Starship Asterisk*

APOD Robot wrote: In fact, red spots along the dark dusty filament to the left of the bright cluster include the protostar cataloged as HOPS 68, recently found to have crystals of the silicate mineral olivine within its protostellar envelope.

cketter wrote:Also, check out this new Vesta video I found from spaceweather.com today. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1020
Very cool! They say that even higher resolution images are in store for October!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnificent_Frigatebird wrote:

Magnificent Frigatebird

<<The Magnificent Frigatebird (Fregata magnificens) was sometimes previously known as Man O'War, reflecting its rakish lines, speed, and aerial piracy of other birds. It spends days and nights on the wing, with an average ground speed of 10 km/hour, covering 223±208 km before landing. They alternately climb in thermals (as high as 2500 m) and descend to near the sea surface. The only other bird known to spend days and nights on the wing is the Common Swift.

The Magnificent Frigatebird is silent in flight, but makes various rattling sounds at its nest. The sharp outline of the wings may cause some observers to misidentify a Frigatebird as a modern featherless pterosaur. It is widespread in the tropical Atlantic, breeding colonially in trees in Florida, the Caribbean and Cape Verde Islands. It also breeds along the Pacific coast of the Americas from Mexico to Ecuador including the Galapagos Islands.

The Magnificent Frigatebird is 100 cm long with a 215 cm wingspan. Males are all black with a scarlet throat pouch (gular sac) which is inflated like a balloon in the breeding season. Although the feathers are black, the scapular feathers produce a purple iridescence when they reflect sunlight. Females are black, but have a white breast and lower neck sides, a brown band on the wings and a blue eye ring.

This species feeds mainly on fish, and also attacks other seabirds to force them to disgorge their meals. Frigatebirds produce very little oil and therefore do not land in the ocean. These birds do not swim and cannot walk well, and cannot take off from a flat surface. Having the largest wingspan to body weight ratio of any bird, they are essentially aerial, able to stay aloft for more than a week, landing only to roost or breed on trees or cliffs.>>

biddie67 wrote:A question about implications of the presence of olivines in HOPS 68 - other than confirming that the telescope, et.al. are helping to isolate such details, what does it's presence in a star mean compared to stars where it doesn't seem to be found?

Tszabeau wrote:This is one of the best of the best APODs and discussions ever. I hope my question doesn't sound altogether flippant but: could someone hear me scream in a nebula? In other words when a tree falls in a Nebula does it make a sound (provided someone's there to hear it)?

David Theil wrote:Now a question for the group; has anyone seen a caption for the Spitzer image that explains what bands the RGB color channels are assigned to?

Color Mapping

Band      Wavelength 	Telescope		 Color
Infrared 	 3.6 µm 	 Spitzer IRAC 	Blue
Infrared 	 4.5 µm 	 Spitzer IRAC 	Teal
Infrared 	 8.0 µm 	 Spitzer IRAC 	Green
Infrared 	24.0 µm 	 Spitzer MIPS 	Red 

thumlyly wrote:Tiny entities like electrons spin and orbit, but molecules do not, nor what is made by molecules, until the size e.g. of the asteroid Vesta.

Some moons, such as Earth's, do not spin but do orbit.

And there is no indication that the universe of billions of spinning galaxies is itself spinning (though how that might be detected is a puzzle).

Within the chaotic complexity of these nebulae, there are suggestions of inflationary expansion maybe, but not spinning. So does it take a density factor to initiate spinning, shared by atomic particles and planets but not rain clouds until they become hurricanes and not nebulae until they become a galaxy of their stars?

neufer wrote:

Tszabeau wrote:... could someone hear me scream in a nebula? In other words when a tree falls in a Nebula does it make a sound (provided someone's there to hear it)?

At pressures below a millionth of an atmosphere the mean free path of gas molecules becomes longer than the size of your head and also longer than the wavelength of any sounds you might try to produce. Very large events like supernova are capable of producing very long wavelength sounds (and shock waves) but no one would hear a "tiny" tree fall over.

And Horton couldn't hear a "tiny" Who for similar reasons.

neufer wrote: The Magnificent Frigatebird is silent in flight, but makes various rattling sounds at its nest. The sharp outline of the wings may cause some observers to misidentify a Frigatebird as a modern featherless pterosaur. It is widespread in the tropical Atlantic, breeding colonially in trees in Florida, the Caribbean and Cape Verde Islands. It also breeds along the Pacific coast of the Americas from Mexico to Ecuador including the Galapagos Islands.