For the other Astronuts out there

The fun thing about "He Who Shrank" is that if he had first landed on a different atom in his universe he would have gone down a different road. Each atom contains an infinite number of universes in this scenario. I won't argue one way or the other on that. "That way lies madness." (Not that I'm against insanity, I volunteered for three tours in 'Nam.)

 

How about if the shrinker avoids planets and just keeps shrinking? See ya at the other end of infinity.

 

The Leo Trio​

Image Credit & Copyright: Steve Cannistra​

Explanation: This popular group leaps into the early evening sky around the March equinox and the northern hemisphere spring. Famous as the Leo Triplet, the three magnificent galaxies found in the prominent constellation Leo gather here in one astronomical field of view. Crowd pleasers when imaged with even modest telescopes, they can be introduced individually as NGC 3628 (left), M66 (bottom right), and M65 (top). All three are large spiral galaxies but tend to look dissimilar, because their galactic disks are tilted at different angles to our line of sight. NGC 3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy, is temptingly seen edge-on, with obscuring dust lanes cutting across its puffy galactic plane. The disks of M66 and M65 are both inclined enough to show off their spiral structure. Gravitational interactions between galaxies in the group have left telltale signs, including the tidal tails and warped, inflated disk of NGC 3628 and the drawn out spiral arms of M66. This gorgeous view of the region spans over 1 degree (two full moons) on the sky in a frame that covers over half a million light-years at the trio's estimated distance of 30 million light-years.
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Tomorrow's picture: pixels in space​

 

It's atomic number would change if anything was added to the nucleus. The electrons don't mass enough to matter. U-238 + one proton = U-239.

 

Remember that the "238" is the atomic weight. Adding an electron won't change that noticeably.

 

Phobos: Moon over Mars​

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Zolt Levay (STScI) - Acknowledgment: J.Bell (ASU) and M.Wolff (SSI)​

Explanation: A tiny moon with a scary name, Phobos emerges from behind the Red Planet in this timelapse sequence from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Over 22 minutes the 13 separate exposures were captured near the 2016 closest approach of Mars to planet Earth. Martians have to look to the west to watch Phobos rise, though. The small moon is closer to its parent planet than any other moon in the Solar System, about 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) above the Martian surface. It completes one orbit in just 7 hours and 39 minutes. That's faster than a Mars rotation, which corresponds to about 24 hours and 40 minutes. So on Mars, Phobos can be seen to rise above the western horizon 3 times a day. Still, Phobos is doomed.
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Tomorrow's picture: Ares 3 Landing Site​

 

So, is Phobos a relatively recent capture?

 

I lost all knowledge of atomic structures and such soon after high school. Not that I ever attained much if any in the first place. It's probably still in there just loose bits of quantum energy floating around the black hole in the center of my brain.
In "He Who Shrank" I just take the simple route and see a metaphor for trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

 

Speculative fiction (what-if-ing) can be interesting, I agree.

 

Ares 3 Landing Site: The Martian Revisited
HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

Explanation: This close-up from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera shows weathered craters and windblown deposits in southern Acidalia Planitia. A striking shade of blue in standard HiRISE image colors, to the human eye the area would probably look grey or a little reddish. But human eyes have not gazed across this terrain, unless you count the eyes of NASA astronauts in the scifi novel The Martian by Andy Weir. The novel chronicles the adventures of Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded at the fictional Mars mission Ares 3 landing site corresponding to the coordinates of this cropped HiRISE frame. For scale Watney's 6-meter-diameter habitat at the site would be about 1/10th the diameter of the large crater. Of course, the Ares 3 landing coordinates are only about 800 kilometers north of the (real life) Carl Sagan Memorial Station, the 1997 Pathfinder landing site.
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Tomorrow's picture: looking back​

 

Atomic physics is somewhat simplified if you think of our solar system as an atom. ALL of the junk floating around the Sun doesn't amount to much compared to the star itself.

 

Ahh, Dark Matter. That which is among/between the galaxies separates all (somehow) .

 

Dark matter doesn't react with anything we know of at this time. No detectors, no lens, no nothing. People are working on it, no guarantees we'll ever understand it of course. Some day we might met other intelligences. That's when we may find out how much we don't know about the universe. I know humans will keep trying, it's what we do. We could have stayed in Olduvai Gorge, but we didn't.

Derail: I read a story about humans traveling around the Milky Way, clockwise, looking for other intelligent life. Halfway round they met other, very humanlike, but not exactly. The two groups exchanged DNA samples and found that both came from the same source, Earth. Instead of giving up on the search they just looked at the nearest galaxy, Andromeda. They weren't giving up.

 

Scientists admit they don't know everything. It would be boring it they did. Einstein dismissed his "Cosmological Constant" because he could prove it. They're on the road to proving it now. Or disproving it. The universe is like that.

 

When you consider our view of the Universe is only seen by peaking through that tiny speck of observable Suns there's a lot we'll never see.

 

Look up "The Hubble Deep Field".

 

Sonified: The Jellyfish Nebula Supernova Remnant​

Image Credit: X-ray (blue): Chandra (NASA) & ROSAT (ESA); Optical (red): DSS (NSF); Radio (green): VLA (NRAO, NSF); Sonification: NASA, CXC, SAO, K. Arcand; SYSTEM Sounds: M. Russo, A. Santaguida)​

Explanation: What does a supernova remnant sound like? Although sound is a compression wave in matter and does not carry into empty space, interpretive sound can help listeners appreciate and understand a visual image of a supernova remnant in a new way. Recently, the Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443) has been sonified quite creatively. In the featured sound-enhanced video, when an imaginary line passes over a star, the sound of a drop falling into water is played, a sound particularly relevant to the nebula's aquatic namesake. Additionally, when the descending line crosses gas that glows red, a low tone is played, while green sounds a middle tone, and blue produces a tone with a relatively high pitch. Light from the supernova that created the Jellyfish Nebula left approximately 35,000 years ago, when humanity was in the stone age. The nebula will slowly disperse over the next million years, although the explosion also created a dense neutron star which will remain indefinitely.
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Tomorrow's picture: comet tails​