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Here in BAUT, and in many other internet discussion fora, you can easily find posts on the difficulty of getting independent astrophysics, planetary science, cosmology, etc research published. If you read such posts, you will find 1001 reasons why independent researchers can't get anything...
This section of the forum is for astronomy and space exploration questions with straightforward, generally accepted answers. Questions that are likely to lead to extended discussion about the correct answer, or that have no clearcut correct answer, should be posted in the forum most appropriate...
Since I publish Universe Today, I get asked a lot of questions. Some are related to a specific story and others are just general space and astronomy questions. If I do know the answer, I'll send it back, but think that lots of you would find the questions and their answers quite interesting. So, I...
Of course atoms are so very small and made up mostly of nothing. (If the nucleus was the size of a baseball, then the first electron would be a pinhead, and the first energy level 50 yards away. Right?) But we're talking distances and sizes that would dwarf those numbers. How many miles is it...
Sorry for the "&", but I just ran out of room for the "?". (Yes, I'm apologizing for using internet shorthand. LOL...) Anyway, my question is: Why do we not burn up when ascending into space? (Or do we, a little bit?) My guess is because we aren't going fast enough because we have...
Does the universe exist in a container or is the universe it's own container? The universe must be finite and exist within a boundary of sorts if it is still expanding (or do I have that backwards). It's seems to be more an argument in logic than in astrophysics....
Okay, I was reading another article out on the internet and came across this interesting one in Physic World (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/43657) and it sort of blew me away if this is confirmed true. But, that would mean we are getting closer to unified theory and other natures of the...
Because of a bracket failure on my watch, I needed to purchase a replacement. The best store localy for that was one of these catalogue shops here in the UK we call Argos. Looking at my requirements of multiple alarms, I got a Casio Sea-Pathfinder Gents LCD Watch. This purports to give a...
Hurricane Earl makes me wonder how wet, wild & stormy early Mars was. How common were hurricanes, tornadoes, monsoons? As time went on of course, Mars became Antarctica like, then finally becoming what it is today: arid, dry, thin-aired & deep cold;well below the line. How wet & humid might...
i assume that space debris contact earth every day, how much mass is the earth accumulating every day from cosmic dust, debris and meteor impact? does sunlight add to the mass of the planet due to photosynthesis?
Initially I assumed that just jovian planets could migrate inwards towards a star as they formed, explaining Warm and Hot Jupiters. In recent days it seems that we have discovered planets similar in size to Earth (about 1.5 earth masses in the case of HD 10180, and 3-4 earth masses in the case of...
I was hoping to find someone who may have a picture, or be able to quickly throw together one, of all the galaxies from a top down (as most ive seen are) we've seen, to scale, or close to possibly. with a radius around, earth, and all telescopes we've used to document these findings. i dont know...
I am visiting Albuquerque, NM For 3 Nights this weekend. Assuming good weather conditions, where would be a good spot in that area to hang out and see the sky at night? I don't mind driving up to an hour away. I've driven through the desert at night before and remember how much of the night sky...
When space expands over time, doesn't that expansion move electrons far enough from 'their' nuclei to allow them to radiate and drop to orbitals closer to those nuclei?
I've been listening to you guys drivel on for years, now, and have been inspired to look up to the night skies. I've recently moved to an area with very little light pollution and am astounded by the amount and the instance of 'shooting stars.' I have observed the perseids, the leonids but...
Say Venus & Mars. Or Titan & Earth's Moon. Or Mars with Europa. Or put Venus at Neptune's distance from the Sun. Or switching Mercury with Saturn, Venus with Uranus & Earth with Neptune. What happens to Europa, Callisto, Ganymede & Titan if you put them at Ceres's distance from the Sun, then...
My understanding of special relativity is getting better, but I still have some questions. A ship passing the earth by at a great speed will see that the Earth is not round any more. It will be flattened by length contraction. If we take the path of travel perpendicular to the axis of rotation...
The core of Earth is about 1/3 mass of Earth. But there is a lot of iron in iron ores outside the core. Roughly which proportion of total iron in Earth is outside the core and what proportion is inside? What is the distribution of other siderophiles, such as nickel, gold, platinum and...
In a follow-up of their famous paper Einstein posed a modified version of the "paradox": suppose that two particles th-at interacted closely at some times are now separated by a large distance (so, the Principle of Separabilty applies) -we measure the location of particle A -based on the...
My dad asked me the other day, "Where did the Big Bang happen?" Knowing almost nothing on the subject, I made something up. I said "It happened right here." and I pointed at my left knee. Since stars and galaxies are pretty much all moving away from each other (at least on a large scale) and...
First off please forgive me for my bad grammar I know its really bad.:wall: But anyway , A year or so ago me and my friend were standing outside smoking a cigerette at around 12 oclockish at night.It was a clear nice night and We were just looking at the stars, To my amazement I Noticed if you...
The other day my instructor was telling us about what charge is (I'm talking about the charge of a proton or an electron.). He said if you ask a physicist what charge is, they will tell you that they really don't know what charge is, but they know a little about what it does. He then told us that...
Precisely what is defined as zero point of bolometric correction?
Does Venus really mark off a pentagram every eight years? Only posting here since it's nonsense from a Dan Brown novel and I'm just curious.
Is the galaxy just an accretion disc around a supermassive black hole? All the larger galaxies so far studied seem to be orbiting supermassive black holes. Is the fate of the universe to be eaten?
So, I've heard quite a lot about this the last weeks thanks to the upcomming pb-collisions at LHC later this year. And I just thought I'd run this by you, since the answers I've gotten from other sources are far from comforting. So basically, the theory states that we might be living in...
Little Magellanic Cloud and some other galaxies are famous for low metal content. And some stars in Milky Way itself are even less metallic. But what about gas clouds? Are there any gas clouds that are conspicuous for low metal content? While some metals are quite volatile, e. g, carbon in...
I have a question on the laws of relativity i'm not entirely sure about... Is the expansion of the universe dependent on relativity? If no, does that mean you can observe galaxies far away moving faster than c or shouldn't the speed of light be accounted for in Hubble's law?
http://imgur.com/JGkBC.jpg I know this isn't Pluto and AFAIK it doesn't look like a painting or computer generated image of Pluto. Would anyone happen to know offhand? Oops, I did a quick Google and turns out to be an image from some site called The Iranian. Still think it might be that...
Is it possible that bar formation in barred galaxies are caused by their supermassive black hole cores, and related to the tilt of the axis of rotation of these cores? Suppose that the long gamma-ray burst associated with the formation of a supermassive core black hole, whose axis of rotation is...
Hello, We believed stars can't be more massive than 150 times than the sun... How does the biggest star ever found ( R136a1) Change the existing concepts we have about stellar evolution? And what about the kind of Supernova or Hyper-nova this star will meet at the end? Will that be...
Hello, can anyone please tell me where and when I can view the lunar x. thanks.
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