Starship Asterisk*

When I see images of stars being born like this one, I have a thought which is as simple as it is wondrous (to me), namely that these things just "happen by themselves"! On Earth when water vapor clouds condense, rain drops appear, in space when hydrogen clouds condense, STARS appear! Just...

What I like about this image of Pluto and Charon which Ann posted is to think that these two are mutually tidally locked in their slow dance, forever facing one another, never turning their backs. Almost romantic! (although Pluto hides its heart...)

The supermassive black hole of NGC 1365 has been found to rotate close to the maximal possible speed, so just under the speed of light, based on measurements of the inner edge of the accretion disk; but wouldn't that be the case of all black holes with accretion disks? i.e. that matter spins increa...

The supermassive black hole of NGC 1365 has been found to rotate close to the maximal possible speed, so just under the speed of light, based on measurements of the inner edge of the accretion disk; but wouldn't that be the case of all black holes with accretion disks? i.e. that matter spins increas...

I'm posting two images I like to look at side by side, the top one is the center of M100 (provided by AVAO on this site) and the other is the Circinus galaxy, both show lots of activity, with starburst rings around a nucleus itself active, and also because, well, I simply find they look good togethe...

Unfortunately I could find no information about the star driving HH 30. HH 111 is another matter. According to Wikipedia, The HH 111 driving force is a 25 L ☉ class 1 protostar, so, in other words, it is 25 times brighter than the Sun. Already! Very young stars are always a bit faint, and they grow...

The statues should be looking up! Impressive image...

This could be where Carl Sagan's "sinkers" congregate on Jupiter! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uakLB7Eni2E

Saturn images don't look real, they look surreal!
(and upon seeing it for the first time, I too was floored and thought "Holy cow, this thing really is for real!!")

I have also dwelled a lot these days in this area of Cygnus, so glorious it justifies getting the right binoculars just to see it alone! In the circle on top you see something like a hook or a musical F clef starting with Sadr, and your eyes spontaneously make out a mirror shape with the stars on th...

That witch seems bewitched by the beauty of Rigel!

Ann wrote: ↑Wed Oct 30, 2024 5:14 pm Looks like you spotted the cluster Stock 2! It sure looks fun and impressive!

Ann

Glad to learn this, thank you! I've now googled it and it just gets funnier, what I saw as a stick figure is nicknamed the Muscleman cluster!

Last night I spotted a magnificent... stick figure! If ever you show people the Double Cluster in Perseus with its many supergiants and they're not too impressed, just say "Go left and you can always look at a stick figure instead!". Fun for kids too. - Seriously though, it really is a pre...

I really appreciate the nice pink / magenta Hydrogen Alpha emission :) BTW, by coincidence I was imaging this target a couple of nights ago, in H-alpha as well as RGB. Two processed versions here from exactly the same data. One has all of the H-alpha data mapped to the red channel (which is physica...

Nice APOD, an otherworldy nebular landscape! And interesting comments, Ann, Gamma Cassiopeiae is a wonderful star! If you look at it and then move to Alpha Cas and then back again, you get a marked blue/red contrast, beautiful. Too bad they're not closer still to one another! IC 63 looks quite ghost...

I don't usually have that much to say about planetary nebulas, but this closeup is my favorite picture of the Helix Nebula: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01EVTAR11AQYQ25CN885YE4MD8.jpg Ann I also like those tiny cometary knots all around the central star, supposedly there are some 40 000 of them in t...

If I understand correctly those EGGs at the tip of the tiny comlumns I've circled, they each contain a newborn star slowly drifting out of the main pillar ? M16_HubbleWebbPisano_6500 copie.jpg I don't think that they slowly drifting out of the main pillar. I think they stay where they were in the e...

If I understand correctly those EGGs at the tip of the tiny comlumns I've circled, they each contain a newborn star slowly drifting out of the main pillar? https://asterisk.apod.com/download/file.php?id=50459&t=1 Possibly, but to the best of my knowledge, there are no immediate signs of it. htt...

If I understand correctly those EGGs at the tip of the tiny comlumns I've circled, they each contain a newborn star slowly drifting out of the main pillar?

And speaking of density, another enigma for me is why doesn't dark matter contract on and on, collapse, how does it put the brakes on gravity, in the same way for example that electron degeneracy pressure puts the brakes in white dwarfs (unless there might exist super compact dark matter bodies but...

And speaking of density, another enigma for me is why doesn't dark matter contract on and on, collapse, how does it put the brakes on gravity, in the same way for example that electron degeneracy pressure puts the brakes in white dwarfs (unless there might exist super compact dark matter bodies but ...

Thank you for your answers, Chris and Victor. I'm sure they can capture dark matter under the right conditions Coud the smaller and denser early universe be one such condition? I'm thinking specifically of the recent discovery of black holes just a few million years after the Big Bang that were mor...

Thank you for your answers, Chris and Victor. I'm sure they can capture dark matter under the right conditions Coud the smaller and denser early universe be one such condition? I'm thinking specifically of the recent discovery of black holes just a few million years after the Big Bang that were more...

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?

NGC 4380, a rare example of a BL Lac object in a spiral galaxy - a beautiful one at that! - instead of an elliptical galaxy. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, P. Erwin