# Tag Info

30

You are correct. The Earth would always appear in approximately the same location in the sky, when viewed from a point on the lunar surface. And it would be seen to spin, the continents coming in and out of view over the course of an Earth day (24 hours). The sun would make it's way across the sky, from one horizon to the other over a period of about two ...

25

Brown and Batygin, the authors of the paper on the possible planet, have a webpage addressing this. A few reasons not already covered: It moves quite slowly - the authors estimate 0.2-0.6 arc seconds per hour - so standard surveys may not notice the movement and fail to recognize it as a solar system object. Eris, which is the most distant confirmed ...

19

Still new at stellarium but here are some quick capture gif lasting one month. Sorry about the quality- limited to 256 colors for smaller gifs. Date on lower left corner. By the way the sun is of course the brightest and i use it as reference for recording (start record when sun is in frame then stop when it appears again in the same position which is ...

18

One way to answer would be to consider the brightest star in our sky (other than the Sun), which is Sirius. Then determine how far you would have to be from our Sun for it to be as bright as Sirius is from here. That turns out to be 1.8 light years. That's not even halfway to the nearest star, so if you're in any other star system, then our Sun is just ...

18

This graph from XKCD says a lot about why that is the case The bottom line is, the 9th planet is too small to be detected through WISE, and too far/small to have been detected through visible observation. Most likely this hypothetical planet is a long ways away, possibly as far as 1200 AU, and not particularly large, making it difficult to see. WISE was ...

17

Surely if you stared long enough, the light from them would eventually hit your eye? Collecting light over a long span of time is how telescopes can see very dim objects. The human visual system doesn't work that way. For one thing, even when you think you are staring at something, your eyes still dance around a bit. It's a built-in response called ...

17

Yes and here's a video of "a Giant Comet Hitting the Sun": The impact occurred sometime during May 10-11, 2011. The comet was not named but believed to be a member of the Kreutz family of comets Many close calls Before this spectacular plunge we had witnessed several other comets graze (come close without hitting) the ...

16

There are many normal methods that we use to detect exoplanets, but none of them work well in the case of the 9th planet. Here are some of the main ones. Radial velocity. The Sun is not moving significantly with respect to Earth, and the hypothetical planet is too far away from the Sun to have much of an impact. Transit. This is obviously impossible, as ...

14

To add to Mark Bailey's answer; the Earth would indeed hang in the sky and rotate, but it would also wax and wane over the course of a lunar day (27.3 Earth-days). Starting at lunar dawn, the Earth would be half-full. The Earth would then wane (more shadow) towards lunar noon. At lunar noon, the Earth would be all in shadow (New Earth) and quite close to ...

13

A lot of satellites are visible under the right conditions. Usually up to 2 hours after sunset and 2 hours before sunrise. This allows the sun to strike the satellite when you are on the dark side. Depending on the orbit, it will take between 1 and 5 minutes to traverse most of the sky. Usually, they will enter the shadow and you lose sight of them.

12

As Mark Adler mentioned, the best way is to compare the brightness to other nearby stars. I'm going to assume that you have instantaneous travel time, and also take into account that you are actually getting closer to stars depending on the direction you go. I'm using this table from Wikipedia. I'm going to go no further on the list than Sirius, and assume ...

12

You could confirm with taking an image of the star trails. They would form a circle with the apparent center at the zenith of the location. You do not need a pole star at all. Just a night of viewing. You would also be able to tell based on the height above the horizon that the sun is. On the equinox, the sun would be on the horizon at noon (when it is ...

12

Not at all a dumb question, but actually you can see distant galaxies with the naked eye. From the northern hemisphere, the Andromeda Galaxy, our biggest neighboring galaxy, is visible if you know where to look, and is at a reasonably dark place. From the southern hemisphere, the two smaller, but nearer, irregular galaxies called the Small and Large ...

12

The term "color" is a label that humans have assigned to denote the ratio between the intensity at various wavelengths in the three different wavelength bands, or regions, that the human eye is able to perceive. These bands are centered roughly at 430, 545, and 570 nm, but are quite broad and even overlap: Human cone response, normalized to the same ...

11

Key factors: How close is perihelion? Too close and it may be destroyed on its first pass. We know Halley's Comet, which has a perihelion of about 0.6AU, has been orbiting for over 2000 years, passing the sun every 74-76 years and is still going strong. How big is it? Every pass loses material, so a bigger comet could last longer. What is its composition? ...

11

Two basic conditions need to be met for anyone on the globe to observe the International Space Station (ISS) from any location: ISS needs to pass roughly overhead of your location, and it needs to do that during night so it's visible to the naked eye Now, obviously there are other requirements, like e.g. weather (if it's overcast we won't be able to see ...

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Tl;DR Detection via polarized light - Antimatter interaction with polarized light could be detected by vector rotation; We're mostly sure, because absence of gamma rays and characteristic Faraday polarization indicates absence of observable antimatter in meaningful amounts. Long answer I do believe @userLTK to be correct on his comment. To my limited ...

9

The real reasoning has nothing to do with some civilization "deliberately" hiding its radio emissions. Rather, the problem is that we can not expect some other civilization to do something we would not do ourselves. It makes no sense whatsoever to radiate large amounts of energy into space when there exist other, more economical alternatives. Radio ...

8

(Source, Wikipedia Commons) The moon is generally called a "Harvest Moon" when it appears that way (i.e. large and red) in autumn, amongst a few other names. There are other names that are associated with specific timeframes as well. The colour is due to atmospheric scattering (Also known as Rayleigh scattering): may have noticed that they always ...

8

In your friends picture are more artifacts than the one you showed in the 2nd picture a little bigger. I marked more of them in the picture below. They are all in a perfect line to the bright light. So these artifacts are caused by the bright light and the lens of the camera. A lens is not flat it's, well lenticular (it's where the name came from). The ...

8

Those are model calculations, which hint to the existence of a possible body of about 10-times the mass of Earth. Calling this a discovery would clearly be premature. The confidence level is just a little above the "evidence" level of 3 sigma, under the assumption, that the discoveries of the KBO objects leading to the inference aren't observationally ...

8

The possible planet 9 is thought to be about 10 Earth masses and is unlikely to be a gas giant (it may be the core of an "interrupted" gas giant). As such, it will not be generating significant luminosity itself and would be rocky, or more likely, icy in character. It would thus only be seen by reflected light. The considerations for what wavelength to ...

7

Your guess was correct. It is the Andromeda Galaxy, M31. Here is a map of the part of the sky near zenith at the place and time you provided: Sky map for Taganrog, Russia on 11/23/2013 5:00:00 PM UTC. Even the rotation is small. The sky map is rotated approximately 30° counter clockwise relative to the photo. You were approximately facing south when taking ...

7

Here's an answer I wrote for a question on Space.SE, but which applies equally well here. Let's talk about the Hubble space telescope, which would be much better at observing these comets than any ground telescope: From astroengine.com Using the equation: (d / D) × c = φ where d is the diameter of the Oort Cloud comet (some estimates put this ...

7

Your question is too general, you need to get to specific examples. First, very few neutron stars are pulsars. Pulsars are either a brief phase during a pulsar's spin-down at the start of a neutron star's life, or they are the product of the spin-up of a neutron star in a binary system. Most neutron stars fall in neither of these categories. A standard ...

7

Possible reasons that the planet has not been picked up previously: It's not there. Photographic proper motion surveys cover the whoke sky. To avoid these planet 9 would have to be fainter than about 18th or 19th magnitude. This puts a lower bound in the size/albedo/distance combination for any planet 9. The proposed planet could easily be fainter than ...

6

As for projecting the Sun onto a screen at a low cost, I would recommend starting with a ~50-200$sunspotter box, which is basically a lens mounted on a wooden box, that projects the sun onto a white piece of card. The advantage of using a telescope is that it can be programmed to track the Sun, so that if you want to trace sunspots, for instance, you can do ... 6 Because there are so many planets out there! There just happens to be an entire web page dedicated to calculating that answer. Transits can only be detected if the planetary orbit is near the line-of-sight (LOS) between the observer and the star. This requires that the planet's orbital pole be within an angle of$d_*/a\$ (part 1 of the figure below) ...

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