# All Questions

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### Is the Tombaugh Regio on Pluto visible from Earth?

Is the Tombaugh Regio on Pluto discernably visible from Earth ground based or Earth orbiting telescopes? And more generally, can surface features seen in Hubble images be matched with images from New ...
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### Are lunar occultations visible to the naked eye?

The Moon occults a lot of stars. But are these events visible to the naked eye? Won't it be blinded out by the crescent even at its thinnest just before sunrise? Did ancient astronomers actually ...
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### What is a “jumping trojan”? And what do their orbits look like?

I was googling Neptune's trojan companions and found on Wiki this claim about ~200 km diameter (316179) 2010 EN65: " the object is actually a jumping trojan, is jumping from the Lagrangian ...
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### Does Pluto have impact craters?

I've heard from a lot of sources that Pluto doesn't seem to have any impact craters, but I see a few things that look like impact craters, highlighted in this picture: For comparison, here's ...
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### How significant is a planet's density to the formation of life?

I'm doing some writing set on a fictional earthlike planet that for reasons needs to be substantially larger than Earth but can't have substantially higher gravity. I've been able to compromise with a ...
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### How did our ancestors discover the Solar System?

I wonder, how did our ancestors discover the Solar System? They did not have any telescopes to see distant objects, right? Even a planet looks like a star from a distance. They discovered the ...
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### What's to be gained from the New Horizons mission once it's beyond the Kuiper Belt?

Now that we have seen what Pluto has to offer and New Horizons is headed to the Kuiper Belt, is there anything we can gain from the mission in interstellar space after it travels beyond the Kuiper ...
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### How do you determine which star, between two, is more luminous?

For example, if star 1 is 4x bigger than star 2 but both are the exact same temperature how do you determine which is more luminous?
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### Real images (not “artist concept”) by NASA

Does NASA make publicly available real images of missions in an organized manner? What I mean is: Say I'm looking for the images taken by New Horizons - a simple list of the images in chronological ...
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### Any tip on maintaining a log of celestial objects?

I am an amateur observer and Olympus 10x50 binocular is my tool. As I keep locating celestial objects (Planets, Stars etc), I would like to maintain a log of the observed objects. The purpose of the ...
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### How can they tell no asteriods will hit earth in the next hundreds years?

It has come to my mind this interrogation : How can they tell no asteroids (big enough to create damage) will hit earth in the next hundreds years? Because, so far, we were unable to get a clear ...
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### How many nested stable (1 Mio years) orbits are theoretically possible?

If we look at our solar system we have the sun which has planet orbits and planets have moon orbits. If we look at the possible size difference from hypergiants to small asteroids why shouldn't it be ...
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### which pulsar has the longest spin period so far?

Vela X-1 has a 283s spin period, while this one may have a 2.7hr spin period. However neither of them is included in ATNF catalog. They are not included in $p-\dot{p}$ diagram either. The longest ...
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### Speed of light through the ISM and Wavelength

Articles written about fast radio bursts describe the signal's short-wavelength components arriving before its longer-wavelength components, suggesting energy-dependent time delays in the interstellar ...
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Regarding solar system dynamics, i.e. planets in stellar systems and moons in planetary systems, this is often mentioned in the literature, but it is difficult to find a good analysis/explanation of ...
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### Can stellar black holes cancel each other?

Hypothetical question: when a pair of identical stellar black holes are very close to one another wouldn't the side facing each other experience lower gravitational force? How is this logic un/sound?
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### Official Definition of Satellite?

So I had an argument with a friend, which was about whether the Moon is a planet or a satellite. IAU 2006 Resolution B5 gives definitions on what it is to be a planet, but there is a vagueness, as I ...
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### Problem with Dobsonian reflector telescope

I'm not sure whether I should ask this question here but I'll give it a shot. I have a XT8 Dobsonian Reflector telescope and it works fine. But recently when I use the focuser to focus the image when ...
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### How to calculate the moon phase [duplicate]

I need a way of to calculate the moon phase. Do you know resources for research the theory from behind this? I basically have searched in Google, but the results were not very satisfactory. Exists a ...
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### Planets and moons positions in cartesian coordinates?

Is there freely available and reliable source, where one can find positions of planets and moons of the Solar system at given time in cartesian coordinates? (I am writing a simple gravity simulator ...
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### Historical astronomical lunar tables

I hope this is the right place to ask this question, and I apologise if not. I've come across a date written in an old book, but it is written using what seems to be a lunar/zodiac system. Below is a ...
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### Energy required for light speed [closed]

It is said that in order for us to travel at the speed of light, there has to be an infinite amount of energy. Light is made up of photons but photons themselves do not have an infinite amount of ...
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### Is there a limit to how hot a star can be?

I think that size and mass do not correlate to temperature, but then again these factors contribute to the internal pressure. I would like to know if there is a limit to how hot a star can get and ...
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### How to calculate a planet's current position within the solar system

I'm making an application that needs to calculate a planet's current position within the solar system - I don't want to calculate its position in the sky. For example, what I want to do is exactly ...
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### What does the BinTableHDU store?

I'm just getting started with very primitive analysis of FITS data, and I have a 'raw' FITS file which I don't know how to get different wavebands of data from (if this is even possible). ...
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### what planet is the most radioactive?

So as I understand it the source of most geothermal energy on Earth is due to radioactive decay. Jupiter is the most massive planet but if the bulk of it's mass comes from gaseous elements instead of ...
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### Will the Sun rotate slower in red giant form?

When the Sun runs out of hydrogen to fuse it will grow bigger in size and my question is does it rotate more slowly, like a spinning ice skater extending their arms to reduce angular velocity? What ...
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### Why are radio telescopes shaped so differently than optical telescopes?

Why are radio telescopes typically only a dish with a receiver above it, while optical telescopes have a primary, plus secondary and sometimes even a tertiary mirror? In other words, why do radio ...
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### How long until the Earth and Moon become a binary planet?

With the rate at which the moon is further receding into a higher orbit, how long until the barycentre between us and the moon leaves the earth, and going by the IAUs 2006 definition update, we become ...
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### Are trojans in L5 more likely than in L4?

Mars has much more trojans in L5. Does it reflect a common pattern?
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### How has the Earth's orbit changed over hundreds of millions or billion of years?

First, I know that modeling orbital mechanics of 8 planets is hard, but there are some theories out there, for example, Jupiter is thought to have moved in towards the sun then started moving away. ...
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### Who invented the blink comparator?

The Wikipedia page for the blink comparator fails to mention who invented it. Many other pages extol the importance of the device, but we cannot find any mention of an inventor. Wikipedia does ...
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### How significant and accessible is modern Chinese astronomy?

Is China fully integrated in the international astronomical community, or does military secrecy and language problems and sanctions (ITAR) or something else stand in the way? Does China have valuable ...
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### Suns Orbital speed and escape velocity question

This is a homework question and I don't want an answer but just want to understand what its asking for. We are given that a star with a mass of x solar masses in ...
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### Semimajor axis variations in co-orbital moons

I've been playing with simulations of co-orbital bodies similar to Saturn's moons Janus & Epimetheus- horseshoe orbits where the two bodies are of comparable mass- and I'm seeing some very odd ...
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### Why is $g$ tied to the oscillator strength $f$ in $\log{gf}_{\odot}$

The $\log{gf}$ value of an element in a star, where $f$ is the oscillator strength, or probability of transition in an atom, is a scientifically pursued quantity with relation to the model atmosphere ...
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### How small would you have to crush an object for it to become a black hole?

I was wondering how much you had to crush an object for it to become a black hole. Recently I learned that anything could become a black hole (even you) if it were crushed down small enough, for ...
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### What will the last days of Earth be like?

The sun is a main-sequence star; as I understand it the sun will expand into a red giant in a few billion years. I have heard conflicting reports of what this entails - some sources I found say the ...
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### Are stars NML Cygni, UY Scuti, VY Canis Majoris and VV Cephei near the ends of their lives?

Are the four stars mentioned in the title stars that are going to go supernova, or are they stars that are in mid-life, like our Sun, but just happen to be so much larger than our Sun?
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### Could martian meteorites come from Olympus Mons?

Could Olympus Mons have thrown ejecta out of Mars' orbit when it was active? Does it fit with the composition and dating of meteorites with martian origin?
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### How to tell a crater is old or not?

Based on Wikipedia, we can estimate the age of a planet's surface. How to tell a particular crater is newly formed or not? It may have sharp edge. Different astronomical objects may have different ...
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### about H$_\alpha$ and H$_\beta$ lines in astronomical objects' spectra

Generally there may be some line ratio between the two lines. If H$\alpha$ is strong, it is quite possible we can see H$_\beta$ too. Is it possible we can see H$_\beta$, but can not see H$_\alpha$? ...
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### Where to get Polaris Right ascension value from

To calculate for example the polaris hour angle I use this formula to calculate polaris hour angle. τ = θ - α τ= hour angle θ= sideral time α= polaris RA (~ 2h32m) But where does the α=2h32m come ...
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### Could the James Webb Space Telescope detect biosignals on exoplanets?

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) which is slated to launch in 2018 will bring us a better view of exoplanets, but will it be sufficient to detect signs of life on at least some of those worlds? ...
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### How to run MOOG on OS X Yosemite

By what process can a user running the latest version of OS X Yosemite execute MOOG with \$MOOG in bash? Due to the removal of 32bit libraries in OS X 10.7+, the ...
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### What is the axial tilt of a planet measured relative to?

I am very much a beginner on the astronomy front but I understand about planets having different axial tilts, hence why Venus turns the opposite direction from the Earth and Uranus turns sideways. ...
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### Why doesn't the Moonrise appear red when viewed from orbit?

After searching through many videos, I finally found one that shows, from the perspective of low earth orbit, the Moon transiting the horizon. It is actually a Moonset, but it shouldn't make a ...
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### Why was Pluto's resonance not discovered until 1965?

Over here, I was shocked to learn: The Neptune–Pluto system lies in a 3:2 orbital resonance. C.J. Cohen and E.C. Hubbard at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division discovered this in ...