# All Questions

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### Is there anywhere I can find some kind of database on all known stars and their properties (mass, surface temperature, radius, and luminosity)?

I have been looking for some kind of collection of all known stars and their individual respective mass/radius/temperature/and luminosity, can you link me to one if it exists? My goal is to write an ...
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### What is the orbit of Earth around the Sun?

According to wikipedia and other sources, a planet and a star always move in a circular orbit around the common center of mass of the both bodies, in case of Earth and sun, this center of mass lies ...
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### What determines the configuration of orbits in a binary system?

There are essentially two configurations of orbits a system with two bodies can have: A configuration where the paths do not cross: A configuation where the paths cross: Note: Size of the ...
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### How would vehicles travel through the interstellar medium with its such low density?

I've heard from a number of different places that the density in the interstellar medium can have an average of 1 atom per centimeter cubed. Perhaps I have a wrong understanding of what 'nothing' is ...
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### Stable polar solar orbit with earth continuously observable

Is there a stable polar solar orbit such that the earth is always in view and not eclipsed by the sun?
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### Data for Sun's Orbit

The planets generally kindof orbit around the sun, but a more precise statement is that the planets and the sun all orbit around a common barycenter. Because the sun is so massive, this barycenter is ...
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### Accretion disks - why are they disk-shaped, rather than spherical?

So, the theory (briefly) about accretion disks is that stuff falling into the black hole will most likely not fall straight into it but will miss it and go into orbit, perhaps for a long time, perhaps ...
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### Method to determine the amount of reflected starlight necessary for an exoplanet to be visible from a given distance/angle?

What is the method to determine the amount of reflected starlight necessary for an exoplanet to be visible from a given distance/angle? (Not from occlusion but actually visible on its own.) Further, ...
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### How often and over what period is Earth’s rotation averaged to compute UT1?

I understand that UT1 (and for that matter UT0, UT2, etc.) are based on averages of actual earth rotation, and serve as a form of mean solar time. However it’s not clear to me when these averages are ...
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### Orbital elements: Difference between longitude of perihelion and argument of perifocus

I am learning orbital elements and one thing isn't clear to me. When I look at the Horizon's ephemeris data for Mars, this gives me argument of perifocus equal to roughly 286.53 degrees on epoch ...
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### Can an observer on Earth only see half of the sky?

Is this the following statement true? An observer on earth only may see half of sky from the northern or southern hemisphere, and even if the observer stands on the equator on top of a very high ...
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### Solar System' formation, considering its and universe's age

It's been said that the sun has 4.6 billion years, and the complete solar system to have similar age. The star-class of the sun seems to be quite common. Stars of its class can have 8 or 9 billion ...
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### What could be the results from the next test at CERN? [migrated]

How possible is it that CERN's Large Hadron Collider, on its second try, could disrupt the gravity of Earth?
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### Is it possible to steer the sight of a Liquid Mirror Telescope using a plain mirror scheme? If yes, why hasn't it been done?

I have read about Liquid Mirror Telescopes in a number of places, and according to these sources, a major disadvantage of these telescopes is that they can only "see" straight up. In a nutshell, the ...
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### Does planets repel

I know gravity is resultant of mass. Gravity is nothing but the attraction force on the body resulted due to its mass. I have a question may be silly but like in magnetism we have attraction and ...
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### Is Jupiter made entirely out of gas?

I heard that Jupiter is made out of gas. But in school I learned that Jupiter has gravity which is 2.5 times that of Earth (Gravity that can tear apart a comet) and gravity is proportional to mass. ...
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### Could a theoretical cube shaped planet have a moon? [migrated]

I'm inventing a constructed world for a personal exercise in writing, and I was wondering if a theoretical cube shaped planet could have a moon. Is that physically possible? I am going on the ...
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### Manned journey to Mars [migrated]

Will we be able to take the amount of water that will be needed for this 18 month trip or will they have to recycle the water that they take with them ? I imagine that this will be quite a challenge ...
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### Why, in the Solar System, all the mass seems to be concentrated at the centre?

Is this a consequence of planet formation in accretion disks ?
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### Deriving Dark Matter; specifically looking for a table of stellar rotational speed versus distance from center of galaxy to derive dark matter

I'm trying to find some data that I can use to derive dark matter (in a loosey-goosey sort of way, I won't be too rigorous). I'm helping a friend out with a final project for his astronomy course and ...
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### What is the line of light in galaxy cluster MACS J1206?

I noticed this in a thread from world building, what is the continuous line of light in MACS J1206 slightly right of center in this picture? The only thing I could think of would be the side view of a ...
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### How does radio bandwidth restrict the choice and use of science payload on interplanetary probes?

I asked a question here about returning to Earth a physical memory capsule along with soil samples, as a complement to radio operations as today. This might return a much larger amount of data ...
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### Where can I find the image of MY Camelopardalis?

In this news article,it says The image captured by the telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory in southern Spain, reveal the physical properties of each of the stars including temperature and shape. ...
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### Why are stars so far apart?

So, this is mere musing, but it seems that stars are quite extremely far apart. I tried to determine the mean distance between nearest neighbors for stars (in just our galaxy) but I'm not sure what it ...
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### How is it known that Pillars of Creation are destroyed?

We can observe Pillars of Creation with 7000 years delay, but it is destroyed only 6000 years ago. How do we know that? How the information about explosion reached the Earth before light do?
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### where is the boundary between dark night and grey night

Is there a clear cut between them? How long and how bright will the moon be for a dark night? I googled but could not find a definition for them. People just talk about them empirically?
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### Do/did the asteroids contain enough water to create Earth's oceans?

It seems from the recent Science paper by Altwegg et al (2014) that the commonly accepted source of Earth's water being the comets might not be (completely) true. Their study suggest that the water in ...
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### luck city of 35

People in the past thought that a city which the length of the visible arc of a star's path in that city is longer, that city is the luck city; Now, for a city with a latitude of 35° how much ...
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### What implications does younger volcanism have on the Moon's thermal evolution?

In the paper Evidence for basaltic volcanism on the Moon within the past 100 million years (Braden et al. 2014), suggest that features such as Ina (image below) represent a far more recent age of ...
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### Are there stars in the first photo from space?

Wikipedia has this photo (see below) labelled "First photo from space" which was taken in 1946 from a U.S. launched German V-2 rocket. Approximately two thirds of the image is a section of the Earth ...
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### Do Pluto and Charon have unusual Langrange points?

The usual examples of Lagrange point mechanics one most commonly encounters, Sun-Earth-L# and Earth-Moon-L#, are examples of 3-body problems where 1 >> 2 >> 3 in terms of their mass. The Pluto-Charon ...
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### Lack of contact with Aliens [closed]

Lack of contact could be due to one of three things ? Interstellar space travel is just not possible . There is no other Alien Life in the Galaxy . There exists Alien life and interstellar space ...
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### What is the most oblate astronomical object known?

There are some very vast spinning objects out there. How high can the eccentricity get, or, which I think is easier to understand, how small can the ratio between the polar and equatorial diameter ...
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### Why is there a black stripe in the Hubble images of Pluto?

While reading reports about the New Horizons misson, I noticed an odd vertical, black stripe in the images of Pluto. Here is an example: Source: Hubble Discovers a Fifth Moon Orbiting Pluto ...
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### The name of a particular low extinction region

There is a region called Baade's window. I remember there is a similar region called "somebody's window", which also has a low amount of dust. Does anyone know the name?
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### Is there a star simulation software that can handle mass ejections and supernovae?

I use MESA right now to play around with stellar dynamics, but it can't do mass ejections and therefore, I can't think of a way to let the simulated stars explode as supernovae. What simulation ...
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### What are the arguments against the Feng and Gallo thin disk explanation of galactic rotation curves?

The well-known galaxy rotation problem is described here. Basically (as one moves outward from the galactic centre, $R$ increasing) the observed pattern of variation in orbital speed $V$ is very ...
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### Typical wavelength of solar flare

I read that solar flares are customarily viewed in H-alpha light, as a temporary brightening of a small portion of chromosphere. What all can be interpreted from this? Is it because, energy of the ...
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### Visibility of earth from moon during day-time of moon

Inspired by this question. I am curious whether earth, besides being nearly fixed on one place on the moon's sky, is it visible during the day-time on moon too? My understanding is that earth should ...
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### How to convert a gravitational force to speed and direction

I am doing some calculations, and I wanted to know that after using the gravity equation, $$F = G \frac{m_1m_2}{r^2}$$ if you can use $F$ and convert it into a speed, such as km/year, and also a ...
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### Voyager spacecrafts

Will the Voyager space crafts actually reach another Star System in 63,000 years? If the answer is yes, what will be powering the crafts to keep them going for so long?
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### Spectra of electromagnetic radiation emitted during solar flare

During solar flare, electromagnetic energy is released at a wide range of wavelengths but the most dominating are x-rays and extreme ultraviolet rays. Why is that intensity of these wavelengths is ...
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### Exploiting symmetry in the axisymmetric Jeans equations

I'm solving the axisymmetric Jeans equations to determine the initial conditions for an exponential disk inside an NFW halo. The density profiles of the two components are ...
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### Distance between Earth and where The Big Bang's happened? [duplicate]

The universe is around 13.8 billion years old. We know how fast the light is. We also know how fast our galaxy moving around inside observable universe. Is it possible to calculating distance ...
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### How should one rationally deal with the issue of space travelling alien civilizations?

What kind of reasoning is appropriate to understand the as of today unanswered question of whether there are (other) interstellar space travelling civilizations in the Milky Way? We have already sent ...
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### how far away could we detect that earth has life?

My guess is that life bearing planets are too far apart to be detected. I think we can only find the ones within a sphere around our planet that is 100s of light years in diameter but I suspect life ...
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### Could the Philae comet lander be recharged by laser?

Could the Philae comet lander be recharged with a laser (or possibly many lasers) from earth? My thought would be to aim one or more powerful lasers from earth at the Philae lander to recharge it ...
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### Are our 'observations' of or near a black hole affected by gravity induced time dilation?

This answer made me wonder if matter/energy/events near a black hole are viewed (by us) in a very different time frame, how might that affect our measurements? ...