Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/astonishing-x-ray-image-of-the.html
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6 Likes
My God it’s full of dead stars!
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I know. I see Dead Stars. Too.
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Yes, but where are the bones? It’s an X-ray, right?
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Just constellate over with the shape of the animal having such long thin bones.
(NB: May have trouble sleeping at night).
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I imagine a kind of basket star.
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Not to be a buzzkill, but all those beautiful arcs in the sky are just from them leaving the shutter open (as it were) while they slew from target to target. Remove the arcs and the picture becomes quite a bit less interesting (to me at least!)
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Thanks for the explanation. I was trying to figure out what I was looking at; that makes a lot more sense than any of the explanations I was able to come up with.
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Aha. So a fractal basket star then. Clearly a buzz which needed despatching.
Mercator sux. Always.
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Wow, I see them too.
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With a lot more orbits, won’t it fill in all the gaps, providing an x-ray image of the entire sky?
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I feel that NASA did a poor job of explaining this, and was even misleading.
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THANK YOU. I was about to ask since there’s no way celestial objects should appear as intact arcs like that.
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At between 5000 to 8000 years old I wonder if archeologists have found any mention of this in past civilizations? Maybe not the sort of thing that would make into observations that were set in stone but surely would have caused some excitement.
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Each arc is an x-ray source that is smeared across the image; it actually obscures that part of the sky. It’s like Pablo here - if he did it long enough the whole picture would just be white.
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Seeing the segment of a worldlines of collapsed stars is pretty metal to me. (pun intended)
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“It’s like shining a black light on the hotel room of the universe…”
– gross astrophysicist no one wants to work with anymore
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