Twice A Year, You May Experience Some Degree Of Television Interference Due To Sun Outages.

Sunset on Mars

Scale of Universe Measured with 1-Percent Accuracy

An ultraprecise new galaxy map is shedding light on the properties of dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion.

Image: An artist’s concept of the latest, highly accurate measurement of the universe from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. The spheres show the current size of the “baryon acoustic oscillations” (BAOs) from the early universe, which have helped to set the distribution of galaxies that we see in the universe today. BAOs can be used as a “standard ruler” (white line) to measure the distances to all the galaxies in the universe. Credit: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A team of researchers working with the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has determined the distances to galaxies more than 6 billion light-years away to within 1 percent accuracy — an unprecedented measurement.

"There are not many things in our daily lives that we know to 1-percent accuracy," David Schlegel, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the principal investigator of BOSS, said in a statement. "I now know the size of the universe better than I know the size of my house."

ya meme // nine quotes

the wizard’s oath (young wizards by diane duane)

The Journey to Mars Begins Tomorrow

NASA is preparing for the first test flight of the Orion crew vehicle set for an unmanned launch on Dec. 4 at 7:05 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Orion spacecraft is designed to eventually take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit to destinations never explored by humans. It will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to distant planetary bodies, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during space travel, and provide safe reentry from deep space.

This mission is the first of three trial runs that the Orion mission must overcome before NASA deems it safe enough for human space travel. 

The next test flights in 2018 and 2021 will use NASA’s Space Launch System rocket (SLS), which is currently in development. When it’s finished, SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever built, boasting even more thrust than the Saturn V booster that blasted astronauts toward the moon in the Apollo era.  

The spacecraft will launch atop a Delta IV Heavy, a rocket built and operated by United Launch Alliance. While this launch vehicle will allow Orion to reach an altitude high enough to meet the objectives for this test, a much larger, human-rated rocket will be needed for the vast distances of future exploration missions.

Exploration Flight Test-1, will mark the farthest distance traveled by a human spaceflight vehicle since 1972 made by Apollo 17.

During its grueling four-and-half-hour test mission, NASA’s Orion space capsule must shoot 3,600 miles away from Earth (15 times higher than the International Space Station!), orbit the planet twice, and brave a thick belt of cosmic radiation. 

Upon re-entry it must deploy 11 parachutes to slow down from 20,000 miles per hour to 20 mph, while withstanding 4,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures before plunging into the Pacific Ocean. 

Check out these incredible photos from the development and testing of the spacecraft.

Countdown, launch and mission coverage will begin at 4:30 a.m. on NASA TV which is available on air and streaming at nasa.gov/nasatv

Vera Rubin (b. 1928)

When Vera Cooper Rubin told her high school physics teacher that she’d been accepted to Vassar, he said, “That’s great. As long as you stay away from science, it should be okay.”

Rubin graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1948, the only astronomy major in her class at Vassar, and went on to receive her master’s from Cornell in 1950 (after being turned away by Princeton because they did not allow women in their astronomy program) and her Ph.D. from Georgetown in 1954. Now a senior researcher at the Carnegie Institute’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Rubin is credited with proving the existence of “dark matter,” or nonluminous mass, and forever altering our notions of the universe. She did so by gathering irrefutable evidence to persuade the astronomical community that galaxies spin at a faster speed than Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation allows. As a result of this finding, astronomers conceded that the universe must be filled with more material than they can see. 

Rubin made a name for herself not only as an astronomer but also as a woman pioneer; she fought through severe criticisms of her work to eventually be elected to the National Academy of Sciences (at the time, only three women astronomers were members) and to win the highest American award in science, the National Medal of Science. Her master’s thesis, presented to a 1950 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, met with severe criticism, and her doctoral thesis was essentially ignored, though her conclusions were later validated. “Fame is fleeting,” Rubin said when she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. “My numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that’s my greatest compliment.”

 Sources:

1. http://innovators.vassar.edu/innovator.html?id=68; http://science.vassar.edu/women/

2. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/45424

This is a simulation of what scientists believe Jupiter’s atmosphere looks like from the inside. Source

It started out as a quick sketch… 4 days later! It’s a scene from one of my favorite books, #SoYouWantToBeAWizard by #dduane #ballpoint #sketch #illustration #dragon #youngwizards

<3

Young Wizards meta: In "So You Want to Be a Wizard", where is the Lone Power's HQ?

At the Top of the Rock observation deck, and I’m debating with my sister over which building was probably the one that held the Dark Book in the overshadowed Manhattan…

White dwarfs polluted with planetary debris

The Hubble Space Telescope has found chemical evidence for the building blocks for rocky planets in an extremely unusual place: the atmospheres of two burned-out stars. Called white dwarfs, these stars are small, dim shadows of stars that would have once been like our sun, and they reside 150 light-years from Earth in the young star cluster of Hyades. Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon and low levels of carbon, both of which are strong indicators of a rocky material similar to that which makes up Earth. “When these stars were born, they built planets,” said Jay Farihi, lead author of the study, “and there’s a good chance they currently retain some of them… Based on the silicon-to-carbon ratio in our study, we can actually say that this material is basically Earth-like.” The material is thought to have ended up in the atmosphere of these stars after they collapsed into white dwarfs, and the larger planets in their solar system nudged asteroids into star-grazing orbits. The stars’ gravitational pull tore the asteroids apart, and the pulverised debris fell into a ring around the white dwarfs and were eventually funnelled inwards to pollute the stars themselves. The discovery suggests that rocky planets may commonly assemble around stars, and may help us to understand what will happen to our solar system in five billion years, when our own sun burns out.

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

Lawrence M. Krauss (via thorosofmyr)