121–130 of 191 posts
Is it possible for a layperson like myself to spend an evening casually looking through the trove of Hubble images or are they only for astronomers? I googled around but I couldn't find an archive anywhere.
For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even…
> Inside a 'thick' nebula, obscuring all other entities in the sky except for their own star and planets. Similarly to the alien planet in Eric Flint's "Mother of Demons"; there was a permanent thick cloud cover, and the the slowly moving sky illumination due to the unseen sun was called "the mother of pearl" by the locals. I also like the idea of living in a dense globular cluster. Interstellar probes and, later, ma…
"...when he was looking through Hubble Space Telescope images and noticed a suspected blemish that looked like a scratch on photographic film" Is it possible for a layperson like myself to spend an evening casually looking through the trove of Hubble images or are they only for astronomers? I googled around but I couldn't find an archive anywhere.
> This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. > Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole... One of the black holes robbed momentum…
Not an expert either but Sagittarius A* has a mass of 10^6 solar masses, the Milky Way itself has a mass of approximately 10^12 solar masses. So I doubt that Sagittarius A* is even relevant in terms of the Milky Ways gravitational potential. That said, the existence of Sagittarius A* does (most likely, this is an area of debate) have an impact on the Milky Way due to the strong, high-frequency radiation from its accr…
For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even…
For those replying to this article with "imagine living there", please note that if life is a verdant, resilient and common as many of us hope it is, the universe might contain quite a number of insane places to live: - Near the center of a galaxy, where stars are so closely packed together that the night sky is filled with bright lights, perhaps illuminating their world to what we experience around twilight, or even…
Another cool places for habitable planets to be: - Active galaxy with a jet stretching perpendicularly to the galaxy plane for distances much bigger than the galaxy's size, shinning in all the wavelengths. - Planet around a double star one of which is a black hole or a neutron star.
I'm not sure that would be very habitable. Unless they're far apart, the neutron star/black hole would be accreting matter from its companion and the accretion disk would be emitting large amounts of x-rays. In some cases, they can occasionally increase in luminosity by a factor of 10, emitting powerful bursts of x-rays.
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To be fair, that does seem to describe the existence of life on our own planet.
I don't think so - in every direction we look things appear largely to be the same. It seems entirely reasonable that extends to life. The only limiting factor is we cannot see other planets to find out.
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This article is even worse, that it shows an illustration without a caption identifying it as an illustration, which is very misleading. (Later they show it again with the caption saying it's an illustration.)
In their defense, NASA did use the same artistic rendition...
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Another cool places for habitable planets to be: - Active galaxy with a jet stretching perpendicularly to the galaxy plane for distances much bigger than the galaxy's size, shinning in all the wavelengths. - Planet around a double star one of which is a black hole or a neutron star.
Planet around a double star one of which is a black hole or a neutron star I'm not sure that would be very habitable. Unless they're far apart, the neutron star/black hole would be accreting matter from its companion and the accretion disk would be emitting large amounts of x-rays. In some cases, they can occasionally increase in luminosity by a factor of 10, emitting powerful bursts of x-rays.
Wikipedia says the magnetic field of a neutron star is between 10^8 and 10^15 times the Earth's. The amount of energy in a magnetic field that strong is mind-boggling. Anything anywhere near a neutron star will be bathed in intense broadband radiation, and whipped about by a rapidly-rotating magnetic field. Not a nice place to set up camp.
> barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes 14 minutes?