Rocket Launches And Rising Seas

Cometa Leonard en la mañana del 10 de Diciembre del 2021, ubicado del lado izquierdo, la estrella Arcturus en la cima y Spica en el extremo derecho.

Crédito: Alan Dyer

https://instagram.com/amazingskyguy

~Antares

What’s Inside a ‘Dead’ Star?

Matter makes up all the stuff we can see in the universe, from pencils to people to planets. But there’s still a lot we don’t understand about it! For example: How does matter work when it’s about to become a black hole? We can’t learn anything about matter after it becomes a black hole, because it’s hidden behind the event horizon, the point of no return. So we turn to something we can study – the incredibly dense matter inside a neutron star, the leftover of an exploded massive star that wasn’t quite big enough to turn into a black hole.

Our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, is an X-ray telescope perched on the International Space Station. NICER was designed to study and measure the sizes and masses of neutron stars to help us learn more about what might be going on in their mysterious cores.

When a star many times the mass of our Sun runs out of fuel, it collapses under its own weight and then bursts into a supernova. What’s left behind depends on the star’s initial mass. Heavier stars (around 25 times the Sun’s mass or more) leave behind black holes. Lighter ones (between about eight and 25 times the Sun’s mass) leave behind neutron stars.

Neutron stars pack more mass than the Sun into a sphere about as wide as New York City’s Manhattan Island is long. Just one teaspoon of neutron star matter would weigh as much as Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth!

These objects have a lot of cool physics going on. They can spin faster than blender blades, and they have powerful magnetic fields. In fact, neutron stars are the strongest magnets in the universe! The magnetic fields can rip particles off the star’s surface and then smack them down on another part of the star. The constant bombardment creates hot spots at the magnetic poles. When the star rotates, the hot spots swing in and out of our view like the beams of a lighthouse.

Neutron stars are so dense that they warp nearby space-time, like a bowling ball resting on a trampoline. The warping effect is so strong that it can redirect light from the star’s far side into our view. This has the odd effect of making the star look bigger than it really is!

NICER uses all the cool physics happening on and around neutron stars to learn more about what’s happening inside the star, where matter lingers on the threshold of becoming a black hole. (We should mention that NICER also studies black holes!)

Scientists think neutron stars are layered a bit like a golf ball. At the surface, there’s a really thin (just a couple centimeters high) atmosphere of hydrogen or helium. In the outer core, atoms have broken down into their building blocks – protons, neutrons, and electrons – and the immense pressure has squished most of the protons and electrons together to form a sea of mostly neutrons.

But what’s going on in the inner core? Physicists have lots of theories. In some traditional models, scientists suggested the stars were neutrons all the way down. Others proposed that neutrons break down into their own building blocks, called quarks. And then some suggest that those quarks could recombine to form new types of particles that aren’t neutrons!

NICER is helping us figure things out by measuring the sizes and masses of neutron stars. Scientists use those numbers to calculate the stars’ density, which tells us how squeezable matter is!

Let’s say you have what scientists think of as a typical neutron star, one weighing about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass. If you measure the size of the star, and it’s big, then that might mean it contains more whole neutrons. If instead it’s small, then that might mean the neutrons have broken down into quarks. The tinier pieces can be packed together more tightly.

NICER has now measured the sizes of two neutron stars, called PSR J0030+0451 and PSR J0740+6620, or J0030 and J0740 for short.

J0030 is about 1.4 times the Sun’s mass and 16 miles across. (It also taught us that neutron star hot spots might not always be where we thought.) J0740 is about 2.1 times the Sun’s mass and is also about 16 miles across. So J0740 has about 50% more mass than J0030 but is about the same size! Which tells us that the matter in neutron stars is less squeezable than some scientists predicted. (Remember, some physicists suggest that the added mass would crush all the neutrons and make a smaller star.) And J0740’s mass and size together challenge models where the star is neutrons all the way down.

So what’s in the heart of a neutron star? We’re still not sure. Scientists will have to use NICER’s observations to develop new models, perhaps where the cores of neutron stars contain a mix of both neutrons and weirder matter, like quarks. We’ll have to keep measuring neutron stars to learn more!

Keep up with other exciting announcements about our universe by following NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

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

Vía Láctea sobre campos de lavanda, Bulgaria.

Crédito: Mihail Minkov

https://instagram.com/fineartshot

~Antares

Esta madrugada del día 13 de agosto tenemos la lluvia de meteoros Perseidas, la cual proviene de los rastros de polvo y rocas que deja tras de si el cometa Swift-Tuttle. Se espera que tenga una actividad de 100 meteoros por hora, aprovechando que la luna esta en un 24% de iluminosidas, la visibilidad de este fenómeno será espectacular.

Sony A7iii

ISO3200

20mm

20 seg

F1.8

Disparo con temporizador (10 seg)

Crédito: Julio C. Lozoya

https://www.facebook.com/jclozoya

@julio_c_lozoya

~Antares

La galaxia de andromeda o también conocida como M31, una galaxia que en unos millones de años colisionaran con nuestra galaxia y ambas se fusionaran formando una nueva.

Te invitamos a que sigas el perfil del autor de esta fotografías para que veas con que equipo la tomo y que hizo para revelarla.

Crédito: Alan Dyer

https://instagram.com/amazingskyguy

https://www.amazingsky.com/

~Antares

Setting the Standards for Unmanned Aircraft

From advanced wing designs, through the hypersonic frontier, and onward into the era of composite structures, electronic flight controls, and energy efficient flight, our engineers and researchers have led the way in virtually every aeronautic development. And since 2011, aeronautical innovators from around the country have been working on our Unmanned Aircraft Systems integration in the National Airspace System, or UAS in the NAS, project.  

This project was a new type of undertaking that worked to identify, develop, and test the technologies and procedures that will make it possible for unmanned aircraft systems to have routine access to airspace occupied by human piloted aircraft. Since the start, the goal of this unified team was to provide vital research findings through simulations and flight tests to support the development and validation of detect and avoid and command and control technologies necessary for integrating UAS into the NAS.  

That interest moved into full-scale testing and evaluation to determine how to best integrate unmanned vehicles into the national airspace and how to come up with standards moving forward. Normally, 44,000 flights safely take off and land here in the U.S., totaling more than 16 million flights per year. With the inclusion of millions of new types of unmanned aircraft, this integration needs to be seamless in order to keep the flying public safe.

Working hand-in-hand, teams collaborated to better understand how these UAS’s would travel in the national airspace by using NASA-developed software in combination with flight tests. Much of this work is centered squarely on technology called detect and avoid.  One of the primary safety concerns with these new systems is the inability of remote operators to see and avoid other aircraft.  Because unmanned aircraft literally do not have a pilot on board, we have developed concepts allowing safe operation within the national airspace.  

In order to better understand how all the systems work together, our team flew a series of tests to gather data to inform the development of minimum operational performance standards for detect and avoid alerting guidance. Over the course of this testing, we gathered an enormous amount of data allowing safe integration for unmanned aircraft into the national airspace. As unmanned aircraft are becoming more ubiquitous in our world - safety, reliability, and proven research must coexist.

Every day new use case scenarios and research opportunities arise based around the hard work accomplished by this incredible workforce. Only time will tell how these new technologies and innovations will shape our world.

Want to learn the many ways that NASA is with you when you fly? Visit nasa.gov/aeronautics.



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

Noche azúl

🗓️ 2012

📸 Mikko Lagerstedt

@mikkolagerstedt

https://www.facebook.com/mikkolagerstedt/

The Roasted Planet

Can you hear this exoplanet screaming? As the exoplanet known as HD 80606 b approaches its star from an extreme, elliptical orbit, it suffers star-grazing torture that causes howling, supersonic winds and shockwave storms across this world beyond our solar system. Its torturous journey boils its atmosphere to a hellish 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit every 111 days, roasting both its light and dark sides. HD 80606b will never escape this scorching nightmare. Download this free poster in English and Spanish and check out the full Galaxy of Horrors.

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

Las colas del cometa NEOWISE tomada el 22 de julio de 2020. La segunda imagen muestra un primer plano del coma y el falso núcleo del cometa. Fue capturado con un smartphone a través del telescopio C11 EdgeHD.

Crédito: Sebastián Voltmer

https://instagram.com/sebastianvoltmer

https://www.voltmer.de/

~Antares

Lago Gallineta, Idaho, con las montañas Sawtooth en el fondo.

EXIF: Sony a7riii, lente Sony 24 mm f/ 1.4 GM

Sky-3 fotos en IS01600, 2 minutos en f / 2.0 (rastreado usando un sky adventurer tracking mount)

Foreground-3 fotos en IS01600, minutos en f / 1 .4

Reflexión de fondo-fotos en IS06400, 20 segundos en la f1.4.

Crédito: Bryony Richards & Eric Benedetti 🇺🇸🇬🇧

✨ Astrophotography of Utah & beyond ✨

https://www.utahastrophotography.com/

https://instagram.com/utahastrophotography

~Antares