can it be a star?

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I wonder if there is a third concentric galaxy here, an elliptic galaxy half the size of the large disk galaxy. It's hard to see in the w/h pictures The Sombrero Galaxy from Webb and Hubble (2024 Nov 26) h.jpg The Sombrero Galaxy from Webb and Hubble (2024 Nov 26) w.jpg https://asterisk.apod.com/dow...

In the Hubble picture, in the distant background, you can see a galaxy far, far away that looks like a miniature M104. It is in the upper right quadrant of the picture, about one fifth of the way down from the top and one sixth of the way left from the right edge. Like M104, it is seen edge-on and ...

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52289670795_e326e225da_b.jpg Rem.: The color assignment for the MIRI used in this example is artistic and not scientific in order to emphasize the drama of the event - just4fun. Original data: NASA/ESA/CSA jac berne (flickr) I was expecting 3 bright sources of re...

to my eye there's another pillar of creation
...

I wonder why does it look like a flare on a red parachute?

And there are "black holes" elsewhere in the Solar system, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Mars%3B_Arsia_Mons_cave_entrance_-MRO.jpg/654px-Mars%3B_Arsia_Mons_cave_entrance_-MRO.jpg Ann my first thought is "At last we know where the Flying Martian Leech ...

I think there are two explanations for the crazily red B-V index for blue-looking NGC 6744. First, the B-V value for NGC 6744 is not its "total" but its "effective" B-V, and those values may well be different, for all I know. The second explanation is that its yellow center must...

I wonder why no one demands to align disk galaxy images, when no regard to any coordinate system is being paid, similar to a plate on a desk before an observer at that desk rather than a lampshade on a ceiling before an observer under that ceiling Dust lanes in front of the core in this APOD make it...

"Dark charge"? Victor conjectured that dark matter might possess a "dark charge" in his prior post (which for some reason isn't appearing in my reply to your reply that does show it). Yeah, well maybe it possesses dark magnetism or dark unicorns. Making up a word without any und...

I don't think the concept of a dark matter black hole makes any sense. The nature of the matter is completely lost in a black hole. It's a singularity with mass. Why would one formed from baryonic matter be any different from one formed from dark matter? They say an electric charge is conserved aft...

Except in actual usage, "temperature" simply isn't used that way. Absent a large enough population of particles for statistics to be meaningful, you would just consider the energy of a particle (which could be all over the place as it absorbs or emits photons and changes its energy state)...

I wonder if baryon clumps (orange) are dots and dark matter clumps (grey) are filaments. Because we arbitrarily set a threshold level to treat a more dense thing as a clump and the rest as an empty background. We could have used the same density threshold for baryons and the dark matter. But then th...

So many stupid questions: - Dark matter is affected by gravity and has gravity of its own, so presumably it could create clumps of greater density due to random concentration fluctuations, correct? - Dark matter is unaffected by the electromagnetic field and so doesn't generate any photons. Does th...

What about black holes in relation to dark matter? Is it fair to presume that they swallow it like everything else? Might the billions of solar masses of the largest ones include copious amounts of dark matter pulled in early on in the history of the universe? Well, for the most part black holes do...

M106 combo.jpgM106 combo-.jpg https://asterisk.apod.com/download/file.php?id=50401&mode=view to my eye the dust lanes in the optic picture are not in the plane of the disk at all. They form a cylinder wall above the disk to the right of the core, seen clearly, and a wall below the disk, to the ...

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/hCXYB5YKXzdq2WEHYEe36d-970-80.jpg.webp And what is Andromeda doing here? Ann https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2410/M106_Obaidly_960.jpg my first thought was: a little galaxy beside may somehow have to do with some of the large galaxy's peculiarities Like a blue rin...

M106 combo.jpgM106 combo-.jpg https://asterisk.apod.com/download/file.php?id=50401&mode=view ...I'm not sure if the galaxy really has a flat disk... https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54054583532_dd39f4840c_b.jpg Credit: NASA/ESA X-ray in blue (CHANDRA) IR in red (SST) To me looks like a dense...

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About those 4 "anomalous arms", are they arms of stars and gas like normal galactic arms, or are they just jets of X-ray hot gas emitted either long ago and distorted over time, or still being added to by central BH activity? I suppose there might be the odd star in those arms, but for th...

Yeah, the closeup Chandra X-ray view of the center of M106 composite hardly looks like the same galaxy! Composite image features X-rays from Chandra (blue), radio waves from the VLA (purple), optical data from Hubble (yellow and blue), and infrared with Spitzer (red). Two anomalous arms, which aren...