Really? Are you kidding me?

Recently it was found that "at least 103 people are found in mass graves and more than 200 others are missing after the leader of a cult allegedly instructed members to starve themselves." (Wikipedia)

Also from Wikipedia:

"Paul Mackenzie's teachings have been described to have placed a huge emphasis on end time doomsday teachings and to be anti-western. Mackenzie rails against the "evils of western life," which includes medical services, education, food, sports, music, and "the uselessness of life." In a song titled "The Antichrist," he denounced the Catholic Church, the United States, and the United Nations as tools of satan.

Mackenzie believed that the Kenyan biometric ID system called Huduma Namba was the Mark of the Beast, in alignment with the fundamentalist teachings of [false prophet William] Branham. He echoed conspiracy theories to his followers insisting the end of days was imminent."

I was supposed to be doing astrophysics homework, but after stumbling across this, words cannot describe just how angry I am now as a Christian myself.

This just proves my statement that MISINTERPRETED BIBLES ARE FAR, FAR MORE DANGEROUS THAN LOADED GUNS.

Have some common sense. God gave us wisdom and I KNOW He would not be pleased by you throwing it in the garbage.

And most importantly, DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ ON THE INTERNET, NOT EVERYTHING THAT CLAIMS TO SPEAK FOR THE BIBLE ACTUALLY DOES SPEAK FOR IT.

"Well, no wonder! Even Satan can disguise himself to look like an angel of light!" - the apostle Paul, 2 Corinthians 11:14.

Euphrates Drying Up ≠ End Times Coming Soon

People like this are so ignorant in their reading of the Bible, it's honestly starting to make me a little angry.

The Euphrates drying up wasn't a single sign but one in a series of seven signs (Revelation 16). 

And this is happening, not because of the end times, because of climate change, which is real. Yet some people think it's a secular distraction against the Second Coming of Jesus, because they are impatient.

Please be super careful about what you believe in on the internet, because it is a dangerous place. Yes, there are videos about why the end times are near, but there are also videos supposedly exclaiming why the Earth is flat. Misinterpreted Bibles are more dangerous than loaded guns.

God Bless

Joseph D. Pelobello

Planetball Comic: Stellar Conflicts

Stellar Conflicts

A planetball comic I originally made in mid-2018 showing the sizes of objects in our universe. I know it's bad quality, but it's OK for me as I've decided not to further pursue countryballs and planetballs (The YouTube channel "AstroCat"/"DogePro" has better and more educational ones).

The objects:

First panel: Jupiter, Pluto, Mercury, Mars, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn

Second panel: the Sun, Sirius, Pollux, Arcturus

Third panel: Arcturus, Aldebaran, Rigel, Deneb, Antares, Betelgeuse, Mu Cephei, VV Cephei A (outdated size)

4th Panel: VY Canis Majoris (Russia-esque), UY Scuti (U.S.A.-esque)

5th Panel: Milky Way, WOH G64

6th Panel: IC 1101

All Glory to God!

New video: Giant Star Profiles

 

Short rundown on a number of stars that have left the main-sequence (and the main-sequence star VV Cephei B). Based on a video originally made in 2018. Credits in the description.

All Glory to God!

The Planets in True Color

A collection of the eight planets of our Solar System, plus two exoplanets (one of which may not exist), all in true color.

All Glory to God!

Image Credits:

• Mercury - NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
• Venus - NASA/JPL-Caltech
• Earth - NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
• Mars - ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA, CC BY-SA IGO 3.0
• Kepler-70b - Hirendra Prakash, YouTube
• Jupiter - ESA/Hubble
• Saturn - NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute
• Uranus - NASA
• Neptune - NASA / JPL / Voyager-ISS / Justin Cowart
• HD 189733 b - Askaniy

Star Size Comparison: 2017 Update

Star Size Comparison

View this file on Wikimedia Commons. 

An image I made in 2017 (based on an earlier, outdated picture by Dave Jarvis under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported License - also the license of this work) showing how small our planet is compared to God's creations. Yes, I am the author of this updated version, which replaces and adds a number of stars.

I made this for the Wikipedia List of Largest Stars page when I was the editor JoeyPknowsalotaboutthat. While I have been blocked, the image has spread across multiple Wikimedia projects.

And indeed, this image still has a few inaccuracies and is likely outdated too in 2023; for instance, NML Cygni's size (based on Debeck et al 2010) is possibly inaccurate due to the star likely being cooler, VV Cephei should be a bit smaller at 1,050 solar radii, and UY Scuti's size exceeds the theoretical ~1,500 solar radii limit for stars in the Milky Way.

All Glory to God!

Unpopular opinion: "Blue dwarf" terminology

One day, when I was a little boy in the kitchen, I knew that Alpha Centauri A was a yellow dwarf. Then I speculated that Beta Centauri must be a blue dwarf (as far as I remember).

Turns out, I was correct, kinda...

Beta Centauri is a blue main-sequence star.

But it turns out, the word "blue dwarf" is not used for small blue main-sequence stars (which often are hard to distinguish from their giant and hypergiant counterparts, like the O-type star Alpha Camelopardalis, which, by the way, is the furthest star from Earth with a Bayer designation.) "Blue dwarfs" is used for a tentative proposed evolved stage of a red dwarf star.

Because red dwarf stars are fully convective, millions of tons of hydrogen fuel is delivered to their cores, meaning these stay on the main-sequence for trillions of years - far longer than the universe has been existing (13.8 billion years). This means literally none of them have left the main-sequence, so we can only speculate what happens if they do.

Because of their small mass, red dwarf stars may not undergo helium fusion and expand into giants, but rather, it is believed their temperatures may increase so they become "blue dwarfs".

However, stars today that do become red giants shrink into white dwarfs once fusion stops. In the process, they become Subdwarf B and O stars. Well-known examples include Kepler-70 (which may or may not have planets very close to it that are subsequently hotter than the Sun) and V391 Pegasi.

Artist's impression of a subdwarf B star; by the European Southern Observatory (ESO)/L. Calçada, INAF-Padua/S. Zaggi and under CC BY 4.0

Now, I have a proposal to make: what if we call these Subdwarf B and O stars blue dwarfs instead? I know the terms "dwarf" and "main-sequence" are synonymous, but there is no point to reserve a term that is more likely to resonate with the public ("blue dwarf") for a purely hypothetical stage that we have to wait trillions of years just to observe. Indeed, the word "dwarf" implies a low luminosity and size - exactly what Subdwarf B and O stars are, especially relative to their main-sequence counterparts.

I have seen professional resources that dispute the proposed "blue dwarf" stage for red dwarfs, instead claiming that they will just collapse straight into white dwarfs. Furthermore, the term "blue dwarf" for the hypothesized evolved stage is a misnomer - these stars would mostly only reach temperatures rivalling that of the Sun, making them more like "yellow subdwarfs".

Can we please use the more easy-to-say name "blue dwarf" with a fitting class of star that exists today rather than for a tentative evolved stage that may or may not exist in the future?

Only time will tell if red dwarfs will "bluen up".

All Glory to God!

Blackbody Curves and Wien's Law

A blackbody curve is a graph showing how much radiation a blackbody (i.e. an ideal or 100% absorber and emitter of thermal radiation, or heat) will emit based on its temperature. All objects with a non-zero temperature will emit thermal radiation.

Cool objects like humans, planets, and brown dwarf stars emit infrared light (which has long wavelengths between 1 micrometer (10^-6 m) and a meter). Hotter objects like stars emit more visible light (wavelengths between 200 and 750 nanometers, or 2 * 10^-7 and 7.5 * 10^-7 m) than infrared light, while the hottest objects like massive stars and accretion disks around black holes (over 50,000 Kelvins) emit mostly ultraviolet light (wavelengths below 200 nanometers); far more than longer wavelengths. Because these hot objects emit mostly blue in the visible spectrum, they appear blue-hot. (We assume all of these objects are black bodies.)

A blackbody curve tells how much of each wavelength across the electromagnetic spectrum an object emits based on temperature. The peak wavelength, or the wavelength of light emitted the most by a black body, is the highest peak in these graphs.

Examples of black body curves for stars. Notice that for cool red stars like Antares, the peak wavelength is in the infrared; for the Sun, it is in the green part of the visible spectrum, while for blue hot stars it is in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The peak wavelength can be determined by Wien's Law:

λ = b / T

Where λ is the peak wavelength in meters, b the proportionality constant of (2.897 771 955 * 10^-3 m * K), and T the temperature in Kelvins. See if you can find out the peak wavelengths for the five stars in the NASA/JPL picture above:

• Antares - 3,660 Kelvin (source)
• Sun - 5,772 Kelvin (IAU)
• Sirius A - 9,940 Kelvin (source)
• Spica A - 25,300 Kelvin (source)
• Gamma Velorum Ab - 57,000 Kelvin (source)

For reference, here is a table showing a number of star types and their peak wavelengths:

All Glory to God, and Happy 19th Dannyversary Danny Phantom!

4 April 2023