After About A Decade Of Slowly Making Friends With All The Local Crows In Our Neighborhood By Feeding

Wow, it’s Friday! Have a great weekend. 

Dunkleosteus model featured in ep. 12 of Shelf Life: 6 Extinctions in 6 Minutes.

Gravity’s Rainbow by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

Decoding Nebulae

We can agree that nebulae are some of the most majestic-looking objects in the universe. But what are they exactly? Nebulae are giant clouds of gas and dust in space. They’re commonly associated with two parts of the life cycle of stars: First, they can be nurseries forming new baby stars. Second, expanding clouds of gas and dust can mark where stars have died.

Not all nebulae are alike, and their different appearances tell us what's happening around them. Since not all nebulae emit light of their own, there are different ways that the clouds of gas and dust reveal themselves. Some nebulae scatter the light of stars hiding in or near them. These are called reflection nebulae and are a bit like seeing a street lamp illuminate the fog around it.

In another type, called emission nebulae, stars heat up the clouds of gas, whose chemicals respond by glowing in different colors. Think of it like a neon sign hanging in a shop window!

Finally there are nebulae with dust so thick that we’re unable to see the visible light from young stars shine through it. These are called dark nebulae.

Our missions help us see nebulae and identify the different elements that oftentimes light them up.

The Hubble Space Telescope is able to observe the cosmos in multiple wavelengths of light, ranging from ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared. Hubble peered at the iconic Eagle Nebula in visible and infrared light, revealing these grand spires of dust and countless stars within and around them.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory studies the universe in X-ray light! The spacecraft is helping scientists see features within nebulae that might otherwise be hidden by gas and dust when viewed in longer wavelengths like visible and infrared light. In the Crab Nebula, Chandra sees high-energy X-rays from a pulsar (a type of rapidly spinning neutron star, which is the crushed, city-sized core of a star that exploded as a supernova).

The James Webb Space Telescope will primarily observe the infrared universe. With Webb, scientists will peer deep into clouds of dust and gas to study how stars and planetary systems form.

The Spitzer Space Telescope studied the cosmos for over 16 years before retiring in 2020. With the help of its detectors, Spitzer revealed unknown materials hiding in nebulae — like oddly-shaped molecules and soot-like materials, which were found in the California Nebula.

Studying nebulae helps scientists understand the life cycle of stars. Did you know our Sun got its start in a stellar nursery? Over 4.5 billion years ago, some gas and dust in a nebula clumped together due to gravity, and a baby Sun was born. The process to form a baby star itself can take a million years or more!

After billions more years, our Sun will eventually puff into a huge red giant star before leaving behind a beautiful planetary nebula (so-called because astronomers looking through early telescopes thought they resembled planets), along with a small, dense object called a white dwarf that will cool down very slowly. In fact, we don’t think the universe is old enough yet for any white dwarfs to have cooled down completely.

Since the Sun will live so much longer than us, scientists can't observe its whole life cycle directly ... but they can study tons of other stars and nebulae at different phases of their lives and draw conclusions about where our Sun came from and where it's headed. While studying nebulae, we’re seeing the past, present, and future of our Sun and trillions of others like it in the cosmos.

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Savage 10 metre fish of the Silurian and Devonian Heavily armoured piscine torpedoes with fierce teeth roamed the oceans in the early days of fishes, in fact the Devonian era is called the age of fishes by palaeontologists as they had a huge burst of speciation and diversified to fill most marine ecological niches during this time. The now extinct (fortunately) class known as placodermi (plate skin in Greek) was the apex predator of these long gone waters, and thrived from 438 to 358 million years ago, dying out at the end Devonian mass extinction (one of the lesser ones).

Keep reading

Look at the bottom gif! The long tentacles are pushed out and parallel to each other while the jelly is motionless. This behavior is predatory, which means that the Marianas Trench Jelly is set in attack mode! 

Read more about the 2016 discovery of the Marianas Trench Jelly

Images of Jupiter taken by JunoCam on NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Mission Juno, Jason Major, Luca Fornaciari,   Gerald Eichstädt

Tarantula Nebula by NASA Hubble

“You’re basically seeing all of the sunrises and sunsets across the world, at once, being reflected off the surface of the moon” – NASA

if you think the ocean now is a scary fuck then you haven’t seen the scary fuck that is the prehistoric ocean

so im watching the history channel on youtube (i could tell you so much on short nosed bears rn) but i just finished watching this thing called the mosasaur and its your pretty basic mega water dinosaur, 50 feet long, eel tail, sonar, doesn’t chew its food etc, but then it got dark

these shits were top predators, no competition whatsoever…..except from themselves. the narrator was saying that even though there was nothing to oppose them, they somehow continued to evolve into like fifty 50 different species of this mega predator. And its really cool because it started as a three foot lizard and in just 6 million years it became “the ultimate success story of evolution”. 

they had these weird funky teeth too. not only were they really big and strong like you’d expect but they had teeth in the roof of them mouth cuz they’d slide their dinner down their mouth like a conveyer belt. and since their so big you’d think wow how did no one see them? apparently sea creatures are frickin blind or something bc this megabeasty would just lie on the frickin bottom of the ocean and wait for something to swim up. then it would propel its ass up with this snaky tail and just boosh i ated you

but mosasaurs kept evolving even though they were literally the top predator. why is that?? that doesn’t happen in nature. turns out they were causing themselves to evolve. turns out they’re one of the only species (including humans) that naturally commits murder aka kills their own kind. they’ll bite each others heads until they can get a good grip then one of them snaps the neck. and they didn’t even eat the other guy. they did it. for. fun. (apparently they thrive on violence????)

and im over here going like wtf. but then it got worse. these scary ass motherfuckers began to go anywhere they pleased. they evolved even more and then moved into fresh water. like swamps and rivers. thats terrifying. NOTHING On eARth could stop them. 

Nothing on Earth ;) aka enter the extinction comet

BUT then I learned that even the bigass dino killing comet didn’t even kill the thing. They literally had to starve to death because all of their prey died out. NOPE not them. THey didn’t die out because they’re like dinosaur gods or some shit. EVERYTHING DIED BUT THEM

Saturn, rings and satellites. Images taken by the Cassini spacecraft.

Imagem credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/ (Precessed by: Kevin M. Gill)