Incredible photograph of the Sun, with the spicules that cover most of the Sun clearly visible as the carpet like texture of the surface. Near the top, several active sunspots can also be seen as the black marks on the surface. Sunspots usually appear in pairs: being created due to magnetic activity, each sunspot of a pair having the opposite magnetic pole of the other.
okay y’all, you can click through the image on a blog, or click here to find my powerpoint on google drive. feel free to look through it, talk to me about it, talk to each other about it, whatever.
i have not edited this in the slightest, so take it all with a grain of salt. do have a look at the “notes” field for most of the slides; that’s where i wrote out (in varying degrees of detail/clarity) my thoughts on the subject at hand, but YMMV with that.
all that said please do credit me if you use this stuff for anything. and if you find any of my sources in the presentation lacking in citations, let me know!
feel free to join in the conversations over on slack (link is for signup, then find the #linguistics channel), or on tumblr! do also keep this post and other posts that involve speculation with respect to the Speech tagged with #not you DD, so that everybody’s butts are covered on that front.
thanks, cousins!
I was so cool and fine and normal about Dairine Callahan at age ten (I was NOT, I was SO NOT NORMAL, and I have never become normal about her, she is a childhood blorbo and I have been rotating her like a 90’s windows screen saver for twenty-two years)
Io is the first Galilean moon of Jupiter, it is slightly larger than Earth’s moon. Io experiences intense tidal heating due to its elliptical orbit and orbital resonance with Europa and Ganymede. This makes Io the most geologically active moon in our solar system. Io’s interior is composed of molten iron sulphide, and the surface is a crust of sulfur and silicon. Io has more than 400 active volcanoes, which can eject lava plumes more than 500 kilometers above the surface. Some of the material from Io’s volcanic eruptions leaves the moon and orbits Jupiter, producing a plasma torus. Io also has lakes of lava called paterae, which can also create eruptions. The most dramatic paterae are Loki, Tvashtar, and Tupan. The constant volcanic activity creates a thin atmosphere of sulfur dioxide and sodium chloride. Io is an interesting model for exoplanets with intense geological activity, such as COROT-7b.
The galaxy sings in B flat. Fifty-seven octaves below middle C, hundreds of thousands of tiny stars with little worlds trailing atmospheres in elliptical orbits. Double-star systems, triple-star, more; planets, civilisations, dark matter, tangible matter, all circling, swarming, humming together in one enormous note, not bumping together but carrying a wave from the centre of their island universe, expanding out into space… Sound cannot exist in a vacuum. This is a widely known fact. And space is a vacuum, sure. But only when you look at it from here, from our tiny little world. Close your eyes, zoom out, and look at the celestial spheres from their view; and space isn’t so thin after all. Close your eyes, zoom in, and even our dense atmosphere is just atoms in a vacuum of their own. Sound as we know it, sure, that doesn’t exist outside our little stardust orb. It’s too small, too fragile. Too like ourselves. But where there’s movement and things to move, there’s sound. Sound waves can be small, only a few thousand nanometres trough-to-crest. And they can be massive, playing the celestial music of the spheres. Because in all that movement, the pulses of our discs and and lights and gravity wells, the stars dance. We are sound, the particles that carry a wave thousands of light-years across. We are the music of the celestial spheres. The galaxy sings in B flat.
Source
anexpansionlikegold
NATASHA I DEMAND YOU HAVE THESE FEELS WITH ME
(via reconfemmandoforares)
Kepler-62 Has Two Water Worlds Circling in its Habitable Zone
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered two planets that are the most similar in size to Earth ever found in a star’s habitable zone — the temperate region where water could exist as a liquid.
The finding, reported online today in Science1, demonstrates that Kepler is closing in on its goal of finding a true twin of Earth beyond the Solar System, says theorist Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is a member of the Kepler discovery team.
Both planets orbit the star Kepler-62, which is about two-thirds the size of the Sun and lies about 1,200 light years (368 parsecs) from the Solar System. The outermost planet from the star, Kepler-62f, has a diameter that is 41% larger than Earth’s and takes 267 days to circle its star. The inner planet, Kepler-62e, has a diameter 61% larger than Earth’s and a shorter orbit of 122 days.
Kepler detected the planets by recording the tiny decrease in starlight that occurs when either of them passes in front of their parent star. Astronomers used those measurements to calculate the planets’ relative size compared to that star.
Continue: Worlds Apart
You know, I think the biggest disappointment of my childhood was not failing to receive my Hogwart’s letter (or the American equivalent). I mean yes, there was a stretch the summer I was eleven where I was hopeful, but September first came around and I sort of shrugged and accepted it (possibly with some relief because I didn’t want to go so far away from Mama and Da).
No. The real disappointment was that the Wizard’s Oath from Diane Duane’s Young Wizards never took. I don’t know how many times I read that oath out loud and then held my breath and hoped. Hoped, hoped, hoped that I would wake up the next morning and the book wouldn’t just be Nita and Kit’s adventure, but would be in the Speech. It never was.
Keep reading
rebloging from my main blog.
And I don’t want to lose you, cousins, so I’ve made us a Lifeboat, if you will.
https://discord.gg/83Fz8KM
I’ve never heard of us having a discord server, but if an established one already exists, please someone link me.
A personal temporospatial claudication for Young Wizards fandom-related posts and general space nonsense.
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