Page 1 of 1 [ 14 posts ] 


Favorite Space Object(s)?
Star 13%  13%  [ 4 ]
Rocky Planet 16%  16%  [ 5 ]
Asteroid 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
Comet 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
Moon 6%  6%  [ 2 ]
Gas Giant Planet 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
White Dwarf 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Neutron Star/Pulsar/Magnetar 22%  22%  [ 7 ]
Black Hole 16%  16%  [ 5 ]
Nebula/Planetary Nebula/Supernova Remnant 9%  9%  [ 3 ]
Spiral Galaxy 6%  6%  [ 2 ]
Elliptical Galaxy 0%  0%  [ 0 ]
Irregular Galaxy 3%  3%  [ 1 ]
Total votes : 32

epiccolton26
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 25 Jan 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 134
Location: Deimos Anomaly

25 Mar 2015, 3:46 pm

What's your favorite space object?

My favorite objects: Black holes and Neutron stars.

Reasons: There's just something mystifying and intriguing about these zombie corpses of dead stars that have long exploded into oblivion in a brilliant supernova, particularly black holes and their capabilities of bending the laws of physics.



Fnord
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 May 2008
Gender: Male
Posts: 60,953
Location:      

25 Mar 2015, 8:01 pm

Rocky planets, because that's where we are most likely to find life-forms similar to the ones we already know (in my opinion, of course).



epiccolton26
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 25 Jan 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 134
Location: Deimos Anomaly

25 Mar 2015, 8:19 pm

Yeah. I often read up on the news regarding our search for the right planet that can support carbon-based lifeforms like us. This planet will only be around for so long, even if we do put our ecological conservation methods to the max potential (i.e. recycling, saving power, etc.)



starkid
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 9 Feb 2012
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,812
Location: California Bay Area

25 Mar 2015, 9:31 pm

I like black holes because I like to think about them destroying human beings who fly into or near them. Also, large stars because I like to think about iron in the plasma state.



slave
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 28 Feb 2012
Age: 113
Gender: Male
Posts: 4,420
Location: Dystopia Planetia

26 Mar 2015, 2:05 am

Magnetars!

they are so extraordinary in every respect

they excite my mind :nerdy: :nerdy: :nerdy: :nerdy: :nerdy: :nerdy:



cberg
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 31 Dec 2011
Gender: Male
Posts: 12,183
Location: A swiftly tilting planet

26 Mar 2015, 2:18 am

Pulsars, Neutron stars & spiral galaxies; I see neutrinos as the best way of obtaining a firsthand spatial perspective of the universe and all the physical relations within it. Spiral galaxies deviate somewhat from this system of reasoning due to the gravity waves traversing their arms.


_________________
"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos :mrgreen:


epiccolton26
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 25 Jan 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 134
Location: Deimos Anomaly

26 Mar 2015, 10:15 am

Magnetars are pretty powerful neutron stars, considering they have a magnetic field capable of sucking all the iron out of your blood from 100 miles (161 kilometers), leaving your body in a frozen mess of distorted gore. 8O



naturalplastic
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 26 Aug 2010
Age: 71
Gender: Male
Posts: 35,189
Location: temperate zone

26 Mar 2015, 11:57 am

Each of the listed objects are cool.

But my favorite current obsession is not listed.

My current favorite objects are "brown dwarfs".

Brown dwarfs are theoretical objects that are larger than gas giants (the biggest kind of known planet), but smaller than dwarf stars. Gas giants are built more like the sun than like the earth. And the ones in our solar system even generate and radiate modest amounts of heat (though its generated via chemical means, and not via nuclear nuclear fushion).

Brown dwarfs, if they exist, would also emit heat (via infrared light) but would be below the threshold to be massive enough to have nuclear fushion . Thus they would be intermediate in both mass, and in 'behavior', between gas giants and small true stars.

Like black holes brown dwarfs are known to exist only in theory. But also like black holes there are odd objects astronomers have found in space that are strong contenders to be actual specimens.



Adamantium
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2013
Age: 1026
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,863
Location: Erehwon

26 Mar 2015, 12:12 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Each of the listed objects are cool.

But my favorite current obsession is not listed.

My current favorite objects are "brown dwarfs".

Brown dwarfs are theoretical objects that are larger than gas giants (the biggest kind of known planet), but smaller than dwarf stars. Gas giants are built more like the sun than like the earth. And the ones in our solar system even generate and radiate modest amounts of heat (though its generated via chemical means, and not via nuclear nuclear fushion).

Brown dwarfs, if they exist, would also emit heat (via infrared light) but would be below the threshold to be massive enough to have nuclear fushion . Thus they would be intermediate in both mass, and in 'behavior', between gas giants and small true stars.

Like black holes brown dwarfs are known to exist only in theory. But also like black holes there are odd objects astronomers have found in space that are strong contenders to be actual specimens.


I am with you on this, but I think the idea that brown dwarfs are theoretical is out of date.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_brown_dwarfs

The ones on the confirmed list are pretty sure.

I have a wonderful app on my iphone called "exoplanet" that gives me notifications for every extrasolar planet candidate and confirmed discovery as their discovery is made public. It also lists quite a few brown dwarfs and sometimes refinements to calculations put a former suspected jovian exoplanet into the brown dwarf mass range.

That said, I am a big fan of planets and galaxies.. it's very hard to pick favorites. I like instabilities so complicated atmospheres, supernova remnants, quasars (love those jets!), black holes, and regions of active star formation have a special appeal.



slave
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 28 Feb 2012
Age: 113
Gender: Male
Posts: 4,420
Location: Dystopia Planetia

26 Mar 2015, 2:43 pm

Would it be accurate to think of gas(Hydrogen) planets on a continuum WITH stars??

Gas planets being collections of gas that never reached the mass required for fusion to occur.
Stars being gas giant planets that became massive enough for fusion to occur.



Adamantium
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2013
Age: 1026
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,863
Location: Erehwon

26 Mar 2015, 2:57 pm

slave wrote:
Would it be accurate to think of gas(Hydrogen) planets on a continuum WITH stars??

Gas planets being collections of gas that never reached the mass required for fusion to occur.
Stars being gas giant planets that became massive enough for fusion to occur.


It is correct, surely?

http://exoplanets.org/methodology.html

Quote:
The definition of "planet" is somewhat contentious. The IAU has defined the term "planet" for objects orbiting the Sun in terms of gravitational properties: massive enough for gravity to force it into a spheroidal shape, and to be the dominant gravitational object in its orbit. Asteroids share similar orbits, and so are not planets; Pluto shares part of its orbit with much larger Neptune. Not all astronomers agree with this definition, but it is "official".

Outside the Solar System, there is no formal definition.

Many astronomers feel that an object is a planet if it formed like the planets in our Solar System (i.e., from a bottom-up process in a disk of material around the young Sun). There may be other ways to form planets, though (from gravitational instabilities of said disks, or, "top down"), and we can rarely (if ever) tell how planets formed, so this definition is not that useful, in practice.

Ignoring formation mechanisms (and composition), one can also set up a mass spectrum from low to high: asteroid, dwarf planet, planet, brown dwarf, star. We cannot yet detect things much smaller than planets, so the relevant boundary to define is between planets and brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are basically low-mass stars, and so may have fundamentally different formation mechanisms than planets, but probably have signifacnt mass overlap with them (that is, the smallest brown dwarfs are less massive than the largest planets).

The IAU recommended a boundary at 13 Jupiter masses, that being roughly the mass at which a solar composition brown dwarf can just, briefly, fuse deuterium in its core. This recommendation also stated that "free-floating" exoplanets be called "sub-brown dwarfs".

So it's complicated. Basically, an exoplanet is a planet that orbits another star. We use a cutoff of 24 Jupiter masses to be on the safe (inclusive) side.


You can quibble over the exact thresholds, but somewhere around 13-15 Jupiter masses gets you a brown dwarf. Somewhere around 87 jupiter masses gets you a star.



epiccolton26
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 25 Jan 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 134
Location: Deimos Anomaly

26 Mar 2015, 2:58 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
Each of the listed objects are cool.

But my favorite current obsession is not listed.

My current favorite objects are "brown dwarfs".

Brown dwarfs are theoretical objects that are larger than gas giants (the biggest kind of known planet), but smaller than dwarf stars. Gas giants are built more like the sun than like the earth. And the ones in our solar system even generate and radiate modest amounts of heat (though its generated via chemical means, and not via nuclear nuclear fushion).

Brown dwarfs, if they exist, would also emit heat (via infrared light) but would be below the threshold to be massive enough to have nuclear fushion . Thus they would be intermediate in both mass, and in 'behavior', between gas giants and small true stars.

Like black holes brown dwarfs are known to exist only in theory. But also like black holes there are odd objects astronomers have found in space that are strong contenders to be actual specimens.


I was initially going to add Brown Dwarves, but I wasn't sure if they could be an object of their own. I'll add it to the poll options, though.



Adamantium
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 6 Feb 2013
Age: 1026
Gender: Female
Posts: 5,863
Location: Erehwon

26 Mar 2015, 3:00 pm

I vote to add a slot for KBOs, too. If there had been one, I would have given them a vote.



epiccolton26
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl

User avatar

Joined: 25 Jan 2014
Gender: Male
Posts: 134
Location: Deimos Anomaly

26 Mar 2015, 3:48 pm

I'd like to add them. Unfortunately, though, I can't seem to figure out how to edit a poll and the original thread.