Space Engine On Pillowfort Coming Soon

Cold Green World

Picture of the day 2 - November 10, 2018

A cold ice-giant and one it’s moons passing in front of the disk of the Milky Way.

Pictures of the day 2 - November 24, 2019

I have to admit, this planet is probably to closest reminder to me of Christmas. This purple-colored Earth with violet seas and a deep purple atmosphere is quite unique. Whats even more fascinating about the planet is its brilliant green sunsets and sunrises.

Space Engine System ID: RS 5581-42-1-2-487 6 (Unedited)

High Resolution Pics

Purple Earth

Lone Moon

Kind of Christmassy

Weird Atmosphere

Green Sunset

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.

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

Picture of the day 2 - November 15, 2018

Shepard moon orbiting within a ring gap of a giant planet.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about space or astronomy in general?

I’m not sure which is the biggest mistake, but I believe that one of them is the colors that are imposed on the images of planets, nebulae and other bodies of space. Many images are not real colors, many of them are fake colors. False colors are used to differentiate, some particular type of material, temperature, wavelength, chemical or mineral variations, and other factors.

Mercury with colors in visible light

Color-enhanced, this image represents chemical and mineral variations across the planet: tan areas are lava-formed plains, and blue regions show material that reflects little light.

This image shows two different views of the Horsehead Nebula. On the right is a view of the nebula in visible light, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile . The new image on the left shows the nebula in the infrared, using observations from Hubble’s high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3.

Some illustrations of space can also deceive or confuse, like images of exoplanets, where in fact we do not know for sure what it would be, since we can not have such clear images to the point where we can see them closely, and other things like representation of the curvature of space time, which shows a curvature in 2D, would actually be in 3D, but this is a little harder to visualize.

Curvature of the space-time fabric in 2D

Curvature of the space-time fabric in 3D

An annotated view of the Beta Pictoris system.

Artist’s impression of Beta Pictoris b. The debris disk around the parent star can be seen.

You can learn more about it by clicking here!

Various Views Of The Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) (M8)

Insight System - Post 1

First post of the Insight System.

The Insight system (named after the newest Mars lander) is a wide-spaced binary system consisting of a yellow G1V type star (Insight A) and a dimmer orange K5V type star (Insight B), that orbit each other in an elliptical orbit at an average distance of 192.3 AU. Both stars complete 1 orbit around each other every 2,432 years.

Insight A is 1.6 times brighter than our sun, and Insight B is only 1/6th the brightness of our sun.

Both stars have their own solar systems.

My first post if of the 6 planets orbiting the dimmer star Insight B.

First Planet Insight B-I (1.1 Earth masses)

Second Planet Insight B-II (5.3 Earth Masses)

Third Planet Insight B-III (11.7 Jupiter Masses)

Fourth Planet Insight B-IV (0.20 Jupiter Masses)

Fifth Planet Insight B-V (0.27 Earth masses)

Outer-most planet Insight B-VI (1.42 Jupiter Masses)

More pictures to come soon.

Twin Sunset

Picture of the Day 2 - October 22,2018

Two sun’s setting viewed from planetary orbit.

Double Moons

Picture of the Day - October 17, 2018

A double transit of two moons across the face of a giant ringed planet.

Picture of the Day 2 - October 17,2018

Another wider angle shot

Pictures of the day - November 28, 2018

Ringed Earth-sized moon with a thin foggy atmosphere.

High Resolution Pictures

Violet Rings

Closeup

Sky

Thin Atmosphere

Crater fog