My Favorite Savory Twist To A Classic Christmas Cookie, Are These Everything Bagel Shortbread Cookie

Ravenclaw Headcanon

Ravenclaws will go to great lengths just to prove a point.

Hey all y'all Americans out there please keep this in mind, make sure your votes count and oust the cheeto from the White House

Vote Blue

in almost every other children's book where the main heroine is swept away to a land of whimsy she's shown having a lovely time; braving dangers occasionally, trying to find her way home, sure, but ultimately delighting in the magic around her. meanwhile alice spends her entire time in wonderland like

The Stellar Buddy System

Our Sun has an entourage of planets, moons, and smaller objects to keep it company as it traverses the galaxy. But it’s still lonely compared to many of the other stars out there, which often come in pairs. These cosmic couples, called binary stars, are very important in astronomy because they can easily reveal things that are much harder to learn from stars that are on their own. And some of them could even host habitable planets!

The birth of a stellar duo

New stars emerge from swirling clouds of gas and dust that are peppered throughout the galaxy. Scientists still aren’t sure about all the details, but turbulence deep within these clouds may give rise to knots that are denser than their surroundings. The knots have stronger gravity, so they can pull in more material and the cloud may begin to collapse.

The material at the center heats up. Known as a protostar, it is this hot core that will one day become a star. Sometimes these spinning clouds of collapsing gas and dust may break up into two, three, or even more blobs that eventually become stars. That would explain why the majority of the stars in the Milky Way are born with at least one sibling.

Seeing stars

We can’t always tell if we’re looking at binary stars using just our eyes. They’re often so close together in the sky that we see them as a single star. For example, Sirius, the brightest star we can see at night, is actually a binary system (see if you can spot both stars in the photo above). But no one knew that until the 1800s.

Precise observations showed that Sirius was swaying back and forth like it was at a middle school dance. In 1862, astronomer Alvan Graham Clark used a telescope to see that Sirius is actually two stars that orbit each other.

But even through our most powerful telescopes, some binary systems still masquerade as a single star. Fortunately there are a couple of tricks we can use to spot these pairs too.

Since binary stars orbit each other, there’s a chance that we’ll see some stars moving toward and away from us as they go around each other. We just need to have an edge-on view of their orbits. Astronomers can detect this movement because it changes the color of the star’s light – a phenomenon known as the Doppler effect.

Stars we can find this way are called spectroscopic binaries because we have to look at their spectra, which are basically charts or graphs that show the intensity of light being emitted over a range of energies. We can spot these star pairs because light travels in waves. When a star moves toward us, the waves of its light arrive closer together, which makes its light bluer. When a star moves away, the waves are lengthened, reddening its light.

Sometimes we can see binary stars when one of the stars moves in front of the other. Astronomers find these systems, called eclipsing binaries, by measuring the amount of light coming from stars over time. We receive less light than usual when the stars pass in front of each other, because the one in front will block some of the farther star’s light.

Sibling rivalry

Twin stars don’t always get along with each other – their relationship may be explosive! Type Ia supernovae happen in some binary systems in which a white dwarf – the small, hot core left over when a Sun-like star runs out of fuel and ejects its outer layers – is stealing material away from its companion star. This results in a runaway reaction that ultimately detonates the thieving star. The same type of explosion may also happen when two white dwarfs spiral toward each other and collide. Yikes!

Scientists know how to determine how bright these explosions should truly be at their peak, making Type Ia supernovae so-called standard candles. That means astronomers can determine how far away they are by seeing how bright they look from Earth. The farther they are, the dimmer they appear. Astronomers can also look at the wavelengths of light coming from the supernovae to find out how fast the dying stars are moving away from us.

Studying these supernovae led to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will scan the skies for these exploding stars when it launches in the mid-2020s to help us figure out what’s causing the expansion to accelerate – a mystery known as dark energy.

Spilling stellar secrets

Astronomers like finding binary systems because it’s a lot easier to learn more about stars that are in pairs than ones that are on their own. That’s because the stars affect each other in ways we can measure. For example, by paying attention to how the stars orbit each other, we can determine how massive they are. Since heavier stars burn hotter and use up their fuel more quickly than lighter ones, knowing a star’s mass reveals other interesting things too.

By studying how the light changes in eclipsing binaries when the stars cross in front of each other, we can learn even more! We can figure out their sizes, masses, how fast they’re each spinning, how hot they are, and even how far away they are. All of that helps us understand more about the universe.

Tatooine worlds

Thanks to observatories such as our Kepler Space Telescope, we know that worlds like Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tatooine in “Star Wars” exist in real life. And if a planet orbits at the right distance from the two stars, it could even be habitable (and stay that way for a long time).

In 2019, our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) found a planet, known as TOI-1338 b, orbiting a pair of stars. These worlds are tricker to find than planets with only one host star, but TESS is expected to find several more!

Want to learn more about the relationships between stellar couples? Check out this Tumblr post: https://nasa.tumblr.com/post/190824389279/cosmic-couples-and-devastating-breakups

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

“Just because you bury something doesn’t mean that it stops existing.”

— Jenny Han

Do you also feel like this sometimes?

on the pevensies’ names

SO there’s something that always bothered me about Susan, and that was: why is she called Susan??? Peter, Edmund and Lucy’s names all have clear significance, but I never could see what about the name ‘Susan’ was important for her character 

UNTIL my last reread of the Chronicles, when I spotted something in VoDT that I couldn’t BELIEVE I’d never noticed before. It’s a HUGE pointer towards what happens with whether Susan eventually returns to her belief or not, and although I’m sure I’m not the first person to have seen it, I can’t remember reading about it in any Susan’s-fate discussions before, so here goes.

Peter, Edmund and Lucy all have names with deep significance. ‘Peter’ means ‘rock’, which is clearly well suited to his role as the ‘rock’ of the family, but perhaps more importantly he’s named after Saint Peter, who in the Bible is something like the rock upon which my church is founded. The Pope sits on ‘the throne of Saint Peter’ as God’s representative on earth (for the catholic church at least), and Peter’s throne is that of the High King (CS Lewis did a little power in Narnia flowchart thing and Peter sits right below Aslan on it I think). plus the whole Peter-and-the-gate-of-heaven thing in LB. 

‘Edmund’ is a two-part name, translating to ‘prosperity’ and ‘protector’. Sure, ‘protector’ is applicable because of his actions against the Witch, but his name is mostly significant because of its use in Shakespeare - in King Lear, Edmund is the name of the Duke of Gloucester’s bastard younger son, who betrays his family to gain power. Shakespeare’s Edmund is never completely redeemed, but he is an ambiguous character who can be played as really awful or quite sympathetic or a bit of both, and he’s got lots of parallels to Narnia’s Edmund.

‘Lucy’ means ‘light’ and hers is pretty straightforward - she shines the light onto the path to Narnia and to Aslan for her family.

But Susan? ‘Susan’ means ‘lily’, and for the longest time I could not for the life of me figure out why that was important. CS Lewis wouldn’t give all the others such significant names and then come to Susan and be like oh well I guess that will do, but I couldn’t find what it was. Sure, lilies are flowers traditionally used at funerals, which is a bleak bit of foreshadowing, but it didn’t seem like enough. 

AND THEN

I was reading VoDT and at the end, when they get close to Aslan’s country, what do they find? A SEA OF

LILIES

and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed this - that the flower on the path to Aslan’s country is the flower Susan is named for. which, combined with the foreshadowing in PC about her returning to Aslan, is a pretty strong hint about her eventual path.

If we also take a look at a compass - the sea of lilies is in the utter east. it’s heavily implied in the Narnia books that Susan’s path away from Narnia starts when she goes to America, which - from England - is a journey west, the opposite way. so Lewis is definitely paying attention to direction here. and to the east, on the pathway to Aslan’s country, he filled it with Susan’s flowers.  

my whole standpoint on the problem of Susan is a bit more complicated, but I think this is a lovely whisper from Lewis about her eventually getting to rejoin her family

Not that I was expecting much otherwise, but Shark Week has just started and they kicked it off by having a convicted rapist force a caribbean reef shark into tonic immobility.

This is incredibly stressful for the shark and there was no scientific data being collected - they just strap a camera to the dorsal fin for extra content.

Now let’s talk about how ridiculous these assholes look.

They’re in FULL CHAIN MAIL. All these theatrics about how dangerous and scary these REEF SHARKS are, acting like they’re going to be savaged if something goes wrong. It’s all theatrics.

When I worked at the aquarium, my colleagues wore chain mesh gloves and a wetsuit when feeding and handling grey nurse/sand tiger sharks.

These Shark Week dumbasses think they’re so big and tough harassing these reef sharks that are just trying to go about their day.

And this is going to inspire so many idiot divers to copy this stunt to prove how brave they are. 

Shark Week has become an absolute garbage pile of sensationalist rubbish rather than any sort educational conservation programming. 

Putting this on tv is going to encourage idiots to copy the stunt and continue to treat sharks as something to ‘conquer’ rather than the important apex predators that they are.