Official Space is Awesome Thread

[Argonne69]

On December 16, 1992, eight days after its encounter with Earth, the Galileo spacecraft looked back from a distance of about 6.2 million kilometers to capture this remarkable view of the Moon in orbit about Earth. - JPL / NASA

 

 

This image of Earth (on the left) and the moon (on the right) was taken by JunoCam on the Juno spacecraft, three weeks after its August 5 launch. On August 26, 2011, the spacecraft was already almost 10 million kilometers away from the Earth-Moon system. - NASA / JPL-Caltech / Malin Space Science Systems

 

[bscinstnct]

SpaceX rocket explodes

 

 

http://youtu.be/1qBSBonZjM4

[i*windows]

watch this space www.eso.org for a massive announcement tomorrow/today

 

Is this it? Pretty awesome find. Now if it were only a little closer.

 

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2016/08/24/scientists-discover-earth-like-planet-orbiting-star-closest-our-sun/89258306/

 

hi yes that is it, its pretty amazing

[Argonne69]

Jupiter's south pole. Notice the number of cyclones.

 

[Argonne69]

Europa

 

[Argonne69]

The European Space Agency unveiled a new celestial map of our home galaxy, built from the first 14 months of the Gaia satellite’s 5.5 year observational campaign, which began in July 2014. With more than a billion stars, it’s the most complete map of our galaxy ever created. Of course, the map contains roughly 1 percent of the stars in our galaxy.

 

[bscinstnct]

http://www.nbcnews.c...y-shows-n648876

 

 

 

 

Moon's Birth May Have Vaporized Most of Earth, Study Shows

 

The massive collision that created the moon may have vaporized most of the early Earth, according to a new analysis of samples collected during the Apollo moon missions.

[bscinstnct]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tabby-s-star-keeps-getting-stranger/

 

“Tabby’s Star” Keeps Getting Stranger

 

The bizarre object’s overall brightness has been gradually dimming for years

 

 

The brightness dips are even consistent with a gigantic energy-collecting structure built by an intelligent civilization—though researchers have been keen to stress that this "alien megastructure" scenario is quite unlikely.

[bscinstnct]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/13/health/hubble-telescope-galaxies-trnd/index.html

 

There are 10 times more galaxies in our universe than we'd estimated

[Argonne69]

Ceres' Occator Crater, a hole measuring 57 miles (92 km) wide and 2.5 miles (4 km) deep.

 

[Fellaheen51]

Well not quite deep space. But in keeping with the theme, a study in the celestial and terrestrial. With background music added for effect.

 

https://vimeo.com/la...ountrydreamland

 

Embedding is being janky. Click the link.

[i*windows]

Audi are going to the moon - looks like they already have the space time booked too :-)

 

http://youtu.be/4hNa8uiNdR8

 

http://mission-to-the-moon.com/

[Argonne69]

A new image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a galaxy that’s being strangled by tentacles of gas and dust. NGC 4696 is located within the Centaurus galaxy cluster some 150 million light years away. It has a fairly standard elliptical shape, but a closer look shows it’s not quite like its neighbors. The galaxy features bands of curling filaments, made from dust and ionized hydrogen, that are spiraling out from the main body and into interstellar space. New research suggests a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core is responsible for these features, which is also preventing the galaxy from creating new stars. This galaxy is basically dead.

 

 

 

A 2010 view also taken by Hubble:

 

[Argonne69]

Cassini over Saturn's north pole:

 

[Argonne69]

Astronomers at the University of Minnesota Duluth and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences have identified a new class of ring galaxy. Named PGC 1000714, it features an elliptical core with two outer rings. It’s the only known galaxy of its kind in the known universe.

 

[Argonne69]

During a recent calibration exercise, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a remarkable view of Earth and The Moon from a distance of 127 million miles (205 million kilometers). Australia, Southeast Asia, and Antarctica are visible.

 

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

 

The Moon appears very close to Earth because the photo was taken when the Moon was almost directly behind the planet. Here's an image that shows the two to scale:

 

[driverwedge]

Thanks for your continued posts of awesome stuff Argonne!

[Argonne69]

A new "star" could appear in the night sky in 2022. A huge collision between two binary stars roughly 1800 light-years away would produce a red nova that would cause a 10,000 fold increase in brightness over a period of two to three years, enough to be visible from Earth with the naked eye.

 

A 2003 red nova captured by Hubble. Credit: NASA/ESA

 

The shape of the contact binary star system KIC 9832227. Credit: Calvin College

 

http://www.scienceal...ght-sky-in-2022

[MMB1500]

Great to see this thread still going. Love this stuff!

[i*windows]

big news from the office today

 

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1702/

[Argonne69]

Lol. Saturn's moon Mimas, or the Death Star in mid-construction? The Cassini spacecraft captured this image on October 22, 2016 at a distance of 115,000 miles (185,000 km).

 

[i*windows]

if anyone is on twitter then follow https://twitter.com/oanasandu

[Noke]

Thanks for the news, chaps! Best thread on WRX.

[Argonne69]

Adam Makarenko makes detailed planetary models. These are not CGI, but meticulous hand-crafted exo-planets.

 

 

 

More here: http://www.adammakar...com/exoplanets/

[NV825]

More fast radio bursts detected from same location

 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/more-fast-radio-bursts-detected-same-location

 

This article came out last month, but I figured it could be a fun topic of discussion. Aliens? Flares from a neutron star?

[Argonne69]

I was watching a recent episode of 'How the Universe Works' on Science Channel. Until that episode I had never heard of the term "Unnova". Apparently an unnova is a failed supernova, or a star that has exactly the right amount of mass to collapse at the end of its life, but without the bang. One minute it's there shining as a red supergiant, and the next minute it's gone, having collapsed directly into a black hole. Wow.

 

I don't believe anyone has actually witnessed one, but theoretically it should be possible. Of course, if you're on a inhabited planet orbiting the star, the next few weeks/months are going to be a rather bleak as your planet slowly freezes.

 

Neutron stars also fascinate me. Take a star 3 times the size of our sun, and squish it down to 20 km across. A teaspoon of neutron material would weigh ~10 million tons, or slightly less than my sister-in-law. Of course, one could not actually have a teaspoon full of the stuff, as it would decay very rapidly without the surrounding material. The energy in that amount of densely packed neutrons is roughly equal to the energy emitted by the Sun in 1 second, or ~1 billion atom bombs.

[driverwedge]

I was watching a recent episode of 'How the Universe Works' on Science Channel. Until that episode I had never heard of the term "Unnova". Apparently an unnova is a failed supernova, or a star that has exactly the right amount of mass to collapse at the end of its life, but without the bang. One minute it's there shining as a red supergiant, and the next minute it's gone, having collapsed directly into a black hole. Wow.

 

I don't believe anyone has actually witnessed one, but theoretically it should be possible. Of course, if you're on a inhabited planet orbiting the star, the next few weeks/months are going to be a rather bleak as your planet slowly freezes.

 

Neutron stars also fascinate me. Take a star 3 times the size of our sun, and squish it down to 20 km across. A teaspoon of neutron material would weigh ~10 million tons, or slightly less than my sister-in-law. Of course, one could not actually have a teaspoon full of the stuff, as it would decay very rapidly without the surrounding material. The energy in that amount of densely packed neutrons is roughly equal to the energy emitted by the Sun in 1 second, or ~1 billion atom bombs.

 

I'm with you. I love that stuff!

[driverwedge]

I don't remember this being posted, but it's a pretty neat perspective of size and distance from a guy that worked at NASA

 

There's a small plug for his site near the end but gets cool again after that.

 

[Noke]

I don't remember this being posted, but it's a pretty neat perspective of size and distance from a guy that worked at NASA

 

There's a small plug for his site near the end but gets cool again after that.

 

 

Cool vid! Thanks for posting. I loved his ending point.

 

Proxima B, anyone?

[L_L]

I get freaked out by thinking to much of the universe, because of the unknown and size.

If I think to much about the universe, it always boils down to that the things we humans are doing here on earth does not matter...

 

And I am always laughing about the size of VY Canis Majoris (biggest known star) and it's size of 2,800,000,000 km in diameter.

That it would take 1100 years travelling in jet aircraft at 900km/hr to circle it once!

Now that's a size :lol: