Black Holes Are NICER Than You Think!

Celebrate #BlackHoleFriday with Nurturing Baby Stars

Are you throwing all your money into a black hole today?

Forget Black Friday — celebrate #BlackHoleFriday with us and get sucked into this recent discovery of a black hole that may have sparked star births across multiple galaxies.

If confirmed, this discovery would represent the widest reach ever seen for a black hole acting as a stellar kick-starter — enhancing star formation more than one million light-years away. (One light year is equal to 6 trillion miles.)

A black hole is an extremely dense object from which no light can escape. The black hole’s immense gravity pulls in surrounding gas and dust. Sometimes, black holes hinder star birth. Sometimes — like perhaps in this case — they increase star birth.

Telescopes like our Chandra X-ray Observatory help us detect the X-rays produced by hot gas swirling around the black hole. Have more questions about black holes? Click here to learn more.

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

10 Amazing Space Discoveries by the World’s Largest Flying Observatory

On the night of May 26, 2010, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, the world’s largest flying observatory, first peered into the cosmos. Its mission: to study celestial objects and astronomical phenomena with infrared light. Many objects in space emit almost all their energy at infrared wavelengths. Often, they are invisible when observed in ordinary, visible light. Over the last decade, the aircraft’s 106-inch telescope has been used to study black holes, planets, galaxies, star-forming nebulas and more! The observations have led to major breakthroughs in astronomy, revolutionizing our understanding of the solar system and beyond. To celebrate its 10 years of exploration, here’s a look at the top 10 discoveries made by our telescope on a plane:

The Universe’s First Type of Molecule

Scientists believe that around 100,000 years after the big bang, helium and hydrogen combined to make a molecule called helium hydride. Its recent discovery confirms a key part of our basic understanding of the early universe.

A New View of the Milky Way

More than a pretty picture, this panorama of cosmic scale reveals details that can help explain how massive stars are born and what’s feeding our Milky Way galaxy’s supermassive black hole.

When Planets Collide

A double-star system that is more than 300 light-years away likely had an extreme collision between two of its rocky planets. A similar event in our own solar system may have formed our Moon.

How A Black Hole Feasts

Fear not, the dark, my friend. And let the feast begin! Magnetic fields in the Cygnus A galaxy are trapping material where it is close enough to be devoured by a hungry black hole.

Somewhere Like Home

The planetary system around Epsilon Eridani, a star located about 10 light-years away, has an architecture remarkably similar to our solar system. What’s more, its central star is a younger, fainter version of our Sun.

A Quiet Place

Black holes in many galaxies are actively consuming material, but our Milky Way galaxy’s central black hole is relatively quiet. Observations show magnetic fields may be directing material around, not into, the belly of the beast.

The Great Escape

Ever wonder how material leaves a galaxy? The wind flowing from the center of the Cigar Galaxy is so strong it’s pulling a magnetic field — and the mass of 50 to 60 million Suns — with it.

Exploding Star, New Worlds

What happens when a star goes boom? It turns out that supernova explosions can produce a substantial amount of material from which planets like Earth can form.

Stellar Sibling Rivalry

They say siblings need time and space to grow, but here’s one that really needs some room. A newborn star in the Orion Nebula is clearing a bubble of space around it, preventing any new luminous family members from forming nearby.

Clues to Life’s Building Blocks

Radiation from stars is making organic molecules in nebula NGC 7023, also known as the Iris Nebula, larger and more complex. The growth of these molecules is one of the steps that could lead to the emergence of life under the right circumstances.

SOFIA is a modified Boeing 747SP aircraft that allows astronomers to study the solar system and beyond in ways that are not possible with ground-based telescopes. Find out more about the mission at www.nasa.gov/SOFIA.

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

Ancient Bronze Age city reemerges from Iraq river after extreme drought

When an extreme drought caused a 3,400-year-old city to reemerge from a reservoir on the Tigris River in northern Iraq, archaeologists raced to excavate it before the water returned.

The Bronze Age city, at an archaeological site called Kemune, is a relic of the Mittani Empire (also spelled Mitanni Empire), an ancient kingdom that ruled parts of northern Mesopotamia from around 1500 B.C. to 1350 B.C. Researchers have long known of the remains of the city, but they can only investigate them during droughts.

Archaeologists partly excavated Kemune in 2018 and discovered a lost palace with 22-foot-high (7 meters) walls and chambers decorated in painted murals, Live Science previously reported. This time, researchers mapped most of the city, including an industrial complex and a multistory storage facility that likely held goods from all over the region, according to a statement released by the University of Tübingen in Germany. Read more.

Pls tell me interesting facts about stars

Interesting facts about stars:

Heavy stars blow up and make heavier elements like gold. So, every bit of gold you’ve ever seen, worn, or touched came from the dying explosion of a star. Other elements made in supernovae include anything on the periodic table heavier than iron

Heavy stars blow up when they start fusing iron. Meaning, the iron in your frying pan, car, and your blood killed a star at least 3 times the mass of the sun.

Some massive stars that die end up compressing all their mass into a star about 6 miles across, or about the size of a city. This is called a neutron star.

To put this in perspective, these stars start out 3 times as big as our sun and all of their mass is crushed into something the size of a city. The space between atoms is squished away, and the protons and electrons combine to form neutrons. 

Neutron stars are literally as dense as atomic nuclei

Most stars come in pairs

The most common stellar type is a red dwarf, which is a small, red, dim, cool star.

Honestly, that’s just the first few that come to mind, space is really crazy.

A Russian zoo is home to a unique animal - the liger. It is half-lioness, half-tiger. Mother Zita is pictured licking her one month old liliger cub 

TRAILER: “NO BLADE OF GRASS” (1970)

This adaptation of John Christopher’s novel “The Death of Grass” was co-written, directed and produced by Cornel Wilde. It’s a British/American co-production starring Nigel Davenport, Jean Wallace, and John Hamill. 

It follows the survivors of a plague that has hit London in the not too distant future - at least the future not too distant from 1970. When London is overwhelmed by food riots caused by a global famine, a man tries to lead his family to safety in Westmorland. The family is joined by a violent man and his girlfriend as they try to leave before martial law and complete anarchy ensue.

As we’ve been discussing in our ongoing podcast series “Sci Fi Time Capsule”, there’s no era of science fiction film quite like the 1970s.

“No Blade of Grass” is a bit of a rare film, but you can buy it on DVD or stream  it on Apple TV,  Amazon Prime Video, and The Criterion Channel.

Powehi: black hole gets a name meaning 'the adorned fathomless dark creation'

Language professor in Hawaii comes up with name welcomed by scientists who captured first image of galactic phenomenon

Powehi means “the adorned fathomless dark creation” or “embellished dark source of unending creation” and comes from the Kumulipo, an 18th century Hawaiian creation chant. Po is a profound dark source of unending creation, while wehi, meaning honoured with embellishments, is one of the chant’s descriptions of po, the newspaper reported.

Faint starlight in Hubble images reveals distribution of dark matter

Astronomers using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have employed a revolutionary method to detect dark matter in galaxy clusters. The method allows astronomers to “see” the distribution of dark matter more accurately than any other method used to date and it could possibly be used to explore the ultimate nature of dark matter. The results were published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In recent decades astronomers have tried to understand the true nature of the mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the Universe – dark matter – and to map its distribution in the Universe. Now two astronomers from Australia and Spain have used data from the Frontier Fields programme of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to accurately study the distribution of dark matter.

Keep reading

Neutron Stars Collide

The recent detection of two neutron stars colliding has sent waves through spacetime and the astronomical community.

You may have seen headlines in the news and not really know why this is such a big deal.

Here’s the Sparknotes version:

A while back a thing called “gravitational waves” were observed for the first time. These are fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime that propagate out from their source just like light, i.e. radially/like a pebble dropped in water. General relativity shows us that the acceleration of objects with mass cause this event to occur.

Until fairly recently these have been too difficult to observe and in fact Einstein didn’t think we’d ever be able to. A series of laser interferometers have disproved that assumption. Using high-precision analysis of how the lasers shift as a gravitational wave moves through them scientists can now see the small movements in the universe that are gravitational waves.

Importantly, we now have three such observatories capable of working together. Known as the “LIGO-Virgo” team, two observatories in the U.S. and one in Italy detected these shifting in spacetime. Three is a pretty magical number in coordinating detections like this because you can then triangulate where the signal comes from and…

BINGO! Within hours optical observatories were zeroing in on the predicted source of these spacetime fluctuations. Indeed, they confirmed the presence of a previously unseen glow:

What you’re looking at is the glow of two neutron stars colliding into each other. This explosion has the energy of approximately 260,000,000 suns.

Each of these stars has such a large mass that the waves in spacetime are actually detectable from a distance of 140 million light-years away.

Impressive, right? Although you might agree, this still begs the question of what exactly we’ve learned from this event. Well - a lot. Since this is the first observation we have made with both gravitational wave observatories and more traditional astronomical observatories (i.e. light detecting ones) we’ve been able to put some numbers on the phenomenon. Here are some of the things we’ve learned:

1) Gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light!

2) A huge portion of heavier elements (like gold and uranium!) may have their origins in neutron star collisions! Nuclear synthesis in stars more typical like the sun is restricted to closer to 10% of the star’s mass being able to fuse elements together into new ones. This process is actually quite inefficient (actually, YOU are a more efficient radiator than the sun!) and it becomes more difficult for a star to fuse the heavier elements. Before this event we didn’t have a good way of explaining why we found so much more heavy stuff than stellar nuclear synthesis could account for. Now? Baboom! This neutron star collision resulted in the synthesis of so much gold that it’s about 150 times more massive than the Earth! Cha-Ching!

So if you’re an amateur (or professional, I suppose) astronomer and you want to see this collision, now dubbed GW170817, and you build a little radio telescope (another post!), you’ll be able to detect this collision for the next 5-10 years due to the afterglow.

(Image credit: NASA and ESA)