Dave Payne's Astrophotography & Interpretation – APRealSpace

Explore Dave Payne's Astrophotography, showcasing stunning images and insights into astronomy, star formation, galaxies, and more.

Star Formation

A Galaxy of Dynamic Gases

The success of n-body numerical simulation to predict the motion of planets and stars cannot be denied. At the same time, the erroneous application of these model to intra-galactic objects and galaxies themselves have led to a popular narrative that is full of magic and other non-sense. In this ambitious posting, I have put together the astrophysical data in a different way – one that looks at objects from a more scientific and engineering point of view. This data has been used to show that the various objects in space should be considered as continuum bodies, rather than collections of particles. Classical physical laws and concepts are used to show how and why many of the phenomenon we see and

Thermodynamic Cloud Collapse & Me vs Gravity & Grok

Since I began working on this website, I have been using AI to fetch equations, data, and history. In general, I don’t bother discussing things much with AI, because typically AI relies on authority – number of journal articles, citations, simulations, status indicators, and other non-scientific bases to form its opinions. Me, on the other hand, I take the Richard Feynman philosophy that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts“. If AI believes you are straying from its narrative, it tries to “correct” you and actually let you know that what you are asking for is wrong. It finds something it agrees with, and then, tries to interject that it was at least somewhat right all along. It

Video Post – How Friction Creates a Galaxy’s Spirals

The videos presented here represent a culmination of my analysis of spiral galactic structure. The conventional explanations of how spiral work try to shoe-horn the partial differential equations of Navier-Stokes and Maxwell, into the ordinary ones of astro-physicist’s simulations and this leads to gross misrepresentations. It is like an illness in the popular scientific community that is directly related, although less political, to the climate simulators and their ODE simulations of our dynamic, convective atmosphere. “Unicorn” constructs, such as gravity density waves are really how the ODE solutions are tricked into giving realistic results. Shortcuts to PDEs, such as “Ram Pressure”, are elevated to the position of real explanations. There videos take a overview look at how spiral galaxies really

The Anatomy of a Stellar Nursery

Introducing the Rosette Nebula / Stellar Nursery When I first started to image stellar nurseries, I really didn’t know anything about them. I was told that stars are being born there – that is pretty awesome, but I was curious what was it about these light generating molecular clouds (MCs) that made them prolific star builders. Sure, stars are also created in turbulent dark molecular clouds, but stellar nurseries really churn out the stars at a much higher level – often creating whole open clusters of stars. Many of the stellar nurseries get very large and can even be mapped from their Halpha light signal in other galaxies. Ok, so my interest was piqued – I had to figure out

Star Nucleation Amped Up by Tidal Effects

Spiral galaxies can vary widely in the amount of stars they are generating. It is asserted that star nucleation, via the imposition of high pressure over small volumes of molecular cloud, is the rate determining step. Turbulence of molecular clouds in galaxies is greatly increased when the chaotic, but stable, spiral galactic structure is disturbed by tidal effects of nearby galaxies. In this posting, the three main galaxies of the Leo triplet are used to illustrate and link the chain of events from tidal influence to rapid star production in the galaxies we image.

Fueling up a New Star – Gravity vs Angular Momentum

In order to grow, a nucleated (condensed), cold star core must accumulate hydrogen as future mass and fuel before igniting to fusion and becoming a full fledged shining star. But there is a problem in the way. Just as the sun cannot accumulate planets via gravity, without some mechanism to shed angular momentum, hydrogen will just orbit the baby star and not accumulate upon it. Viscous drag both dissipates angular momentum and allows hydrogen molecules to accumulate by spiraling down to the star. Unlike a planetary orbit, in a spiral gravity, angular momentum, and viscous drag (friction) are not orthogonal to one another, allowing friction to dissipate momentum as the gravitational fall increases it. Upon arrival at the star, there remains a lot of angular momentum that still need dissipating. Compressed, hot hydrogen forms a metallic core on the star where it creates an electromagnetic magneto – a sort of electric motor. The magneto converts angular momentum into linear momentum that squirts out as jets from the poles. Both mechanisms allow hydrogen to accumulate without spinning the young protostar to death. The jets also advertise to us that star formation is going on and results in beautiful images.

A Rotting Fish tells no tails

In this website’s second look at the Rotten Fish dark nebula, I wanted to bring home the concenpts involved in star nucleation. In case you were wondering, the answer is yes, star formation can happen in clouds not emitting Halpha light, even though we can certainly assiciate Haspha with star cluster / stellar nurseries. The answer lies in the mechanism of pressure buildup at points allowing diatomic molecular hydrogen and dust to nucleate a star. In both cases, dust provides the necessary cold temperature in addition to critical point temperature suppression. However, in the case of a dark cloud, the pressures required to nucleation is based on cloud turbulence alone, while stellar nursery clouds are aided in pressure build-up by stellar winds. It seems from images, that star formation in clouds is much more sporadic, while star clusters are more likely to be formed in stellar nurseries shining in Halpha light.

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