I Teleport Into Rirhath B

The city breathing, burning, living the life they had preserved. Ten million lives and more. If something should happen to all that life- how terrible! Nita gulped for control as she remembered Fred’s word of just this morning, an eternity ago. And this was what being a wizard was about. Keeping terrible things from happening, even when it hurts. Not just power, or control of what ordinary people couldn’t control, or delight in being able to make strange things happen. Those were the side effects- not the reason, the purpose.

8tracks is Radio, rediscovered - blood in the water i sing; (38min) by maerad| music tags: young wizards, deep wizardry, and the song of twelve | a mix for the song of twelve.

awesome playlist for deep wizardry. listen, cousins!

Star Forming Region S106

Massive star IRS 4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born only about 100,000 years ago, material streaming out from this newborn star has formed the nebula dubbed Sharpless 2-106 Nebula (S106), pictured above. A large disk of dust and gas orbiting Infrared Source 4 (IRS 4), visible in dark red near the image center, gives the nebula an hourglass or butterfly shape. S106 gas near IRS 4 acts as an emission nebula as it emits light after being ionized, while dust far from IRS 4 reflects light from the central star and so acts as a reflection nebula. Detailed inspection of images like the above image has revealed hundreds of low-mass brown dwarf stars lurking in the nebula’s gas. S106 spans about 2 light-years and lies about 2000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

Space is so creepy and wonderful. Who the hell needs hell when there’s space.

Like there’s an old constellation called Eridanus that you can see in the southern sky, and its not a very interesting constellation. It’s a river. It’s actually the water that’s pouring out of Aquarius, so in the sky it’s kind of boring. It’s a path of stars.

But within Eridanus, in between the stars, there’s a place where the background radiation is unexplainably cold. Because after the Big Bang, there was all this light that scattered everywhere, and it’s the oldest light in the universe, but we can’t see it. It’s so dim that it only shows up as a glow of microwaves, so to us, it just looks like the blackness of the night.

But there’s this spot in Eridanus where that little glow of ancient microwaves isn’t what it should be. It’s cold and dark.

And it’s enormous. Like a billion light year across. Of mostly just emptiness. And we don’t know why. One theory is that it’s simply a huge void, like a place where there are no galaxies. Voids like that do exist. Most of them are smaller, but they’re a sort of predictable part of the structure of the universe. The cold spot in Eridanus, if it were a void, would be so enormous that it would change how we understand the universe. 

But another theory is that this cold spot is actually the place where a parallel universe is tangled with our own. 

This is literally my favorite ever. Best post. Good.

King Arthur: I actually think he was probably not a wizard. But he definitely knew about wizardry and did his best to support it.

Gawain: Definitely a wizard. DEFINITELY a wizard. Specializes in liaising with nonhuman species living on earth, go-to diplomat when aliens show up.

Kay: Nope, Kay’s...

"With!"

Ocean on the moon Europe

Scientists' consensus is that a layer of liquid water exists beneath Europa's surface, and that heat from tidal flexing allows the subsurface ocean to remain liquid.

Europa's surface temperature averages about 110 K (−160 °C; −260 °F) at the equator and only 50 K (−220 °C; −370 °F) at the poles, keeping Europa's icy crust as hard as granite. The first hints of a subsurface ocean came from theoretical considerations of tidal heating (a consequence of Europa's slightly eccentric orbit and orbital resonance with the other Galilean moons). Galileo imaging team members argue for the existence of a subsurface ocean from analysis of Voyager and Galileo images.

The most dramatic example is "chaos terrain", a common feature on Europa's surface that some interpret as a region where the subsurface ocean has melted through the icy crust.

The thin-ice model suggests that Europa's ice shell may be only a few kilometers thick. However, most planetary scientists conclude that this model considers only those topmost layers of Europa's crust that behave elastically when affected by Jupiter's tides.

The Hubble Space Telescope acquired an image of Europa in 2012 that was interpreted to be a plume of water vapour erupting from near its south pole The image suggests the plume may be 200 km (120 mi) high, or more than 20 times the height of Mt. Everest.

Life?

So far, there is no evidence that life exists on Europa, but Europa has emerged as one of the most likely locations in the Solar System for potential habitability. Life could exist in its under-ice ocean, perhaps in an environment similar to Earth's deep-ocean hydrothermal vents. Even if Europa lacks volcanic hydrothermal activity, a 2016 NASA study found that Earth-like levels of hydrogen and oxygen could be produced through processes related to serpentinization and ice-derived oxidants, which do not directly involve volcanism.

In 2015, scientists announced that salt from a subsurface ocean may likely be coating some geological features on Europa, suggesting that the ocean is interacting with the seafloor. This may be important in determining if Europa could be habitable. The likely presence of liquid water in contact with Europa's rocky mantle has spurred calls to send a probe there.

Missions

Europa Clipper is an interplanetary mission in development by NASA comprising an orbiter. Set for a launch in October 2024, the spacecraft is being developed to study the Galilean moon Europa through a series of flybys while in orbit around Jupiter.

The Europa Lander is a proposed astrobiology mission concept by NASA to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. If funded and developed as a large strategic science mission, it would be launched in 2027 to complement the studies by the Europa Clipper orbiter mission and perform analyses on site. NASA's budget for fiscal year 2021 neither mandates nor allocates any funds to the mission leaving its future uncertain.

The objectives of the mission are to search for biosignatures at the subsurface ≈10 cm, to characterize the composition of non-ice near-subsurface material, and determine the proximity of liquid water and recently erupted material near the lander's location.

source

My friend made a uquiz that assigns you a whale species. Take it. Take it now.

Gorgeous ‘Pillars Of Creation’ Shine In New Hi-Def Hubble Photo