Neptune ♆

Picture of the Day 2 - November 9, 2018

Narrow sea cuts through the forests of a life supporting world with red-colored vegetation.

Front row seat to a galactic merger.

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Evening of the Cosmos. Widescreen Wallpapers 1440 x 900.

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Using All of Our Senses in Space

Today, we and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the detection of light and a high-energy cosmic particle that both came from near a black hole billions of trillions of miles from Earth. This discovery is a big step forward in the field of multimessenger astronomy.

But wait — what is multimessenger astronomy? And why is it a big deal?

People learn about different objects through their senses: sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell. Similarly, multimessenger astronomy allows us to study the same astronomical object or event through a variety of “messengers,” which include light of all wavelengths, cosmic ray particles, gravitational waves, and neutrinos — speedy tiny particles that weigh almost nothing and rarely interact with anything. By receiving and combining different pieces of information from these different messengers, we can learn much more about these objects and events than we would from just one.

Lights, Detector, Action!  

Much of what we know about the universe comes just from different wavelengths of light. We study the rotations of galaxies through radio waves and visible light, investigate the eating habits of black holes through X-rays and gamma rays, and peer into dusty star-forming regions through infrared light.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which recently turned 10, studies the universe by detecting gamma rays — the highest-energy form of light. This allows us to investigate some of the most extreme objects in the universe.

Last fall, Fermi was involved in another multimessenger finding — the very first detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source, two merging neutron stars. In that instance, light and gravitational waves were the messengers that gave us a better understanding of the neutron stars and their explosive merger into a black hole.

Fermi has also advanced our understanding of blazars, which are galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers. Black holes are famous for drawing material into them. But with blazars, some material near the black hole shoots outward in a pair of fast-moving jets. With blazars, one of those jets points directly at us!

Multimessenger Astronomy is Cool

Today’s announcement combines another pair of messengers. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory lies a mile under the ice in Antarctica and uses the ice itself to detect neutrinos. When IceCube caught a super-high-energy neutrino and traced its origin to a specific area of the sky, they alerted the astronomical community.

Fermi completes a scan of the entire sky about every three hours, monitoring thousands of blazars among all the bright gamma-ray sources it sees. For months it had observed a blazar producing more gamma rays than usual. Flaring is a common characteristic in blazars, so this did not attract special attention. But when the alert from IceCube came through about a neutrino coming from that same patch of sky, and the Fermi data were analyzed, this flare became a big deal!

IceCube, Fermi, and followup observations all link this neutrino to a blazar called TXS 0506+056. This event connects a neutrino to a supermassive black hole for the very first time.  

Why is this such a big deal? And why haven’t we done it before? Detecting a neutrino is hard since it doesn’t interact easily with matter and can travel unaffected great distances through the universe. Neutrinos are passing through you right now and you can’t even feel a thing!

The neat thing about this discovery — and multimessenger astronomy in general — is how much more we can learn by combining observations. This blazar/neutrino connection, for example, tells us that it was protons being accelerated by the blazar’s jet. Our study of blazars, neutrinos, and other objects and events in the universe will continue with many more exciting multimessenger discoveries to come in the future.

Want to know more? Read the story HERE.

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Earth-Like World

Picture of the Day 2 - October 16, 2018

Here I come across the most Earth-like planet to date. The planet is covered in green vegetation, blue oceans and ice caps at the poles. This planet is located near the galactic core; therefore, the sky is full of bright stars, even more so than globular clusters.

First pictures from the M59 galaxy. Here I come across a 7 planet system orbiting an orange giant. All the planets in this system are experiencing the effects of the expanding sun, and orbit relatively close to the sun. The outer-most ice giant orbits just 3.62 AU from the sun.

Space Engine System ID: RS-5581-21-3-270-585

I just unfortunately found out that Tumblr does not allow posts with links in them to show up on searches. This is very problematic for me since I like posting 4K resolution pics on here. Anyone have any suggestions on how to keep Tumblr from reducing image sizes so I do not have to add links to my posts?

High Resolution Pics

Partially molten moon

Galaxy NGC 4429 photo bombs this moon shot.

Molten world

Rising giant

Burnt desert

Solar Atmosphere

These will be the last pics from the Large Magellanic Cloud Galaxy. I will have my next galaxy picked out soon.

High Resolution Pictures

Pale green titan-like world

Three suns

Cratered world with a thin atmosphere

White sun

Binary sunset

Two airless worlds

Pictures of the day - November 26, 2018

A system of 6 planet’s orbiting a rare dim carbon star that has swelled into a red giant. All of the planet’s have been roasted by the star. The star has a very low surface temperature; therefore, all of the planets have a red-tint due to the lack of blue colored light.

The outer-most planets form a double planet system which consist of a Mars-like world orbited by an ocean world. The ocean world once being a frozen ice-covered world melted the by expanded sun.

Space Engine System ID: RS 5581-42-4-1201-1122

High Resolution Pictures:

Inner-most world

Massive giant covering the sky

Roasted Ice-giant and its moons

Another burnt world

Outer-most Double Planets

Hurricane

Glowing Sky

Picture of the Day 2 - November 4, 2018

Auroras glow brilliantly over a lunar sky with the Milky way Galaxy looming large.