Eclipse Solar Total 2020 Desde Valcheta, Río Negro En Argentina

📸 Chris Cook

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Las estrellas más brillantes incrustadas en nebulosas a lo largo de nuestra galaxia derraman un torrente de radiación que devora vastas nubes de gas hidrógeno, la materia prima para construir nuevas estrellas. Este proceso de grabado esculpe un paisaje de fantasía donde la imaginación humana puede ver todo tipo de formas y figuras. Esta nebulosa en la constelación de Cassiopeia tiene velos fluidos de gas y polvo que le han valido el sobrenombre de "Nebulosa Fantasma".

Oficialmente conocida como IC 63, esta nebulosa se encuentra a 550 años luz de distancia en la constelación de Cassiopeia the Queen.

Crédito: NASA, ESA y STScI / Universidad de Estrasburgo

Black Holes: Seeing the Invisible!

Black holes are some of the most bizarre and fascinating objects in the cosmos. Astronomers want to study lots of them, but there’s one big problem – black holes are invisible! Since they don’t emit any light, it’s pretty tough to find them lurking in the inky void of space. Fortunately there are a few different ways we can “see” black holes indirectly by watching how they affect their surroundings.

Speedy stars

If you’ve spent some time stargazing, you know what a calm, peaceful place our universe can be. But did you know that a monster is hiding right in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy? Astronomers noticed stars zipping superfast around something we can’t see at the center of the galaxy, about 10 million miles per hour! The stars must be circling a supermassive black hole. No other object would have strong enough gravity to keep them from flying off into space.

Two astrophysicists won half of the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for revealing this dark secret. The black hole is truly monstrous, weighing about four million times as much as our Sun! And it seems our home galaxy is no exception – our Hubble Space Telescope has revealed that the hubs of most galaxies contain supermassive black holes.

Shadowy silhouettes

Technology has advanced enough that we’ve been able to spot one of these supermassive black holes in a nearby galaxy. In 2019, astronomers took the first-ever picture of a black hole in a galaxy called M87, which is about 55 million light-years away. They used an international network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope.

In the image, we can see some light from hot gas surrounding a dark shape. While we still can’t see the black hole itself, we can see the “shadow” it casts on the bright backdrop.

Shattered stars

Black holes can come in a smaller variety, too. When a massive star runs out of the fuel it uses to shine, it collapses in on itself. These lightweight or “stellar-mass” black holes are only about 5-20 times as massive as the Sun. They’re scattered throughout the galaxy in the same places where we find stars, since that’s how they began their lives. Some of them started out with a companion star, and so far that’s been our best clue to find them.

Some black holes steal material from their companion star. As the material falls onto the black hole, it gets superhot and lights up in X-rays. The first confirmed black hole astronomers discovered, called Cygnus X-1, was found this way.

If a star comes too close to a supermassive black hole, the effect is even more dramatic! Instead of just siphoning material from the star like a smaller black hole would do, a supermassive black hole will completely tear the star apart into a stream of gas. This is called a tidal disruption event.

Making waves

But what if two companion stars both turn into black holes? They may eventually collide with each other to form a larger black hole, sending ripples through space-time – the fabric of the cosmos!

These ripples, called gravitational waves, travel across space at the speed of light. The waves that reach us are extremely weak because space-time is really stiff.

Three scientists received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for using LIGO to observe gravitational waves that were sent out from colliding stellar-mass black holes. Though gravitational waves are hard to detect, they offer a way to find black holes without having to see any light.

We’re teaming up with the European Space Agency for a mission called LISA, which stands for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. When it launches in the 2030s, it will detect gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes – a likely sign of colliding galaxies!

Rogue black holes

So we have a few ways to find black holes by seeing stuff that’s close to them. But astronomers think there could be 100 million black holes roaming the galaxy solo. Fortunately, our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide a way to “see” these isolated black holes, too.

Roman will find solitary black holes when they pass in front of more distant stars from our vantage point. The black hole’s gravity will warp the starlight in ways that reveal its presence. In some cases we can figure out a black hole’s mass and distance this way, and even estimate how fast it’s moving through the galaxy.

For more about black holes, check out these Tumblr posts!

⚫ Gobble Up These Black (Hole) Friday Deals!

⚫ Hubble’s 5 Weirdest Black Hole Discoveries

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Roman’s Heat-Vision Eyes Are Complete!

Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team recently flight-certified all 24 of the detectors the mission needs. When Roman launches in the mid-2020s, the detectors will convert starlight into electrical signals, which will then be decoded into 300-megapixel images of huge patches of the sky. These images will help astronomers explore all kinds of things, from rogue planets and black holes to dark matter and dark energy.

Eighteen of the detectors will be used in Roman’s camera, while another six will be reserved as backups. Each detector has 16 million tiny pixels, so Roman’s images will be super sharp, like Hubble’s.

The image above shows one of Roman’s detectors compared to an entire cell phone camera, which looks tiny by comparison. The best modern cell phone cameras can provide around 12-megapixel images. Since Roman will have 18 detectors that have 16 million pixels each, the mission will capture 300-megapixel panoramas of space.

The combination of such crisp resolution and Roman’s huge view has never been possible on a space-based telescope before and will make the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope a powerful tool in the future.

Learn more about the Roman Space Telescope!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Normalmente ponemos imágenes de la Vía Láctea, estrellas, meteoros y la Luna... pero luego nos preguntamos, ¿Y por que fotos del Sol no? Y que mejor que compartir una de nuestra estrella en uno de los fenómenos que normalizamos pero que no deja de ser maravilloso, una puesta de sol.

Crédito: Juanma Espinosa

https://instagram.com/juanmaespinosa

~Antares

Recordando al cometa NEOWISE.

Crédito: Julio C. Lozoya

Senda estelar alrededor del polo norte celeste. La estrella en el centro de los arcos celestiales concentricos es Polaris.

Imagen desde Bayanhaote, en el interior de Mongolia de China.

Crédito: Jeff Dai

https://instagram.com/jeffdaiphoto

~Antares

Tránsito de la Estación Espacial Tiangong

Se utilizo un refractor de 8 ′′ a lo largo del Mar Mediterráneo, para este tránsito solar de 1/2 segundo de la nueva Estación Espacial Tiangong de China, que incluye los 3 módulos con sus paneles solares y sin duda el brazo robótico. Pueden acceder al video de este tránsito a través de su canal de YouTube o el siguiente link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bp3jCKvX_tY

Credito: Thierry Legault

https://www.facebook.com/thierry.legault.5

~Antares

This is the Hyades Cluster! ✨✨✨

As the closest star cluster to Earth, this star cluster contains hundreds of stars with some of the brighter ones in this image transforming into giant stars as they enter a new phase of their lifespan. Some theorize that the creation of this cluster may have happened all at once as many of these stars are the same age and move in a similar way! 💫💫💫

Taken by me (Michelle Park) using the Slooh Canary Two telescope on November 6th, 2020 at 22:15 UTC.

Luna llena desde la República Popular China.

Crédito: Jeff Dai

https://instagram.com/jeffdaiphoto

~Antares