Unruled Notebook

Below is a NASA image of the Space Shuttle Atlantis’s cockpit, taken in March 2000 during mission STS-101. Can you spot why it should be a fake.

Because, when the cabin lights are on, the camera should click real fast else the cabin light gets overexposed; if this is so, then the stars in the window wouldn’t be captured in the picture; also, the overhanging Earth should have been real bright, rendering the stars invisible.

The image is a composite made with an image editing software. The wikipedia page for this image does say that, so NASA is not to be blamed.

[via a bad astronomy spoof]

Largest known diamond is Lucy, a white dwarf in Centaurus. Discovered in 2004,

[It] is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.

“It’s the mother of all diamonds!” says Metcalfe. “Some people refer to it as ‘Lucy’ in a tribute to the Beatles song ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.’”

[...]

The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

[...]

The white dwarf studied by Metcalfe, Montgomery, and Antonio Kanaan (UFSC Brazil), is not only radiant but also harmonious. It rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations.

“By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth. We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy’s largest diamond,” says Metcalfe.