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Space: The Final Frontier

E

Escape Goat

Member
Jupiter has lost two of its rings (again). They seem to disappear and then randomly reappear. Scientists don't know why!

t1larg.jupiter.before.after.jpg
 
S

spyshagg

Should not be allowed to breed
You cant terraform venus or mars...... No magnetic field = no go.



also a neutron star is a regular star who fused all its resources again and again until all that was left was heavy matter (iron etc). The stars aren't hot enough to fuse iron so all it remains is gravity fighting against the repelling force of neutrons. Hence a neutron start.

Neutron star may be the precursor to pulsars, supernovas and black holes. Not all stars die this way. Ours doesn't have gravity enough to go with a bang
 
S

SolarPowered

Member
Sentry said:
Fucking this. I remember watching the whole series on Hulu back to back, literally an episode or two (even 3) a day. Next time I have the time, i'm going to watch the whole series again.
Click to expand...
I've almost finished all thirteen parts on Hulu. I'm up to part 11 "The persistence of memory". I decided it would be best to go through the book first and I don't regret it at all. They're a fantastic way to get into astronomy. Carl Sagan really has a way of making everything simplistic when it comes to science and it's a shame that there haven't been any major undertakings like Cosmos since his.
UrbanRats said:
Yes, yes and yes!
Might aswell post this video here, also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hdXvMB639A
I love it, with the most famous "Pale Blue Dot" is one of those videos i watch daily.
Astronomy IS a "character building" experience.
Click to expand...
I've never seen this. Very cool video.

Fake edit:
We can't terraform Mars?

This certainly won't speed up our prospects for space travel and terraformed planets.
 
U

UrbanRats

Member
Veidt said:
Because Jupiter is hell, that's why.
Click to expand...
Hey man, at least Jupiter, keeps the Solar system a bit more steady and may prevent some meteor shit to fall into the inner ring.. Mars is just a disappointing brat, you keep giving him atmosphere and he costantly lose it, but it keeps receiving the best space movies and shit. :lol
 
Schrade

Schrade

Member
GONz said:
Boston Globe's The Big Picture has a collection of "a handful of recent images from the Saturnian system". As always with the Big Picture, get ready to be amazed

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/05/checking_in_on_saturn.html
Click to expand...
That is awesome. Thanks!

s31_00000001.gif

An aurora, shining high above the northern part of Saturn, moves from the night side to the day side of the planet in this movie recorded by Cassini. These observations, taken over four days, represent the first visible-light video of Saturn's auroras. They show tall auroral curtains, rapidly changing over time when viewed at the limb, or edge, of the planet's northern hemisphere. The sequence of images also reveals that Saturn's auroral curtains reach heights of more than 1,200 km (746 mi) above the planet's limb. These are the tallest known "northern lights" in the solar system. Each image was obtained with a two- or three-minute exposure, taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera from October 5th to 8th 2009. (NASA/JPL/SSI
Click to expand...
 
F

fallout

Member
The SDO continues to blow my mind.

Dark Filament

This SDO close-up of a filament and active region, taken in extreme UV light, shows a dark and elongated filament hovering above the Sun’s surface (May 18, 2010). The bright regions beneath it, which show where heating is going on in the magnetic field, send up shafts of plasma that trace magnetic field lines emerging from them. Filaments are cooler clouds of gas that are suspended by tenuous magnetic fields. They are often unstable and commonly erupt. This one is estimated to be at least 60 Earth diameters long (about 500,000 miles).
Click to expand...
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/potw.php?v=item&id=1



(link goes to full disk image)
 
C

Culex

Banned
Teh Hamburglar said:
I wonder what Mars would like today if its core hadn't solidified.
Click to expand...

Thread needs to be bumped for shear awesome-ness.


I think even if the core was still molten, it would still be uninhabitable. Far too distant from the sun to support life at those temperatures.
 
E

Escape Goat

Member
Culex said:
Thread needs to be bumped for shear awesome-ness.


I think even if the core was still molten, it would still be uninhabitable. Far too distant from the sun to support life at those temperatures.
Click to expand...


i thought Mars was inside the habitable zone? it just lacked atmosphere/magnetic field.
 
L

Lucky Forward

Member
Ribbon at Edge of Our Solar System: Will the Sun Enter a Million-Degree Cloud of Interstellar Gas?

ScienceDaily (May 24, 2010) — Is the Sun going to enter a million-degree galactic cloud of interstellar gas soon?

Scientists from the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Southwest Research Institute, and Boston University suggest that the ribbon of enhanced emissions of energetic neutral atoms, discovered last year by the NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of the approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble. If this hypothesis is correct, IBEX is catching matter from a hot neighboring interstellar cloud, which the Sun might enter in a hundred years.
Click to expand...
"If our hypothesis is correct, then we are catching atoms that originate from an interstellar cloud that is different from ours," says Dr. Maciej Bzowski, co-investigator of the mission and head of the Polish IBEX team. But since the creation of such ENA atoms is occurring throughout the entire boundary layer between the clouds, why do we see the Ribbon? "It's a purely geometrical effect, which we observe because the Sun is presently just in the right place, within a thousand of astronomical units from the cloud boundary," explains Grzedzielski. "If the cloud-cloud boundary is flat, or better slightly extruded towards the Sun, then it appears the thinnest towards the center of the Ribbon and thicker at the sides, right where we see the edge of the Ribbon. If we were farther away from the boundary, we would see no Ribbon, because all the ENAs would be re-ionized and dispersed in the intervening gas of the Local Cloud."

The model developed by the Polish-US team suggests that the boundary between the Local Cloud and the Local Bubble might be not within a few light years from the Sun, as it was believed earlier, but within just a thousand of astronomical units, a thousand-fold closer. This might mean that the Solar System could enter the million-degree Local Bubble cloud as early as the next century. "Nothing unusual, the Sun frequently traverses various clouds of interstellar gas during its galactic journey," comments Grzedzielski. Such clouds are of very low density, much lower than the best vacuum obtained in Earth labs. Once in, the heliosphere will reform and may shrink a little, the level of cosmic radiation entering the magnetosphere may rise a bit, but nothing more. "Perhaps future generations will have to learn how to better harden their space hardware against stronger radiation," suggests Grzedzielski.
Click to expand...
 
R

RankoSD

Member
A million dollar question: How many stars are in this picture? XD

Rho Ophiuchi Wide Field




Click for full res...

Explanation:The clouds surrounding the star system Rho Ophiuchi compose one of the closest star forming regions. Rho Ophiuchi itself is a binary star system visible in the light-colored region on the image right. The star system, located only 400 light years away, is distinguished by its colorful surroundings, which include a red emission nebula and numerous light and dark brown dust lanes. Near the upper right of the Rho Ophiuchi molecular cloud system is the yellow star Antares, while a distant but coincidently-superposed globular cluster of stars, M4, is visible between Antares and the red emission nebula. Near the image bottom lies IC 4592, the Blue Horsehead nebula. The blue glow that surrounds the Blue Horsehead's eye -- and other stars around the image -- is a reflection nebula composed of fine dust. On the above image left is a geometrically angled reflection nebula cataloged as Sharpless 1. Here, the bright star near the dust vortex creates the light of surrounding reflection nebula. Although most of these features are visible through a small telescope pointed toward the constellations of Ophiuchus, Scorpius, and Sagittarius, the only way to see the intricate details of the dust swirls, as featured above, is to use a long exposure camera.
 
abstract alien

abstract alien

Member
Jesus that shot is amazing. There is so much potential for damn near anything to exist in this picture alone that my mind hurts thinking about it.

Side note: Could someone repost the gif showing the size relation of earth all the way up to the huge sun?
 
abstract alien

abstract alien

Member
Sentry said:
Maybe it's taken from a vid or something? I always thought the same though, tried to fix;

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4030/4663858615_083711efb8_o.png
Click to expand...
I could have sworn there was an animated gif floating around here. Either way, very nice job on the touch up. Its much more vibrant now :^)

Clevinger said:
To me it sounds like the sound effects of an old and cheap alien/horror B-movie.

:lol
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Yep. How they got it right so long ago is beyond me. Stepping outside and having to listen to that would creep me the hell out :^/
 
C

CabbageRed

Member
The galaxy that is labeled as being too large to exist under the laws of physics as we currently understand them, is there any useful information about it out there? Thanks. :)
 
mckmas8808

mckmas8808

Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
CabbageRed said:
The galaxy that is labeled as being too large to exist under the laws of physics as we currently understand them, is there any useful information about it out there? Thanks. :)
Click to expand...


I'd love to read more about this too.
 
F

fallout

Member
astroturfing said:
to the naked eye, it looks like a single star... yet it's hundreds of thousands of stars.
Click to expand...
Actually, it looks like a tiny fuzzy patch in the sky. Still, I agree that it's really neat!
 
T

Teknoman

Member
astroturfing said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

i like that planet/star size comparison vid (dramatic music ftw). my mind cant keep up after the 1:00 mark... stuff is crazy.

also i love these, star clusters (this one called M13)...

M13_mtm900.jpg


to the naked eye, it looks like a single star... yet it's hundreds of thousands of stars.
Click to expand...

The blade runner credits (heh scrap brain zone) music really drove the point home. Anything with Canis Majoris gets me, but thats probably the best size comparison.
 
B

besada

Banned
Clevinger said:
pushed to 1pm, it seems
Click to expand...

Yeah, apparently they've been having a telemetry issue. They're saying 1EDT, although they haven't reset the T-0 count yet.

T-15:00, but still in a hold.
 
M

McNei1y

Member
I understand that 'We are very tiny' but I am trying to think what it would look like if we had VY Canis Majoris as our sun. If I looked out my window into the blue horizon, would it cover up the whole horizon? Would what we see as the sky now, be just big and red?
 
M

msv

Member
It would be so bright we couldn't see. We'd probably burn up pretty quick.

2,900,000,000 km across, so a 1,450,000,000 km radius. 1 AU is 149,597,870 km. We'd be well within the star, holy shit :lol
 
S

shuyin_

Banned
McNei1y said:
I understand that 'We are very tiny' but I am trying to think what it would look like if we had VY Canis Majoris as our sun. If I looked out my window into the blue horizon, would it cover up the whole horizon? Would what we see as the sky now, be just big and red?
Click to expand...
We are cuurently 8 light minutes away from the sun.
To be able to live on a planet orbiting VY Canis Majoris, the planet would have to be a lot farther away from it than Earth is from the sun (light hours or maybe days). So i don't think you'd be able to see it from a close distance anyway :D
 
U

UrbanRats

Member
McNei1y said:
I understand that 'We are very tiny' but I am trying to think what it would look like if we had VY Canis Majoris as our sun. If I looked out my window into the blue horizon, would it cover up the whole horizon? Would what we see as the sky now, be just big and red?
Click to expand...
I think its border would reach Jupiter orbit so, from Earth, you wouldn't see much. :lol
 
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