* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Just for Fun

Blobrana · L

What is the longest natural arch in the world?

Spoiler: The Fairy Bridge in Guangxi, China has a span of about 295 feet.
A close second (?) is Landscape Arch in Arches National Park which has a span of 290 feet.

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How Much Uranium is in the Solar System?

Spoiler: There is 6 x 10^14 tons of Uranium. An estimate of 600 trillion tons or 12 times the amount in the earth's crust for Uranium in the solar system (not including that in the Sun).

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What is the oldest known planet?

Spoiler: PSR B1620-26 b is an extrasolar planet located approximately 12,400 light-years away, near to the Messier 4 globular cluster in the constellation of Scorpius.
The exoplanet has a circumbinary orbit around a pair of stars: a pulsar (PSR B1620-26 A) and a white dwarf (WD B1620-26) with a mass of 0.34 solar masses.
The planet (with an unofficial nickname "Methuselah") is the oldest known extrasolar planet, and is believed to be about 12.7 billion years old.

Hubble Helps Confirm Oldest Known Planet

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Position(2000): RA 16h 23m 38s, Dec -26° 31' 53"

Blobrana · L

What were the last words spoken on the moon?

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Where is the longest mountain chain on Earth?

Spoiler: The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a divergent tectonic plate boundary located along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, and the longest mountain range in the world.

Blobrana · L

Currently, where are the world's only equatorial glaciers?

Spoiler: Mt. Cotopaxi at 5,897m in Ecuador; Puncak Jaya, at 4,884m, in the western half of the island of New Guinea and the eastern most province of the Republic of Indonesia and the Rwenzori Mountains that straddle the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Uganda, currently support the only glaciers on the equator.

Blobrana · L

What's the farthest visible naked-eye star?

Spoiler: The semi-regular pulsating star V762 Cassiopeiae (HIP 5926, HD 7389) in Cassiopeia at a distance of over 15000 light-years is probably the furthest visible naked-eye star.

Visual magnitude: 5.927 (max), 6.02 (min)
Spectral Type: K1V
p = 0.00022 ± 0.00059

Position(2000): RA 01 16 11.8988, Dec +71 44 37.833

However, for a brief moment in time at around 6:12 UT, March 19 2008, a gigantic stellar explosion, called GRB 080319B, reached magnitude 5.8 and became the furthest object visible with the naked eye.
GRB 080319B had a redshift of 0.94 which translates to a distance of 7.5 billion light-years away. The explosions optical afterglow was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded.

Blobrana · L

What is the most distant known object in the Universe?

Spoiler: Gamma-Ray Burst 090423 with a redshift of 8.2 is officially the oldest and most distant known object in the Universe.
GRB 090423 exploded about 600 million years after the Big Bang.
The object replaces the previous record holder, GRB 080913, with a redshift of 6.7 (placing it 800 million yeas after the big bang).
Another distant object, a galaxy called I0K-1 was confirmed spectroscopically with a redshift of 6.964. The galaxy lies so far away that astronomers are seeing it as it appeared 12.88 billion years ago.

Blobrana · L

How big is the Universe?

Spoiler: The short answer is that we don't know. No one knows if the universe is infinitely large, or if our universe is the only one that exists. But, when we ask this question, we usually mean the size of the observable universe. Through observation, we know that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, and that space in the universe is expanding; and this expansion has greatly added to the overall width of the Universe (Because space-time is not static, it is a common misconception that the radius of the observable universe must therefore be only 13.7 billion light-years).
The edge of the observable universe is now located about 46.5 billion light-years away. The overall diameter of the observable universe is 93 billion light-years across.

How big is the Universe?

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