Starship Asterisk*

Just below and right from the mentioned galaxy (call it 430) there is an interesting circle of stars rather close together that looks kind of blank in the center. What is it?jw

oops, I messed up - - it is APOD0806jw

Most likely just a chance alignment of stars that are 10's of lightyears apart

reeeely. ya think? couldn't possibly be anything else, could it? naah.jw

It's either a zero or the letter O. Here is some more of the code:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap051118.html

Code?
Here is some fascinating codes...
APOD January 22, 2005, The Mysterious Voynich Manuscript

or

APOD November 12, 2003, Mars Then And Now

or even better yet

APOD December 15, 2001

Wow, such erudition. I'm sorry, for a minute or two I thought I had misspelled curiosity as r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s.

Here's an idea: could we find a phenomonen, not really commonplace but not unique, that might explain this? Perhaps something we have been learning occurs more frequently than we thought just a few years ago?

Or is that pushing the envelope too much?

jimmysnyder wrote:It's either a zero or the letter O. Here is some more of the code:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap051118.html

Yes, I think 37 is probably the real answer to "life, the universe, and everything," not 42.

What kind of answer are you going for azutjw. You dissed the serious one and mocked the mocking ones.

When you look at an image of the stars, you are seeing a 2 dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional reality. There is no reason to believe that the stars in the circle are any closer to each other than they are to stars outside the circle. Why are you focused on this circle and not on the Dune worm about to eat that galaxy?

Borrowing from another thread, "Has anyone seen my coffee??"

orin stepanek wrote:http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060314.html
It looks like the giant space worm is going to eat the galaxy.
Orin

If you check the apod, the circle of stars is not so circular, and the center isn't so blank.

Again, my apologies to all. I was hoping to initiate a discussion that would seriously speculate on alternate possible origins for the visible phenomonem. I am not a scientist, nor even an astronomer - neither amateur nor otherwise - I am just interested in the universe, human knowledge, and the limitations thereof.

I have seen a similar thing once, asked the same question, and received the same '2-D' answer. Considering the random nature of 2-D justaxposition of a 3-D object as large as the universe, I would expect to see visual relationships fairly common, e.g. CONSTELLATIONS. The scarcity of this effect, coupled with similarities to certain other phenomena, leads me to remember

1. The normal distortion of light passing through a lens
2. Pix of light being 'bent' around galaxies
3. Artist's conceptions of what a black hole might look like
4. A really cool website I ran across a while ago (starting from APOD; nearly all my 'investigations' do) that demonstrated a computerized rendition of the sky as seen when landing on a neutron star

all of which brought me to query some people more experienced than myself regarding the significance of the viewed relationship.

As I said, I am not an astronomer. I am a mechanical engineer with more than 30 years of experience in my profession. In that time I have found that when a possible solution that lies outside CURRENT ACCEPTED practice and knowledge, it is most often greeted with curt dismissal and outright derision. And most often proven correct eventually.

"The universe is not stranger than you imagine - it is stranger than you can imagine."

azutjw wrote:Again, my apologies to all. I was hoping to initiate a discussion that would seriously speculate on alternate possible origins for the visible phenomonem. I am not a scientist, nor even an astronomer - neither amateur nor otherwise - I am just interested in the universe, human knowledge, and the limitations thereof.

I have seen a similar thing once, asked the same question, and received the same '2-D' answer. Considering the random nature of 2-D justaxposition of a 3-D object as large as the universe, I would expect to see visual relationships fairly common, e.g. CONSTELLATIONS. The scarcity of this effect, coupled with similarities to certain other phenomena, leads me to remember

1. The normal distortion of light passing through a lens
2. Pix of light being 'bent' around galaxies
3. Artist's conceptions of what a black hole might look like
4. A really cool website I ran across a while ago (starting from APOD; nearly all my 'investigations' do) that demonstrated a computerized rendition of the sky as seen when landing on a neutron star

all of which brought me to query some people more experienced than myself regarding the significance of the viewed relationship.

As I said, I am not an astronomer. I am a mechanical engineer with more than 30 years of experience in my profession. In that time I have found that when a possible solution that lies outside CURRENT ACCEPTED practice and knowledge, it is most often greeted with curt dismissal and outright derision. And most often proven correct eventually.

"The universe is not stranger than you imagine - it is stranger than you can imagine."

Well why didn't you say so?

In that case I reckon it could be that we are looking down the business end of a gigantic space telescope that has lasers in a circle around the edge, therefore we see the lasers as dots of light and not the actual telescope end.

Well, it could happen...

azutjw wrote:I am a mechanical engineer with more than 30 years of experience in my profession. In that time I have found that when a possible solution that lies outside CURRENT ACCEPTED practice and knowledge, it is most often greeted with curt dismissal and outright derision. And most often proven correct eventually.

This is the theme of the book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn. You may find this book to your liking.

I question that 'most' part though. If possible solutions outside current accepted knowledge were proven correct as often as that, we would be drowning in Newtons, Maxwells, and Einsteins. In actual fact, such visionaries are rare, while crackpots abound.

azutjw wrote:"The universe is not stranger than you imagine - it is stranger than you can imagine."

I can't shake the feeling that you can imagine it and eventually are going to tell us about it. Have you got a possible solution that lies outside current accepted knowledge, or are you asking us if we have one? I don't.

I would suggest azutjw that you pose your question to Josch Hambsch who took the picture or better yet invite him to respond to you're question at Asterisk. There is a link to Josch Hambsch's website and email address from the APOD August 06.

To FieryIce:

Many thanks. That is easily the most constructive response yet.jw

So?!
If it was a "constructive response" did you follow up on it, did you find out anything? Is Josch Hambsch going to post his few cents?

Sorry to have waited so long, but I got busy with other things...

I did communicate (sort of) with Josch Hambsch, and received the same answers I got here, plus a moderately pointed comment that instrument time was far too expensive to waste it on such a trivial object as this asterism.

IMHO the so-called constellations are asterisms, and something this small and regular may well be something else.

Then, I think of the current 'dark matter' investigation(s), and with a sly smirk pasted across my chops I remember Sir Arthur S Eddington:"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

Yo, children - you cannot know what a thing is until it has been properly investigated! Until then, you are merely guessing.

Clearly, this form of semi-intelligent inquiry is not accepted behavior; something I've encountered before...

Good-night all, sleep well.

Well, azutjw, atleast you contacted the source Josch Hambsch. Good job. Too bad Josch Hambsch thought instrument time and expense came first before knowledge.

In response to the generalized question, "what could cause such a phenomenon?"

I'll toss my 2 cents worth in here... I process a lot of astro images and a good many of them seem to have impossibly well aligned or symmetric or interesting patterns in the stars. I've often wondered myself whether sometimes there hasn't been a cosmic roll in the dust/gas clouds from which stars formed. And there probably HAS been! The dust/gas we image has lots of interesting shapes in it, so why shouldn't star formation occur in interesting shapes as well?

I remember from college a long time ago that reality doesn't ever really exhibit truly random behavior, but rather things happen that don't seem "quite right" - in clumps, as it were. As I recall something called a "Poisson distribution" replaces true random events in simulations to better model reality.

-Noel

Here is the epod site.
http://epod.usra.edu/
The picture for today 20070927 has the following:

EPOD wrote: The human eye is very good at picking out patterns in random or complex images. One can hardly look at a star field without seeing what appear to be geometric shapes and alignments. In fact, in the late 1960s there was some serious work done on Schmidt-Kaler rings, circular star patterns that turned out to be phantoms of the eye-brain system trying to perceive order in chaotic fields.

Hope this helps. No form of semi-intelligent inquiry should be accepted here.

why not pick on all the ovals, arcs, and lines of stars seen in the image then?? I'm not sure why you pick on the circle and think there's something more involved just because it stands out more to our eye. While it appears to us as a circle, it is still just a simple, random dispersal of stars (as random as the gas cloud from which they were born would allow).

azutjw wrote:As I said, I am not an astronomer. I am a mechanical engineer with more than 30 years of experience in my profession. In that time I have found that when a possible solution that lies outside CURRENT ACCEPTED practice and knowledge, it is most often greeted with curt dismissal and outright derision. And most often proven correct eventually.

I think this is kind of silly. For every possible solution that is uncommon and eventually found to be better or more correct or what have you, there are hundreds of others that another person thought was better and more "right" but that eventually turns out that person either really was crazy or even just plain wrong.

I don't really get where you are getting that they are almost always proven correct. Most crackpots are just that... crackpots. I think of it historically and how many people were killed for their ideas that eventually turned out to be true but we never talk about the people who came up with ideas that were actually wrong (whether they were killed, or ridiculed, or not). There must have been millions of them. They mostly just aren't worthwhile enough to mention.

For example it is generally accepted that Darwin was "right"... but no one ever talks about the ideas he had which were eventually proven wrong. Indeed, he was wrong a lot as we all are, but his most important idea seems to hold water so we hold him up and forget about the times he was wrong and declare him a revolutionary figure for that one idea. (I am using "one idea" in the loosest way possible.. I know it's not quite right to call it "one idea")

As an artist I have also learned to not "fall in love" with any of my drawings either. As it turns out most of them are trash. I feel the same applies for non-artistic or creative ideas. Most of them are trash. It takes a lot of work to dig up that one gem and it seems many people never find it.

I think it is for this reason that people get ridiculed for new ideas. We get habituated to passing over all these crazy ideas so it's really hard to pick up on the ones that are worthwhile. Yeah, the people who ridicule those ideas are immature but the rest of us who simply ignore or overlook those ideas aren't all that much better. We can come in once it finally gets discovered and say haw, uh, yeah, uh, I knew he was right all along!

Galactic Groove wrote:While it appears to us as a circle, it is still just a simple, random dispersal of stars (as random as the gas cloud from which they were born would allow).

It is by no means clear from the photo that the stars in the circle were born from a coherent gas cloud. There is no reason to believe that the stars in that circle are closer to each other than say one star on the right hand side of the image and another on the left. I had said earlier that what we are looking at is a two dimensional representation of a three dimensional reality. However, I should have said four dimensional reality. The stars in that circle are moving, and so the alignment is temporary.

Many thanks to you all. You have provided me with a modicum of entertainment, along with confirmation of certain secret opinions of mine.

I was trying to open a dialog in which members could offer speculations, perhaps even with some supportive reasoning, regarding a phenomena that (I thought) offered some intriguing possibilites. Here's a quick review of what I got:

Early on,

jimmysnyder wrote:It's either a zero or the letter O.

That's clever. Then again

jimmysnyder wrote:When you look at an image of the stars, you are seeing a 2 dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional reality. There is no reason to believe that the stars in the circle are any closer to each other than they are to stars outside the circle. Why are you focused on this circle and not on the Dune worm about to eat that galaxy?

Highly original thought. Later,

bystander wrote:If you check the apod, the circle of stars is not so circular, and the center isn't so blank.

So, if it isn't geometrically perfect, it must be irrelevant. Eventually,

jimmysnyder wrote:This is the theme of the book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas Kuhn. You may find this book to your liking. {et cetera}I can't shake the feeling that you can imagine it and eventually are going to tell us about it. Have you got a possible solution that lies outside current accepted knowledge, or are you asking us if we have one? I don't.

Still not very participatory, but at least it moves away from condescension. Then

FieryIce wrote:I would suggest azutjw that you pose your question to Josch Hambsch who took the picture or better yet invite him to respond to you're question at Asterisk. There is a link to Josch Hambsch's website and email address from the APOD August 06.

Wow! A real response! Later,

NoelC wrote:I'll toss my 2 cents worth in here... I process a lot of astro images and a good many of them seem to have impossibly well aligned or symmetric or interesting patterns in the stars.

Again, contributor

jimmysnyder wrote: No form of semi-intelligent inquiry should be accepted here.

That narrows the field considerably. Then

Galactic Groove wrote:why not pick on all the ovals, arcs, and lines of stars seen in the image then??

And

geckzilla wrote:I think this is kind of silly.{...}

Well, at least you started off telling us where you're coming from. Most recently, in response to Galactic Groove

jimmysnyder wrote:It is by no means clear from the photo that the stars in the circle were born from a coherent gas cloud. {etc}

Oh, my aching head. If you are determined to get ultra-picky (which seems to be the most common theme), GG never used the word "coherent".

And, of course, all the wonderful philosophical maunderings of professional thinkers. Apparently if I don't think in the same patterns as all you dedicated sky-watchers, I'm either woefully ignorant or some kind of nut-case. Nice job, folks.

So, for all and sundry, here are my final thoughts on the matter.

Suppose there were a neutron star, or maybe even a black hole somewhere near the visual center of that group. Then, suppose there may be some other objects between us and that thing. Wouldn't an observer see something much like that? The real question I was trying to introduce is "How do you know for certain that that isn't what it is?"

On the one hand, if there is clear evidence that this is one thing and not another, a brief summation will (probably) suffice, and I'll toddle off, sucking my thumb and pulling my little red wagon behind me.

On the other hand, when most of what I get for an innocent question is either condescension or outright mockery, I hope I'm intelligent enough to understand that I'm in the wrong place to find original thought.

On the gripping hand, we will never truly know until we get there and obtain hard documentation, so why bother?

Does mental exercise improve intellectual strength and agility, or is it a waste of time and energy?

Good night, sweet prince(s). I shall relieve you of the irritation of my presence, and go back to my silent observations.jw

What? Hey now, I wasn't referring to you when I was writing that at all. I was just saying that not all ideas that are unconventional are good or correct, that's all. I don't mean it as an attack on you or anything you said. I hope you did not take it that way. And I do apologize for creating such a long-winded tangent in your topic.

Thanks for the history lesson azutjw. But you left out my favorite part. The first answer was supplied by BMAONE23. It was thoughful, respectful and probably, but not certainly correct.

BMAONE23 wrote: Most likely just a chance alignment of stars that are 10's of lightyears apart

Did you catch that 'most likely' part? You dissed it:

azutjw wrote: reeeely. ya think? couldn't possibly be anything else, could it? naah.jw

You set the tone did you not?

azutjw wrote:Suppose there were a neutron star, or maybe even a black hole somewhere near the visual center of that group. Then, suppose there may be some other objects between us and that thing. Wouldn't an observer see something much like that?

Didn't I predict that you were eventually going to tell us what you were driving at. Unfortunately, I don't get what you mean. Can you elaborate? Are you asking whether the ring of stars is actually a single star being lensed?

azutjw wrote:The real question I was trying to introduce is "How do you know for certain that that isn't what it is?"

That is not how science is done. Nothing is for certain. It's not even how engineering is done, where even though the race is not always to the swiftest, that is still the way to bet.