astronomy

I posted a warning about the threat from Andromeda in another thread recently but here is a nice presentation. Andromeda’s collision course with the Milky Way: This Week in Astronomy with Dave Eich At 300Km per second! Just something extra to add to our list of worries -- if I should live so...

Hello all, this is my very first post here in this forum (after of my post of presentation). I have a few Qs about of The Big-Bang Theory formulated by Georges Lemaître that have been sprouted since a some years ago. This Qs are placed here in a ramdom way (but not in an order). I am asking...

I wanted to go see it this week, then tonight, but a winter storm, root canal, and light pollution precluded my planned viewing. (Sadly, it is about a 2 hour drive to somewhere I can see the night sky- and iffy even then.) I'd rather hear some posters share if they have seen Mr. Green Comet...

I was searching for something on Google, probably due to reading the JWT thread, and came across the Dragonfly Project, which uses 48 Canon lenses linked together. Does anyone know how/if this project is progressing? Their site doesn't seem to have been updated since 2019. Though I did find a...

All it takes is intelligence, hard work and . . . a supercomputer. Astrophysicists identified the origin of supermassive black hole flares Largest-ever simulations suggest flickering powered by magnetic ‘reconnection’. No electricity involved. :duck:

I'm wondering if I should report it, or if it's unusual at all. This was spectacular! Below are some Photoshop images I made to try and replicate how it appeared to me. I was at my Dad's around 12:35 am, July 31, 2021. He lives in a small town called Copperopolis if you want to look it up. Ya...

When I read about the method used to detect the Goldilocks Zone Planets I am filled with awe. Given the method can only detect a minute number of the possible planets and the large number that have been found is staggering - 16 of these in the so called Goldilocks zone.

The iconic Aricebo radio telescope is to be decommissioned. Arecibo Heartbreak: Iconic SETI Dish Will Be Demolished Due to Risk of ‘Catastrophic’ Collapse

Nothing provocative. No suggesting the "Laws of Physics is wrong. No woo woo whatsoever. This simply is a video explaining how incredibly smooth the surface of a neutron is. From Sixty Symbols https://youtu.be/YfLvuH41sg8

I thought this was interesting. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-sun-life-binary-companion.html I know the Sun is unusual in being a solitary star, so this would make sense.

Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE has passed around the Sun and is moving into the early evening western sky. It’s currently visible by naked eye, but is dimming as it heads toward its closest approach to Earth at 0.69 AU on July 23. I’ve created two charts and an ephemeris that can be viewed on my...

Mile-wide Asteroid 52768 (1998 OR2) is expected to pass Earth by only 0.0421 AU on 2020 APR 29 at 09.59 UT (04.59 CDT). The estimated greatest brilliance by JPL is magnitude +10.8 on MAY 01. I’ve created a chart and ephemeris that can be viewed at https://www.CurtRenz.com/asteroids.html...

I've often wondered, if one had a big enough lens, or an effectively big enough lens (and a massive amount of processing power), if this was possible. Apparently, people much, much cleverer than me have thought about it a lot and will be allowed to keep thinking about it with a budget. I...

Ok, I expect to see some creative parody titles... Anyway, I was outside this evening and I noticed a really bright light in the sky. Initially I thought it was a helicopter or plane approaching the airport some distance away. But it didn’t move. Pulled out Night Sky and saw that it is...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/23/this-is-what-well-see-when-betelgeuse-really-does-go-supernova/#54871a2b43a2 Pretty freaky

Current suggestions on what might have made these stars vanish are failed super-nova or Dyson Spheres, of course it's never aliens, so.....

Research on candidates for non-cosmological redshifts, M. Lopez-Corredoira, C. M. Gutierrez (2005), link is to arXiv abstract: This is not your typical "Arp was right!" paper. I'm interested in what ISF members (those who hang out in this board) think of the paper, especially the extent to...

As in "Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations". Described in a highly readable paper by Beatriz Villarroel and a huge cast of others, The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations project: I. USNO objects missing in modern sky surveys and follow-up...

In a very active thread here in this board, a couple of astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology topics have come up which many regular readers may not have heard of. First, expansion of the universe. Yeah, the results are pretty clear: if General Relativity (GR), then the universe seems to be...

I am starting this thread out of frustration at the lack of relevant content in the The Electric Comet Theory /SAFIRE Part V thread. Initially that thread - or rather, its predecessors - kept more or less on target, and there were many posts on electric comet models etc, and discussions...

No, that tiny disc that can be seen racing in front of the Sun on November 11th will not be an ET’s flying saucer. The innermost planet Mercury will appear to transit the disk of the Sun on 2019 NOV 11 for observers in the Americas, Europe, Africa, Near East and New Zealand. This will be the...

LMXB: low mass x-ray binary; i.e. as low mass star and a stellar-mass black hole in orbit around each other. Emits copious amounts of x-ray radiation. Based in Paice+ (2019), "A black hole X-ray binary at ∼100 Hz: multiwavelength timing of MAXI J1820+070 with HiPERCAM and NICER" (link to...

On Sabine Hossenfelder's BackReAction blog, it's titled "Dark matter nightmare: What if we are just using the wrong equations?" (link). At its heart it's about averaging non-linear equations, those in General Relativity (GR) in particular. An extract: As with, it seems, almost all her...

Please can somebody advise me about this? I'm playing around, writing SciFi stories, and it's occurred to me that I've been using star charts as if they're basically the same as terrestrial maps. So, for example, I'd explain that this star system is west of another star system. Is this the...

https://www.space.com/alien-planet-k2-18b-water-vapor-not-earth-twin.html Water vapour has been detected in the atmosphere of a super-Earth with habitable temperatures by UCL researchers in a world first. K2-18b, which is eight times the mass of Earth, is now the only planet orbiting a star...

Were doomed, it's almost as big as the one that didn't do in the big dinosaurs. https://skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=4422

Article Paper; Indication of Another Intermediate-mass Black Hole in the Galactic Center Takekawa, S. et al. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aafb07/meta (free access)

https://phys.org/news/2018-09-pluto-reclassified-planet.html Pluto pulled itself into a round shape, is geologically the second most complex solar orbiting object, and was most disgracefully red carded. Thank you for this revising revisionism.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/28/galaxy-without-any-dark-matter-baffles-astronomers My first guess was that the dark matter had got separated out somehow, reading on that's one of the speculations. This is an interesting point:

https://phys.org/news/2018-03-nasa-next-generation-space-telescope.html I think we should all march if there is any further delay to the launch. Mankind depends on the results of James Webb and our escape to the stars, because American politicians cannot be relied on to do their duty as...