a narrow band of sky on the edge of Canis Major and Bootes that’s absolutely crawling with galaxies, and which astronomers have decided to subject to the scrutiny of just about every instrument in their arsenal
Tag: astronomy
KML Astronomy
In an ideal world all such observational astronomical data would exist in a machine-readable markup format, and I’m willing to venture it soon will. Just as it took the geospatial web 1 year or 2 to reorient itself towards making its data available in a format compatible with KML, the astronomical web will take a while to provide its data in a similar format.
lets hope this speeds up astronomical discoveries
Planet sized diamond
BPM 37093, now known as the biggest diamond in the galaxy, 50LY away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, has a diameter of 4000 km.
conspiracy-minded folk would call it an artifact of a kardashev type II civilization 🙂 also, earth is 6000 km.
Earth-Sky mashup
adding a horizon line. neat
CMB Cold Spot
Aastronomers have found an enormous hole in the Universe, nearly 1b light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.”
A Star with a Comet Tail
It’s amazing to discover such a startlingly large and important feature of an object that has been known and studied for over 400 years. Mira’s comet-like tail stretches more than 13 light years.
4-way Galaxy Merger
4 massive galaxies are colliding in the largest galactic merger ever seen. The smash-up is shedding light on how the biggest galaxies in the universe form – and why many of them stopped giving birth to stars billions of years ago.
massive galaxies lose their gas early and do not create new stars.
Digital Universe Atlas
Since 1998, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium have engaged in the 3D mapping of the Universe. This cosmic cartography brings a new perspective to our place in the Universe and will redefine your sense of home
Chemical Radiance
what the film does – and it does this very successfully, in my opinion – is set up an increasingly melancholy sense of psychological isolation as an international crew of scientists, aboard a ship called the Icarus 2, flies toward the Sun. The Sun, we learn, is dying – and so it needs to be restarted with a “stellar bomb” the size of Manhattan. In fact, we learn, the bomb is so big that it contains literally all of the Earth’s fissile material.
stunning. must see?
Back to 2320AD
a realistic model of stellar colonization along paths, instead of the usual spherical
Gregor J. Rothfuss 