Yes, Astronomy, YES!

theweekmagazine:

An engineer for the space exploration company SpaceX has outlined an elaborate plan to build Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, which he says could be ready to fly within the next 20 years.

“We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship… so let’s do it,” writes BTE Dan on his website, BuildTheEnterprise.org (which has been loading intermittently because of heavy traffic). 

The website includes conceptual blueprints, budgeting proposals, a timeline for research and development, and almost every other conceivable detail.

Could they actually pull this off?

expose-the-light:

Pink Opaque

An extraordinary outburst produced by a black hole in a nearby galaxy has provided direct evidence for a population of old, volatile stellar black holes. The discovery, made by astronomers using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, provides new insight into the nature of a mysterious class of black holes that can produce as much energy in X-rays as a million suns radiate at all wavelengths.

Researchers used Chandra to discover a new ultraluminous X-ray source, or ULX. These objects give off more X-rays than most binary systems, in which a companion star orbits the remains of a collapsed star. These collapsed stars form either a dense core called a neutron star or a black hole. The extra X-ray emission suggests ULXs contain black holes that might be much more massive than the ones found elsewhere in our galaxy.

A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy really is just next door as large galaxies go. So close, and spanning some 260,000 light-years, it took 11 different image fields from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite’s telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light. While its spiral arms stand out in visible light images of Andromeda (also known as M31), the arms look more like rings in the GALEX ultraviolet view, dominated by hot, young, massive stars. As sites of intense star formation, the rings have been interpreted as evidence Andromeda collided with its smaller neighboring elliptical galaxy M32 more than 200 million years ago. The large Andromeda galaxy and our own Milky Way are the dominant members of the local galaxy group.

The dusty golden glow of the planetary nebula known as Sharpless 2-71 is seen in a newly released picture from the Gemini North observatory in Hawaii.

Although the nebula was discovered in 1946, astronomers are still debating which star created the complex cloud of dust and gas. Some hold that the bright star at the center of the object is the one that shed shells of material as it swelled and died, forming the nebula.

But the central star doesn’t appear to radiate the right amounts of high-energy light to cause the surrounding gas to glow as intensely as we see today. This led other experts to suspect that a dimmer, bluer star—which does pump out enough high-energy radiation—might be the nebula’s true parent.

A newly released image from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) shows the ultraviolet glow of the Helix nebula, also called NGC 7293.

The object is what’s known as a planetary nebula, which is made from the gas and dust left over after a sunlike star dies. The dense core of the star, called a white dwarf, sits at the center of this eerie cosmic “eye.”

The largest, most violent star forming region known in the whole Local Group of galaxies lies in our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Were the Tarantula Nebula at the distance of the Orion Nebula — a local star forming region — it would take up fully half the sky. Also called 30 Doradus, the red and pink gas indicates a massive emission nebula, although supernova remnants and dark nebula also exist there. The bright knot of stars left of center is called R136 and contains many of the most massive, hottest, and brightest stars known. The above image is one of the largest mosaics ever created by observations of the Hubble Space Telescope and has revealed unprecedented details of this enigmatic star forming region. The image is being released to celebrate the 22nd anniversary of Hubble’s launch.

What’s that past Dione? When making its closest pass yet of Saturn’s moon Dione late last year, the robotic Cassini spacecraft snapped this far-ranging picture featuring Dione, Saturn’s rings, and the two small moons Epimetheus and Prometheus. The above image captures part of the heavily cratered snow-white surface of the 1,100 kilometer wide Dione, the thinness of Saturn’s rings, and the comparative darkness of the smaller moon Epimetheus. The image was taken when Cassini was only about 100,000 kilometers from the large icy moon. Future events in Cassini’s continuing exploration of Saturn and its moons include tomorrow’s flyby of Titan and imaging the distant Earth passing behind Saturn in June.

Crater, or peak?

This black-and-white mosaic is one part of a stereo pair captured recently by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Scientists use such pictures to create 3-D models of the moon’s surface.

The resulting images help make it clear that this feature is a depression—a relatively young, unnamed impact crater that’s 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) wide.

Astronaut Don Pettit recently created this psychedelic scene using a stationary camera aboard the International Space Station, about 240 miles (386 kilometers) above Earth.

The digital composite includes 18 images stacked together to show star trails wheeling through Earth’s “airglow”—light spawned by various chemical interactions in the upper atmosphere.