"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number.
But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national
deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should
call them economical numbers."

Richard Feynman

Mark your calendars!There’s a new comet coming that’s brighter than even the full moon!

A new comet has been discovered that is predicted to blaze incredibly brilliantly in the skies on 28 November 2013; current predictions are of an object that will dazzle the eye at up to magnitude —16. That’s far brighter than the full Moon. If predictions hold true then C/2012 S1 will certainly be one of the greatest comets in human history, far outshining the memorable Comet Hale-Bopp of 1997 and very likely to outdo the long-awaited Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4) which is set to stun in March 2013.

parislemon:

buzzfeed:

This is what it would look like if Jupiter was as close to Earth as the moon is.

I don’t know why this terrifies me, but it does. Maybe because of Melancholia.

Would be cool for a while I think.

Measuring Supernovae with “Foe”

From the Department of Mind-shattering Facts comes this gem:

A foe is a unit of energy equal to 10⁴⁴joules or 10⁵¹ergs, used to measure the large amount of energy produced by a supernova. The word is an acronym derived from the phrase [ten to the power of] fifty-one ergs.

If 10⁵¹ hasn’t made you faint, get this — all the energy the sun has, is and will ever produce throughout its entire lifetime of 10 billion years is 1 foe. A supernova puts out 1 foe of energy, the equivalent of our sun, every few seconds. By the time you finish this sentence, a supernova somewhere just ejected four to five suns.

What happened just before the big bang?

“The big foreplay.” — Anon.

Measuring the Universe

smithsonianmag:

Stunning Star Trail Photographs from International Space Station

NASA astronaut Don Pettit recently uploaded a gallery of photos to the Johnson Space Center’s Flickr page. Pettit on how he captured these amazing images:

“My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, the ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”

Ed note: Here are the Hubble Space Telescope’s finest photos.

h/t Twisted Sifter

A star half a million times the mass of our sun was torn apart by a black hole. Let’s put that in perspective.

I just finished reading this piece that absolutely blew my mind by the scale of the events that happened. As an exercise, I made an attempt to visualize just how large a scale we are talking about here…

Each dot is the Sun and all the dots put together form the mass of the star that was torn apart by the black hole… dayum, that’s one hell of a black hole right there.

But the mind-blowing action doesn’t stop there. They measured the brightness of this star as it was getting torn apart peaking at 4 trillion times brighter than the Sun, but even then it’s not even a blip in the cosmic radar…

Holy shit.