The Astronomy Thread

VAR!
2011 July 1
NASA, A Picture Of the Day (APOD)
varHubblepanel_hst800.jpg


Description​

This episode in the life of Edwin Hubble just caught my imagination this evening, and I wanted to share NASA's . His determination of what he was seeing (not to mention the equipment named after him) have seriously altered mankind's understanding of the space frontier.


Must be hotter than hell in the center of a galaxy.

Hello, percysunshine.

The stars there are so close together, there probably isn't a planet in the system with a weed on it, although what would I know? When I went to grade school, the study of stars seems so advanced that it was the dark ages compared to what children and young astronomers are learning right now. I've been enjoying Nasa's picture of the day website for many years.
 
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VAR!
2011 July 1
NASA, A Picture Of the Day (APOD)
varHubblepanel_hst800.jpg


Description​

This episode in the life of Edwin Hubble just caught my imagination this evening, and I wanted to share NASA's . His determination of what he was seeing (not to mention the equipment named after him) have seriously altered mankind's understanding of the space frontier.


Must be hotter than hell in the center of a galaxy.

Hello, percysunshine.

The stars there are so close together, there probably isn't a planet in the system with a weed on it, although what would I know? When I went to grade school, the study of stars seems so advanced that it was the dark ages compared to what children and young astronomers are learning right now. I've been enjoying Nasa's picture of the day website for many years.

So I would guess that the suns orbit the black hole like planets orbit suns. Slowly they spiral in and then...whamo! ...slurp....belch...digest.
 
Must be hotter than hell in the center of a galaxy.

Hello, percysunshine.

The stars there are so close together, there probably isn't a planet in the system with a weed on it, although what would I know? When I went to grade school, the study of stars seems so advanced that it was the dark ages compared to what children and young astronomers are learning right now. I've been enjoying Nasa's picture of the day website for many years.

So I would guess that the suns orbit the black hole like planets orbit suns. Slowly they spiral in and then...whamo! ...slurp....belch...digest.

How long do you think they have?
 
Now we know where the water came from...
:cool:
Astronomers spot cosmic reservoir of water
July 22, 2011 -- Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology say they have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe.
The researchers have found a mass of water vapor that's at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in all the Earth's oceans in a quasar -- one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos -- 30 billion trillion miles away, a Caltech release said Friday.

"The environment around this quasar is unique in that it's producing this huge mass of water," says Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a visiting associate at Caltech. "It's another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times."

Because light from the distant quasar has taken 12 billion years to reach Earth, the observations reveal a time when the universe was just 1.6 billion years old. A quasar is powered by an enormous black hole steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust and spewing out huge amounts of energy.

In this particular quasar, the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years, astronomers said. Measurements of the water vapor and of other molecules, such as carbon monoxide, suggest there is enough gas to feed the black hole until it grows to about six times its current size.

Read more: Astronomers spot cosmic reservoir of water - UPI.com
 
Warm-Season Flows on Slope in Newton Crater - seasonal time lapse video

... These images come from observations of Newton crater, at 41.6 degrees south latitude, 202.3 degrees east longitude, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. In time, the series spans from early spring of one Mars year to mid-summer of the following year ...

These times and places have peak surface temperatures from about 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to 80 degree above zero Fahrenheit (about 250 to 300 Kelvin). Liquid brines near the surface might explain this activity, but the exact mechanism and source of the water are not understood.
 
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The temperature would seemingly sustain grass and human life, one would think. Maybe the atmosphere is toxic or the "water" is not water as life on earth has it. Maybe the minerals are not conducive to producing chlorophyll plants, or that water is so scarce life as we know it is not possible. There's a chink in the chain missing somewhere. If scientists found out what it was, it could be turned around unless solar active years destroy all that is started there at periodic intervals that are closer than a millenia or two considering Mars' closer proximity to the sun being unfriendly to sustainable life. I'm just making guesses.
 
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Perhaps the Martian planet helps our planet Earth to maintain an appropriate distance from the sun to have oceans and environments that do sustain human life.
 
I played a little imagination mind game, thinking about what a Martian summer would be like in the conditions in the photo. The surface would be perhaps 80 F. but only a foot or two above the surface, beyond the immediate radiated heat, the air would be very cold. That's because the atmosphere there is only about 1% of Earth's; earth's air pressure is about 14.6 psi at sea level, and on one of the lowest elevations on Mars, where the atmosphere is densest, it's about .19 psi.
That would compare with being at a very high elevation on Earth. There are warm winds moving from the equator toward the poles, but the "air" is about 96+ pct carbon dioxide.

Mars orbits on average about 143 million miles and the Earth about 93 million miles from the sun, so it's on average 50 million miles further from the sun's source of heat and energy.
 
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Man Jupiter is bright tonight...even with the full moon.

Snuck out with the binoculars for a peek. Only saw Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto to the North.

Cool Sky and Telescope Utility for Jupiter and the Galilean moons:

That must be some pair of binoculars combined with discerning eyesight, Missourian.


Nah, a pair of Nikon 7x50's

This is an image of Jupiter and it's Galilean moons through 7x35 binoculars:

imagesqtbnANd9GcSGregfPMMJBF4VCFAj5imiC1Ry-YoVr4XzgWZZL0m4ymPnPm1N.jpg

They are tiny and dim, but a little indirect viewing and you'll pick them out.

P.S. - ISS flyby here in MO in 12 minutes. NNW to NNE for 2 minutes.
 
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(Reuters) - Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard.
The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.
"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.
Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation.
In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.
The measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science on Thursday.
In addition to carbon, the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare toward the carbon-rich center.
Its high density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.
Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.
"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here." article credits
 
Collisions of stars are incredibly unlikely; they occupy such a relatively miniscule volume of space, that even when a pair of galaxies collide, few if any of their constituent stars crash into each other.

Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit a common primary object. In our own solar system Venus doesn’t deserve to smash into anything, since it’s orbit is so perfectly circular.
But Mercury is not so well behaved. Its orbit – already the most lopsided – wildly changes shape. Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus. Then those two worlds MAY collide.

Here's a fair approximation of what that might look like.
Mercury's diameter is 40 percent that of Venus

colliding%20planets.jpg


In globular clusters star collisions do happen.
 
Collisions of stars are incredibly unlikely; they occupy such a relatively miniscule volume of space, that even when a pair of galaxies collide, few if any of their constituent stars crash into each other.

Objects in space like planets are much more likely to collide if they orbit each other or orbit a common primary object. In our own solar system Venus doesn’t deserve to smash into anything, since it’s orbit is so perfectly circular.
But Mercury is not so well behaved. Its orbit – already the most lopsided – wildly changes shape. Influences from faraway Jupiter will eventually make its path so elliptical that it will swing out to Venus. Then those two worlds MAY collide.

Here's a fair approximation of what that might look like.
Mercury's diameter is 40 percent that of Venus

colliding%20planets.jpg


In globular clusters star collisions do happen.

It's believed that the number of collisions that occur in globular clusters is approximated by the relatively rare "blue straggler" stars that are theoretically produced by those collisions.
 

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