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Top 10 Unsolved Space Mysteries
Joe Jordan writes "Space.com is advertising the Top 10 Space Mysteries for 2003, and perhaps for all time, given the current rate of discovery." Some of them are obvious, like the origin of life, and the possibility of alien life forms, but the list is still a good compilation of space's greatest questions.
Let's ignore that the parent was surely refering to the absurdity of SciFi in space in general.
Assuming that the force is uniform in all directions, there is no reason that the lower density material escapes in planar direction (what tells the material in which plane it has to escape, so to speak).
My totally uneducated guess is the following:
Stars rotate around one axis. This angular momentum has to be preserved. If memory serves right a supernova occurs, when the equlibrium of gravitational contraction force and the thermonuclar repulsion force collapses, until a certain pressure is reached which leads to a final explosive fusion process. Now think of figure skating, rotating and a contracting diameter.
The outmost material will be hurled back into space, the rest contributes to a white dwarf, neutron star, black hole, or whatever.
But the critical part (for our question at hand) is that the star in it latest moments is not spherical, but eliptical. The material in the rotational plane has a higher momentum, so it will be more likely hurled back into space.
As I said, this is a fairly uneducated guess. The question is, does the centrifugal force matter anything, considering strength the gravitational force and the thermonuclear explosion?
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Actually color perception is only loosely related to wavelength. What you were taught in highschool was an oversimplification that borders on a lie (as is much of high school science!). Color is really a spatial attribute, not a point one (Google for Edward Land's "Retinex" theory of color preception), and perception of color is not absolute - it depends on the spatially adjacent colors; this isn't an optical illusion - it's the nature of color perception. It doesn't even stop there because color is a compatative attribute - things look "leaf green" because they stimulate your visual cortex in the same say as a leaf, but that is still true if you wear red goggles, and experiments have shown that normal color vision returns after a couple of weeks of wearing colored goggles!
You should also note that humans can only see a fraction of the possible colors (combinations of wavelengths of light) even in the visual part of the spectrum), and there is therefore nothing absolute about what we perceive - it's just what we can differentiate. If instead of having 3 differently tuned color cones in our eye (the cones have bell-curve-like light wavelength response that peak around R/G/B) we had more, then we would be able to differentiate more wavelength combinations. With our eyes the way they are you can differentially stimulate our color cones with only three wavelengths of light, but if we had 4 (peak tuned to R/G/B/Yellow say, or ANY different wavelengths) then you would need 4. Some people in fact do have 4 types of color cones and can therefore differentiate colors that you cannot. Your "red" surface is someone else's patterned one!
That absolute "red" that you are worrying about therefore isn't an irreducible gestalt experience/quale - it's a differential surface attribute detection that a machine will be able to duplicate just fine.
Incidently note also that what you see a color as isn't going to be precisely what I see it as - we may agree on things like "green's a bit like blue and a bit like yellow" that are based on the underlying transducers and brain architecture, but what the color actually looks/feels like is going to be as personal as any other experiental phenomena.