Starship Asterisk*

I was 14 when I saw 2001- A Space Odyssey , and it knocked me for a loop. So I went to the library to borrow a book about space. That book told me that all stars are suns . I couldn't believe it. That same night I went out to look at the stars. And I asked myself, if those tiny little lights are su...

Hi everyone, I'm fairly new here, as the naïveté of my question suggests. Here is more context: I can't think of a single domain in human activities where knowledge fuels passion as much as in astronomy. For instance I'm also a music lover, and if I'd listen to a Bach masterpiece and a musicologist ...

I think that The current theory about the origin if the Universe, has in one part a semi-religious conception In fact, who raised for the first time about the primordial atom, the Big Bang and the expansion of the Univrerse, was the astronomer and priest Lamaitre. As regards the primordial atom, &q...

I really do recommend the sequence of images below, but of course it is always much easier to show things with several images rather than one: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c1/ESO_-_Eso1030a_%28by%29.jpg/1920px-ESO_-_Eso1030a_%28by%29.jpg Ann That center cluster is thought ...

SuperBIT_tarantula_1024[1].png The Tarantula Nebula from SuperBIT Image Credit: SuperBIT, NASA When I first saw this image, I was unimpressed. I was, like, come on, haven't we seen hundreds of pictures of the Tarantula Nebula? What's so special about this one? But when I started searching for pictu...

In her paper "UGC 2885, the largest known spiral galaxy", Rubin writes "its diameter is its claim to fame: it is 250 000 parsecs". Press releases sometimes use the exact same figure, 250 000, but replace parsecs with light-years, and of course that's a huge difference. So, either...