Science Facts - Blog Posts

Summer Starts in the Northern Hemisphere!

Today is the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere -- the solstice! People located in the Northern Hemisphere will have the longest day of the year today, and people located in the Southern Hemisphere will have the shortest day of the year.

The angle between the Earth’s orbit and the axis of its rotation creates our seasons, tilting each hemisphere toward the Sun during summer in that half of the Earth. This is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and winter in the Southern Hemisphere. The other half of the year, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, creating winter in the north and summer in the south.

Solstices happen twice per year, at the points in Earth’s orbit where this tilt is most pronounced.

These days are the longest (in the summer hemisphere) and shortest (in the winter hemisphere) of the year, and mark the change of seasons to summer and winter, respectively.

For more Earth science, follow NASA Earth on Twitter, on Facebook, or on the web.

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You’re Always Surrounded by Neutrinos!

This second, as you’re reading these words, trillions of tiny particles are hurtling toward you! No, you don’t need to brace yourself. They’re passing through you right now. And now. And now. These particles are called neutrinos, and they’re both everywhere in the cosmos and also extremely hard to find.

Neutrinos are fundamental particles, like electrons, so they can’t be broken down into smaller parts. They also outnumber all the atoms in the universe. (Atoms are made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks … which maybe we’ll talk about another time.) The only thing that outnumbers neutrinos are all the light waves left over from the birth of the universe! 

Credit: Photo courtesy of the Pauli Archive, CERN

Physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed the existence of the neutrino, nearly a century ago. Enrico Fermi coined the name, which means “little neutral one” in Italian, because these particles have no electrical charge and nearly no mass.

Despite how many there are, neutrinos are really hard to study. They travel at almost the speed of light and rarely interact with other matter. Out of the universe’s four forces, ghostly neutrinos are only affected by gravity and the weak force. The weak force is about 10,000 times weaker than the electromagnetic force, which affects electrically charged particles. Because neutrinos carry no charge, move almost as fast as light, and don’t interact easily with other matter, they can escape some really bizarre and extreme places where even light might struggle getting out – like dying stars!

Through the weak force, neutrinos interact with other tiny fundamental particles: electrons, muons [mew-ons], and taus [rhymes with “ow”]. (These other particles are also really cool, but for right now, you just need to know that they’re there.) Scientists actually never detect neutrinos directly. Instead they find signals from these other particles. So they named the three types, or flavors, of neutrinos after them.

Neutrinos are made up of each of these three flavors, but cycle between them as they travel. Imagine going to the store to buy rocky road ice cream, which is made of chocolate ice cream, nuts, and marshmallows. When you get home, you find that it’s suddenly mostly marshmallows. Then in your bowl it’s mostly nuts. But when you take a bite, it’s just chocolate! That’s a little bit like what happens to neutrinos as they zoom through the cosmos.

Credit: CERN

On Earth, neutrinos are produced when unstable atoms decay, which happens in the planet’s core and nuclear reactors. (The first-ever neutrino detection happened in a nuclear reactor in 1955!) They’re also created by particle accelerators and high-speed particle collisions in the atmosphere. (Also, interestingly, the potassium in a banana emits neutrinos – but no worries, bananas are perfectly safe to eat!)

Most of the neutrinos around Earth come from the Sun – about 65 billion every second for every square centimeter. These are produced in the Sun’s core where the immense pressure squeezes together hydrogen to produce helium. This process, called nuclear fusion, creates the energy that makes the Sun shine, as well as neutrinos.

The first neutrinos scientists detected from outside the Milky Way were from SN 1987A, a supernova that occurred only 168,000 light-years away in a neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. (That makes it one of the closest supernovae scientists have observed.) The light from this explosion reached us in 1987, so it was the first supernova modern astronomers were able to study in detail. The neutrinos actually arrived a few hours before the light from the explosion because of the forces we talked about earlier. The particles escape the star’s core before any of the other effects of the collapse ripple to the surface. Then they travel in pretty much a straight line – all because they don’t interact with other matter very much.

Credit: Martin Wolf, IceCube/NSF

How do we detect particles that are so tiny and fast – especially when they rarely interact with other matter? Well, the National Science Foundation decided to bury a bunch of detectors in a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice to create the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. The neutrinos interact with other particles in the ice through the weak force and turn into muons, electrons, and taus. The new particles gain the neutrinos’ speed and actually travel faster than light in the ice, which produces a particular kind of radiation IceCube can detect. (Although they would still be slower than light in the vacuum of space.)

In 2013, IceCube first detected high-energy neutrinos, which have energies up to 1,000 times greater than those produced by Earth’s most powerful particle collider. But scientists were puzzled about where exactly these particles came from. Then, in 2017, IceCube detected a high-energy neutrino from a monster black hole powering a high-speed particle jet at a galaxy’s center billions of light-years away. It was accompanied by a flash of gamma rays, the highest energy form of light.

But particle jets aren’t the only place we can find these particles. Scientists recently announced that another high-energy neutrino came from a black hole shredding an unlucky star that strayed too close. The event didn’t produce the neutrino when or how scientists expected, though, so they’ve still got a lot to learn about these mysterious particles!

Keep up with other exciting announcements about our universe by following NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

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May the Four Forces Be With You!

May the force be with you? Much to learn you still have, padawan. In our universe it would be more appropriate to say, “May the four forces be with you.”

There are four fundamental forces that bind our universe and its building blocks together. Two of them are easy to spot — gravity keeps your feet on the ground while electromagnetism keeps your devices running. The other two are a little harder to see directly in everyday life, but without them, our universe would look a lot different!

Let’s explore these forces in a little more detail.

Gravity: Bringing the universe together

If you jump up, gravity brings you back down to Earth. It also keeps the solar system together … and our galaxy, and our local group of galaxies and our supercluster of galaxies.

Gravity pulls everything together. Everything, from the bright centers of the universe to the planets farthest from them. In fact, you (yes, you!) even exert a gravitational force on a galaxy far, far away. A tiny gravitational force, but a force nonetheless.

Credit: NASA and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing and B. O'Shea, M. Norman

Despite its well-known reputation, gravity is actually the weakest of the four forces. Its strength increases with the mass of the two objects involved. And its range is infinite, but the strength drops off as the square of the distance. If you and a friend measured your gravitational tug on each other and then doubled the distance between you, your new gravitational attraction would just be a quarter of what it was. So, you have to be really close together, or really big, or both, to exert a lot of gravity.

Even so, because its range is infinite, gravity is responsible for the formation of the largest structures in our universe! Planetary systems, galaxies and clusters of galaxies all formed because gravity brought them together.

Gravity truly surrounds us and binds us together.

Electromagnetism: Lighting the way

You know that shock you get on a dry day after shuffling across the carpet? The electricity that powers your television? The light that illuminates your room on a dark night? Those are all the work of electromagnetism. As the name implies, electromagnetism is the force that includes both electricity and magnetism.

Electromagnetism keeps electrons orbiting the nucleus at the center of atoms and allows chemical compounds to form (you know, the stuff that makes up us and everything around us). Electromagnetic waves are also known as light. Once started, an electromagnetic wave will travel at the speed of light until it interacts with something (like your eye) — so it will be there to light up the dark places.

Like gravity, electromagnetism works at infinite distances. And, also like gravity, the electromagnetic force between two objects falls as the square of their distance. However, unlike gravity, electromagnetism doesn't just attract. Whether it attracts or repels depends on the electric charge of the objects involved. Two negative charges or two positive charges repel each other; one of each, and they attract each other. Plus. Minus. A balance.

This is what happens with common household magnets. If you hold them with the same “poles” together, they resist each other. On the other hand, if you hold a magnet with opposite poles together — snap! — they’ll attract each other.

Electromagnetism might just explain the relationship between a certain scruffy-looking nerf-herder and a princess.

Strong Force: Building the building blocks

Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The strong force is where things get really small. So small, that you can’t see it at work directly. But don’t let your eyes deceive you. Despite acting only on short distances, the strong force holds together the building blocks of the atoms, which are, in turn, the building blocks of everything we see around us.

Like gravity, the strong force always attracts, but that’s really where their similarities end. As the name implies, the force is strong with the strong force. It is the strongest of the four forces. It brings together protons and neutrons to form the nucleus of atoms — it has to be stronger than electromagnetism to do it, since all those protons are positively charged. But not only that, the strong force holds together the quarks — even tinier particles — to form those very protons and neutrons.

However, the strong force only works on very, very, very small distances. How small? About the scale of a medium-sized atom’s nucleus. For those of you who like the numbers, that’s about 10-15 meters, or 0.000000000000001 meters. That’s about a hundred billion times smaller than the width of a human hair! Whew.

Its tiny scale is why you don’t directly see the strong force in your day-to-day life. Judge a force by its physical size, do you? 

Weak Force: Keeping us in sunshine

If you thought it was hard to see the strong force, the weak force works on even smaller scales — 1,000 times smaller. But it, too, is extremely important for life as we know it. In fact, the weak force plays a key role in keeping our Sun shining.

But what does the weak force do? Well … that requires getting a little into the weeds of particle physics. Here goes nothing! We mentioned quarks earlier — these are tiny particles that, among other things, make up protons and neutrons. There are six types of quarks, but the two that make up protons and neutrons are called up and down quarks. The weak force changes one quark type into another. This causes neutrons to decay into protons (or the other way around) while releasing electrons and ghostly particles called neutrinos.

So for example, the weak force can turn a down quark in a neutron into an up quark, which will turn that neutron into a proton. If that neutron is in an atom’s nucleus, the electric charge of the nucleus changes. That tiny change turns the atom into a different element! Such reactions are happening all the time in our Sun, giving it the energy to shine.

The weak force might just help to keep you in the (sun)light.

All four of these forces run strong in the universe. They flow between all things and keep our universe in balance. Without them, we’d be doomed. But these forces will be with you. Always.

You can learn more about gravity from NASA’s Space Place and follow NASAUniverse on Twitter or Facebook to learn about some of the cool cosmic objects we study with light.

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Weird Magnetic Behavior in Space

In between the planets, stars and other bits of rock and dust, space seems pretty much empty. But the super-spread out matter that is there follows a different set of rules than what we know here on Earth.

For the most part, what we think of as empty space is filled with plasma. Plasma is ionized gas, where electrons have split off from positive ions, creating a sea of charged particles. In most of space, this plasma is so thin and spread out that space is still about a thousand times emptier than the vacuums we can create on Earth. Even still, plasma is often the only thing out there in vast swaths of space — and its unique characteristics mean that it interacts with electric and magnetic fields in complicated ways that we are just beginning to understand.

Five years ago, we launched a quartet of satellites to study one of the most important yet most elusive behaviors of that material in space — a kind of magnetic explosion that had never before been adequately studied up close, called magnetic reconnection. Here are five of the ways the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission (MMS) has helped us study this intriguing magnetic phenomenon.

1. Seeing magnetic explosions up close

Magnetic reconnection is the explosive snapping and forging of magnetic fields, a process that can only happen in plasmas — and it's at the heart of space weather storms that manifest around Earth.

When the Sun launches clouds of solar material — which is also made of plasma — toward Earth, the magnetic field embedded within the material collides with Earth's huge global magnetic field. This sets off magnetic reconnection that injects energy into near-Earth space, triggering a host of effects — induced electric currents that can harm power grids, to changes in the upper atmosphere that can affect satellites, to rains of particles into the atmosphere that can cause the glow of the aurora.  

Though scientists had theorized about magnetic reconnection for decades, we'd never had a chance to study it on the small scales at which it occurs. Determining how magnetic reconnection works was one of the key jobs MMS was tasked with — and the mission quickly delivered. Using instruments that measured 100 times faster than previous missions, the MMS observations quickly determined which of several 50-year-old theories about magnetic reconnection were correct. It also showed how the physics of electrons dominates the process — a subject of debate before the launch.

2. Finding explosions in surprising new places

In the five years after launch, MMS made over a thousand trips around Earth, passing through countless magnetic reconnection events. It saw magnetic reconnection where scientists first expected it: at the nose of Earth's magnetic field, and far behind Earth, away from the Sun. But it also found this process in some unexpected places — including a region thought to be too tumultuous for magnetic reconnection to happen.

As solar material speeds away from the Sun in a flow called the solar wind, it piles up as it encounters Earth's magnetic field, creating a turbulent region called the magnetosheath. Scientists had only seen magnetic reconnection happening in relatively calm regions of space, and they weren't sure if this process could even happen in such a chaotic place. But MMS' precise measurements revealed that magnetic reconnection happens even in the magnetosheath.  

MMS also spotted magnetic reconnection happening in giant magnetic tubes, leftover from earlier magnetic explosions, and in plasma vortices shaped like ocean waves — based on the mission's observations, it seems magnetic reconnection is virtually ubiquitous in any place where opposing magnetic fields in a plasma meet.  

3. How energy is transferred

Magnetic reconnection is one of the major ways that energy is transferred in plasma throughout the universe — and the MMS mission discovered that tiny electrons hold the key to this process.

Electrons in a strong magnetic field usually exhibit a simple behavior: They spin tight spirals along the magnetic field. In a weaker field region, where the direction of the magnetic field reverses, the electrons go freestyle — bouncing and wagging back and forth in a type of movement called Speiser motion.

Flying just 4.5 miles apart, the MMS spacecraft measured what happens in a magnetic field with intermediate strength: These electrons dance a hybrid, meandering motion — spiraling and bouncing about before being ejected from the region. This takes away some of the magnetic field’s energy.

4. Surpassing computer simulations

Before we had direct measurements from the MMS mission, computer simulations were the best tool scientists had to study plasma's unusual magnetic behavior in space. But MMS' data has revealed that these processes are even more surprising than we thought — showing us new electron-scale physics that computer simulations are still trying to catch up with. Having such detailed data has spurred theoretical physicists to rethink their models and understand the specific mechanisms behind magnetic reconnection in unexpected ways. 

5. In deep space & nuclear reactions

Although MMS studies plasma near Earth, what we learn helps us understand plasma everywhere. In space, magnetic reconnection happens in explosions on the Sun, in supernovas, and near black holes.

These magnetic explosions also happen on Earth, but only under the most extreme circumstances: for example, in nuclear fusion experiments. MMS' measurements of plasma's behavior are helping scientists better understand and potentially control magnetic reconnection, which may lead to improved nuclear fusion techniques to generate energy more efficiently.

This quartet of spacecraft was originally designed for a two-year mission, and they still have plenty of fuel left — meaning we have the chance to keep uncovering new facets of plasma's intriguing behavior for years to come. Keep up with the latest on the mission at nasa.gov/mms.

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Cosmic Couples and Devastating Breakups

Relationships can be complicated — especially if you’re a pair of stars. Sometimes you start a downward spiral you just can’t get out of, eventually crash together and set off an explosion that can be seen 130 million light-years away.

For Valentine’s Day, we’re exploring the bonds between some of the universe’s peculiar pairs … as well as a few of their cataclysmic endings.

Stellar Couples

When you look at a star in the night sky, you may really be viewing two or more stars dancing around each other. Scientists estimate three or four out of every five Sun-like stars in the Milky Way have at least one partner. Take our old north star Thuban, for example. It’s a binary, or two-star, system in the constellation Draco.

Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbor, is actually a stellar triangle. Two Sun-like stars, Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman, form a pair (called Alpha Centauri AB) that orbit each other about every 80 years. Proxima Centauri is a remote red dwarf star caught in their gravitational pull even though it sits way far away from them (like over 300 times the distance between the Sun and Neptune).

Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2/Davide De Martin/Mahdi Zamani

Sometimes, though, a stellar couple ends its relationship in a way that’s really disastrous for one of them. A black widow binary, for example, contains a low-mass star, called a brown dwarf, and a rapidly spinning, superdense stellar corpse called a pulsar. The pulsar generates intense radiation and particle winds that blow away the material of the other star over millions to billions of years.

Black Hole Beaus

In romance novels, an air of mystery is essential for any love interest, and black holes are some of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe. They also have very dramatic relationships with other objects around them!

Scientists have observed two types of black holes. Supermassive black holes are hundreds of thousands to billions of times our Sun’s mass. One of these monsters, called Sagittarius A* (the “*” is pronounced “star”), sits at the center of our own Milky Way. In a sense, our galaxy and its black hole are childhood sweethearts — they’ve been together for over 13 billion years! All the Milky-Way-size galaxies we’ve seen so far, including our neighbor Andromeda (pictured below), have supermassive black holes at their center!

These black-hole-galaxy power couples sometimes collide with other, similar pairs — kind of like a disastrous double date! We’ve never seen one of these events happen before, but scientists are starting to model them to get an idea of what the resulting fireworks might look like.

One of the most dramatic and fleeting relationships a supermassive black hole can have is with a star that strays too close. The black hole’s gravitational pull on the unfortunate star causes it to bulge on one side and break apart into a stream of gas, which is called a tidal disruption event.

The other type of black hole you often hear about is stellar-mass black holes, which are five to tens of times the Sun’s mass. Scientists think these are formed when a massive star goes supernova. If there are two massive stars in a binary, they can leave behind a pair of black holes that are tied together by their gravity. These new black holes spiral closer and closer until they crash together and create a larger black hole. The National Science Foundation’s LIGO project has detected many of these collisions through ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.

Credit: LIGO/T. Pyle

Here’s hoping your Valentine’s Day is more like a peacefully spiraling stellar binary and less like a tidal disruption! Learn how to have a safe relationship of your own with black holes here.

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NASA Spotlight: Brandon Rodriguez, Jet Propulsion Laboratory Education Specialist 

Brandon Rodriguez is an education specialist at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California where he provides resources and training to K-12 schools across the Southwest. Working with a team at JPL, he develops content for classroom teachers, visits schools and speaks with students and trains future teachers to bring NASA into their classroom. When he’s not in the classroom, Brandon’s job takes him on research expeditions all around the world, studying our planet’s extreme environments.  

Fun fact: Brandon wakes up every morning to teach an 8 a.m. physics class at a charter school before heading to JPL and clocking in at his full time job. When asked why? He shared, “The truth is that I really feel so much better about my role knowing that we’re not ‘telling’ teachers what to do from our ivory tower. Instead, I can “share” with teachers what I know works not just in theory, but because I’m still there in the classroom doing it myself.” - Brandon Rodriguez

Brandon took time from exciting the next generation of explorers to answer some questions about his life and his career: 

What inspired you to work in the educational department at NASA?

I was over the moon when I got a call from NASA Education. I began my career as a research scientist, doing alternative energy work as a chemist. After seven years in the field, I began to feel as if I had a moral responsibility to bring access to science to a the next generation. To do so, I quit my job in science and became a high school science teacher. When NASA called, they asked me if I wanted a way to be both a scientist and an educator- how could I resist?

You were born in Venezuela and came to the U.S. when you were 12 years old. Can you tell us the story of why and how you came to America?

I haven't been back to Venezuela since I was very young, which has been very difficult for me. Being an immigrant in the USA sometimes feels like you're an outsider of both sides: I'm not truly Latin, nor am I an American. When I was young, I struggled with this in ways I couldn't articulate, which manifested in a lot of anger and got me in quite a bit of trouble. Coming to California and working in schools that are not only primarily Latinx students, but also first generation Latinx has really helped me process that feeling, because it's something I can share with those kids. What was once an alienating force has become a very effective tool for my teaching practice.

Does your job take you on any adventures outside of the classroom and if so, what have been your favorite endeavors?

I'm so fortunate that my role takes me all over the world and into environments that allow to me to continue to develop while still sharing my strengths with the education community. I visit schools all over California and the Southwest of the USA to bring professional development to teachers passionate about science. But this year, I was also able to join the Ocean Exploration Trust aboard the EV Nautilus as we explored the Pacific Remote Island National Marine Monument. We were at sea for 23 days, sailing from American Samoa to Hawaii, using submersible remotely operated vehicles to explore the ocean floor. 

Image Credit: Nautilus Live 

We collected coral and rock samples from places no one has ever explored before, and observed some amazing species of marine creatures along the way.

Image Credit: Nautilus Live 

What keeps you motivated to go to work every day?

There's no greater motivation than seeing the product of your hard work, and I get that everyday through students. I get to bring them NASA research that is "hot off the press" in ways that their textbooks never can. They see pictures not online or on worksheets, but from earlier that day as I walked through JPL. It is clearly that much more real and tangible to them when they can access it through their teacher and their community.

Do you have any tips for people struggling with their science and math classes? 

As someone who struggled- especially in college- I want people to know that what they struggle with isn't science, it's science classes. The world of research doesn't have exams; it doesn't have blanks to be filled in or facts to be memorized. Science is exploring the unknown. Yes, of course we need the tools to properly explore, and that usually means building a strong academic foundation. But it helped me to differentiate the end goal from the process: I was bad at science tests, but I wanted to someday be very good at science. I could persevere through the former if it got me to the latter.

If you could safely visit any planet, star, or solar system, where would you visit and what would you want to learn?

Europa, without a doubt. Imagine if we found even simple life once more in our solar system- and outside of the habitable zone, no less. What would this mean for finding life outside of our solar system as a result? We would surely need to conclude that our sky is filled with alien worlds looking back at us.

Is there a moment or project that you feel defined (or significantly impacted) your career up to today?

While I never worked closely with the mission, Insight was a really important project for me. It's the first time while at JPL I was able to see the construction, launch and landing of a mission.

If you could name a spaceship, what would you name it?

For as long as I can remember, I've been watching and reading science fiction, and I continue to be amazed at how fiction informs reality. How long ago was it that in Star Trek, the crew would be handing around these futuristic computer tablets that decades later would become common iPads?  In their honor, I would be delighted if we named a ship Enterprise.

Thanks so much Brandon! 

Additional Image Credit: MLParker Media

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What would happen if a Black hole would be near the earth? What would be the consequences to humans?

Out of all the theories and fantasies created around blackholes, which of them, in your opinion, do you think could come closest to reality?

uhmm, can you tell me what exactly a black hole is? or what iy does? thanks, just really confused and curious on how it actually works.

The Cats Eye Nebula in Optical and X-ray : To some it looks like a cat’s eye. To others, perhaps like a giant cosmic conch shell. It is actually one of brightest and most highly detailed planetary nebula known, composed of gas expelled in the brief yet glorious phase near the end of life of a Sun-like star. This nebula’s dying central star may have produced the outer circular concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. The formation of the beautiful, complex-yet-symmetric inner structures, however, is not well understood. The featured image is a composite of a digitally sharpened Hubble Space Telescope image with X-ray light captured by the orbiting Chandra Observatory. The exquisite floating space statue spans over half a light-year across. Of course, gazing into this Cat’s Eye, humanity may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution … in about 5 billion years. via NASA

The Clearest Images of Jupiter ever taken

These beautifully real images are some of the closest images of Jupiter. Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but slightly less than one-thousandth the mass of the Sun. The original image was captured by JunoCam, the camera on NASA's Juno mission in orbit around Jupiter. This image was taken on Juno's 22nd close pass by Jupiter on Sept. 12, 2019 with image processing done by Prateek.

📸: NASA's Juno Space Probe / JunoCam

You Are Made of Stardust

Though the billions of people on Earth may come from different areas, we share a common heritage: we are all made of stardust! From the carbon in our DNA to the calcium in our bones, nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.

The building blocks for humans, and even our planet, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for stars. If we could rewind the universe back almost to the very beginning, we would just see a sea of hydrogen, helium, and a tiny bit of lithium.

The first generation of stars formed from this material. There’s so much heat and pressure in a star’s core that they can fuse atoms together, forming new elements. Our DNA is made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. All those elements (except hydrogen, which has existed since shortly after the big bang) are made by stars and released into the cosmos when the stars die.

Each star comes with a limited fuel supply. When a medium-mass star runs out of fuel, it will swell up and shrug off its outer layers. Only a small, hot core called a white dwarf is left behind. The star’s cast-off debris includes elements like carbon and nitrogen. It expands out into the cosmos, possibly destined to be recycled into later generations of stars and planets. New life may be born from the ashes of stars.

Massive stars are doomed to a more violent fate. For most of their lives, stars are balanced between the outward pressure created by nuclear fusion and the inward pull of gravity. When a massive star runs out of fuel and its nuclear processes die down, it completely throws the star out of balance. The result? An explosion!

Supernova explosions create such intense conditions that even more elements can form. The oxygen we breathe and essential minerals like magnesium and potassium are flung into space by these supernovas.

Supernovas can also occur another way in binary, or double-star, systems. When a white dwarf steals material from its companion, it can throw everything off balance too and lead to another kind of cataclysmic supernova. Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study these stellar explosions to figure out what’s speeding up the universe’s expansion. 

This kind of explosion creates calcium – the mineral we need most in our bodies – and trace minerals that we only need a little of, like zinc and manganese. It also produces iron, which is found in our blood and also makes up the bulk of our planet’s mass!

A supernova will either leave behind a black hole or a neutron star – the superdense core of an exploded star. When two neutron stars collide, it showers the cosmos in elements like silver, gold, iodine, uranium, and plutonium.

Some elements only come from stars indirectly. Cosmic rays are nuclei (the central parts of atoms) that have been boosted to high speed by the most energetic events in the universe. When they collide with atoms, the impact can break them apart, forming simpler elements. That’s how we get boron and beryllium – from breaking star-made atoms into smaller ones.

Half a dozen other elements are created by radioactive decay. Some elements are radioactive, which means their nuclei are unstable. They naturally break down to form simpler elements by emitting radiation and particles. That’s how we get elements like radium. The rest are made by humans in labs by slamming atoms of lighter elements together at super high speeds to form heavier ones. We can fuse together elements made by stars to create exotic, short-lived elements like seaborgium and einsteinium.

From some of the most cataclysmic events in the cosmos comes all of the beauty we see here on Earth. Life, and even our planet, wouldn’t have formed without them! But we still have lots of questions about these stellar factories. 

In 2006, our Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth containing tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away – the first star dust to ever be collected from space and returned for study. You can help us identify and study the composition of these tiny, elusive particles through our Stardust@Home Citizen Science project.

Our upcoming Roman Space Telescope will help us learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies, all while exploring many other cosmic questions. Learn more about the exciting science this mission will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.

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Gabriella Mistral nebula by AstroCapetown

The Sun is White, not Yellow.

i learned that the Sun is 99.86% of all mass in our solar system. Every other planet, asteroid, and comet only adds up to 7/50th of a single percent (x)

Tracking the Sun’s Cycles

Scientists just announced that our Sun is in a new cycle.

Solar activity has been relatively low over the past few years, and now that scientists have confirmed solar minimum was in December 2019, a new solar cycle is underway — meaning that we expect to see solar activity start to ramp up over the next several years.

The Sun goes through natural cycles, in which the star swings from relatively calm to stormy. At its most active — called solar maximum — the Sun is freckled with sunspots, and its magnetic poles reverse. At solar maximum, the Sun’s magnetic field, which drives solar activity, is taut and tangled. During solar minimum, sunspots are few and far between, and the Sun’s magnetic field is ordered and relaxed.

Understanding the Sun’s behavior is an important part of life in our solar system. The Sun’s violent outbursts can disturb the satellites and communications signals traveling around Earth, or one day, Artemis astronauts exploring distant worlds. Scientists study the solar cycle so we can better predict solar activity.

Measuring the solar cycle

Surveying sunspots is the most basic of ways we study how solar activity rises and falls over time, and it’s the basis of many efforts to track the solar cycle. Around the world, observers conduct daily sunspot censuses. They draw the Sun at the same time each day, using the same tools for consistency. Together, their observations make up the international sunspot number, a complex task run by the World Data Center for the Sunspot Index and Long-term Solar Observations, at the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, which tracks sunspots and pinpoints the highs and lows of the solar cycle. Some 80 stations around the world contribute their data.

Credit: USET data/image, Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels

Other indicators besides sunspots can signal when the Sun is reaching its low. In previous cycles, scientists have noticed the strength of the Sun’s magnetic field near the poles at solar minimum hints at the intensity of the next maximum. When the poles are weak, the next peak is weak, and vice versa.

Another signal comes from outside the solar system. Cosmic rays are high-energy particle fragments, the rubble from exploded stars in distant galaxies that shoot into our solar system with astounding energy. During solar maximum, the Sun’s strong magnetic field envelops our solar system in a magnetic cocoon that is difficult for cosmic rays to infiltrate. In off-peak years, the number of cosmic rays in the solar system climbs as more and more make it past the quiet Sun. By tracking cosmic rays both in space and on the ground, scientists have yet another measure of the Sun’s cycle.

Since 1989, an international panel of experts—sponsored by NASA and NOAA—meets each decade to make their prediction for the next solar cycle. The prediction includes the sunspot number, a measure of how strong a cycle will be, and the cycle’s expected start and peak. This new solar cycle is forecast to be about the same strength as the solar cycle that just ended — both fairly weak. The new solar cycle is expected to peak in July 2025.

Learn more about the Sun’s cycle and how it affects our solar system at nasa.gov/sunearth.

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While it is true that photons have no mass, it is also true that we see light bend around sources with high mass due to gravity. This is not because the mass pulls on the photons directly, but instead because the mass warps the space-time through which the photons travel. Imagine a bowling ball on a mattress. The ball is a massive object — say, the Sun — and the mattress represents space-time, in which it sits. (Of course, space-time is four-dimensional, but it’s a bit harder to imagine that!) When you place the bowling ball on the mattress, it deforms the surface. If a grid were drawn on the mattress, you would see the grid deform, so the straight lines of the boxes were no longer straight. The same is true for a star sitting in space-time — the star deforms space-time around it, causing it to curve toward the star. Now imagine a marble; this represents a photon. If you roll the marble in a straight line on the mattress and it comes too close to the bowling ball, the marble will curve because the mattress it’s traveling on dips and curves around the bowling ball. This is what happens to light traveling through space: When it comes too close to a massive object, it encounters warped space-time and curves not because it’s being pulled by gravity, but because the space-time it’s traveling through is curved, so its “straight” path becomes a curved, bent one.

. . Keep Supporting and Following us . 👉👉👉👉 @unrevealedfiles 👉👉👉👉 @unrevealedfiles 👉👉👉👉 @unrevealedfiles 👉👉👉👉 @unrevealedfiles 👉👉👉👉 @unrevealedfiles . 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒎𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝒇𝒂𝒔𝒄𝒊𝒏𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒔𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒄𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒆𝒄𝒉𝒏𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒚 .

i learned that the north star is 4000 times brighter than our sun. The light we see when we look at the north star was generated in the year 1587, and it has been traveling through space for 434 years to reach us (x)

The Earliest Galaxy

Astronomers think they have found a galaxy that existed just 300 million years after the big bang. The galaxy named HD1 is so old, it likely only exists of what are known as population iii stars, the very first stars that ever came into existence, made of mostly hydrogen, helium and a small amount of beryllium and lithium.

We have never seen any population iii stars, and according to the theories of the early universe, most of these stars would have been colossal blue giant stars that wouldn't have lived very long at all, a few million years at most before going supernova and collapsing into black holes.

One thing that really stands out about this galaxy is it's unusually powerful in ultra violet light, a common feature of massive blue giant stars, but the amount seen in this galaxy may indicate the presence of a supermassive black hole behaving as a quasar, if this is correct, it will be the earliest example of a blackhole too.

If supermassive black holes were present just 300 million years after the big bang, it may be evidence that black holes were being created much earlier than previously thought.

The next step is to turn the James Webb Telescope towards it, and while it is more focused on the Infra Red, it will be able to resolve much more detail than Hubble, and maybe begin to see if indeed, this was a Qasar just 300 million years into the Universe's existence, or if the galaxy was producing far more stars than even the most prolific starburst galaxy would do today.

Source : https://astronomy.com/news/2022/04/researchers-discover-the-most-distant-galaxy-yet

NGC 3314

At first glance you'd be forgiven for thinking this was two galaxies merging, but they are actually 23 million light years from one another, and just happen to be overlapping due to our perspective.

The closest galaxy is 117 million light years away with the other 140 in the constellation of Hydra.

Egg Nebula

also known as RAFGL 2688 and CRL 2688, the Egg Nebula is located 3000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus.

The nebula is a bi-polar proto-planetary nebula, or essentially a star in the dying days of it's existence starting to throw out shells of atmosphere as it moves towards being a white dwarf.

The central star is concealed by an area of dust with the light poking out in areas where the dust is lightest, this is thought to be an accretion disk around the star.

Meet NGC 2841

Location: In the constellation Ursa Major

Type: Flocculent spiral galaxy

Discovered by: William Herschel

NGC 2841 is a beautiful example of a flocculent spiral galaxy – a type with discontinuous, featherlike, and patchy arms. A bright cusp of starlight distinguishes the galaxy's center from the dust lanes that outline the group of almost white middle-aged stars. The far younger blue stars trace the spiral arms.

Find out more information about NGC 2841 here.

Right now, the Hubble Space Telescope is exploring #GalaxiesGalore! Find more galaxy content and spectacular new images by following along on Hubble’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration; Acknowledgment: M. Crockett and S. Kaviraj (Oxford University, UK), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), B. Whitmore (STScI), and the WFC3 Scientific Oversight Committee

HiPOD 22 Apr 2022: Layers to the West of Gale Crater

The objective of this observation is to examine thin layers in the Nepenthes Mensae region. Because this location is close to Gale Crater, these layers may one day be compared to those currently being studied by the Curiosity rover. This scene was also imaged by the Context Camera onboard MRO.

Nepenthes Mensae is a plateau, whose name derives from Greek for a drug that quells all sorrows with forgetfulness. “Nepenthe” literally means “without grief” (ne = not, penthos = grief) and was a potion given to Helen by an Egyptian queen in Homer’s “Odyssey.”

Enhanced color image is less than 1 km across; black and white is less than 5 km.

ID: ESP_055565_1750 date: 4 June 2018 altitude: 265 km

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

Random Fact #3,062

The wind on Neptune can blow at speeds of 2,000 km/hour.

The winds causing the Great Dark Spot specifically have been measured to be around 1,127 km/hour.

Herschel’s view of new stars and molecular clouds by europeanspaceagency

HiPOD 20 Apr 2022: Recent Gullies in Equatorial Valles Marineris

Although actively-forming gullies are common in the middle latitudes of Mars, there are also pristine-looking gullies in equatorial regions.

In this scene, the gullies have very sharp channels and different colors where the gullies have eroded and deposited material. Over time, the topography becomes smoothed over and the color variations disappear, unless there is recent activity.

Changes have not been visible here from before-and-after images, and maybe such differences are apparent compared to older images, but nobody has done a careful comparison. What may be needed to see subtle changes is a new image that matches the lighting conditions of an older one. Equatorial gully activity is probably much less common—perhaps there is major downslope avalanching every few centuries—so we need to be lucky to see changes.

MRO has now been imaging Mars for over 16 years, and the chance of seeing rare activity increases as the time interval widens between repeat images.

Enhanced color image is less than 1 km across.

ID: ESP_072612_1685 date: 22 January 2022 altitude: 263 km

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

Stars and Dust Across Corona Australis : Cosmic dust clouds cross a rich field of stars in this telescopic vista near the northern boundary of Corona Australis, the Southern Crown. Less than 500 light-years away the dust clouds effectively block light from more distant background stars in the Milky Way. Top to bottom the frame spans about 2 degrees or over 15 light-years at the clouds’ estimated distance. At top right is a group of lovely reflection nebulae cataloged as NGC 6726, 6727, 6729, and IC 4812. A characteristic blue color is produced as light from hot stars is reflected by the cosmic dust. The dust also obscures from view stars in the region still in the process of formation. Just above the bluish reflection nebulae a smaller NGC 6729 surrounds young variable star R Coronae Australis. To its right are telltale reddish arcs and loops identified as Herbig Haro objects associated with energetic newborn stars. Magnificent globular star cluster NGC 6723 is at bottom left in the frame. Though NGC 6723 appears to be part of the group, its ancient stars actually lie nearly 30,000 light-years away, far beyond the young stars of the Corona Australis dust clouds. via NASA

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