astrophysics-georg
just ask me things. please
51 posts
Latest Posts by astrophysics-georg
NGC 1512 by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope
M15 // Phil Hoppes
Check out this zoom-out from the sharpest view of the Andromeda Galaxy ever, revealing over 100 million stars
can you hear the music?
With NASA announcing their streaming service NASA+ and also announcing it’s going to be free and also ad free, I’d just like to appreciate the lengths they go to make scientific knowledge and exploration as available as they possibly can.
Why Quasars Ignite
There's your winning smile, a bright summers day, then there's Quasars ! Unlike the latter, Quasars are amongst the brightest objects in the Universe, often shining out more energy than the entirety of the galaxy that hosts them.
While we know a fair bit about what they are, how they begin has been a debate since they were first found.
Most galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their centre, our Milky Way has one 4.5 million times the mass of our own Sun, and in galactic terms, that's fairly light weight, there are black holes within 60 million light years of us several billion times the mass of our Sun, real goliaths, which tend to sit at the centre of Elliptical Galaxies.
Qasars are incredibly active supermassive black holes, so the question remains, why are some quasars and others not, what causes this to happen ?
A team of astronomers from the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire have found an interesting bit of information which may hint towards the answer. In a study of Quasars, they have discovered that galaxies that are home to a Quasar are three time more likely to be in a state of interaction or collision with another galaxy.
This leads them to believe that the galaxy merger is responsible for piling an enormous quantity of material towards the black hole, causing it to grow incredibly quickly but also as messy eaters, pushing out much of it in the form of radiation in beams emanating from the poles.
One consequence of this is the galaxy is quenched of dust and gas, the very elements needed to create new stars, and is likely the reason most elliptical galaxies have such monster black holes, the remnants of all the star making material consumed, and that pushed out, leaving behind stars old enough to live on since that happened.
Source :
Messier 100 Galaxy by Judy Schmidt
A philosopher once asked, "Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?" Pointless, really..."Do the stars gaze back?" Now, that's a question.
- Neil Gaiman, Stardust
To Stand on a Comet
This footage was taken by ESA Rosetta probe on the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The snow fall is in fact a number of things, firstly the background stars moving as the comet rotates, secondly the zippy streaks are in fact cosmic rays and then there is dust moving about too, so none of it snow !
WHAT IS A NEUTRINO??
Blog#123
Wednesday, September 15th, 2021
Welcome back,
Neutrinos are elusive subatomic particles created in a wide variety of nuclear processes. Their name, which means “little neutral one,” refers to the fact that they carry no electrical charge. Of the four fundamental forces in the universe, neutrinos only interact with two — gravity and the weak force, which is responsible for the radioactive decay of atoms. Having nearly no mass, they zip through the cosmos at almost the speed of light.
Countless neutrinos came into existence fractions of a second after the Big Bang. And new neutrinos are created all the time: in the nuclear hearts of stars, in particle accelerators and atomic reactors on Earth, during the explosive collapse of supernovas and when radioactive elements decay. This means that there are, on average, 1 billion times more neutrinos than protons in the universe, according to physicist Karsten Heeger of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Despite their ubiquity, neutrinos largely remain a mystery to physicists because the particles are so tough to catch. Neutrinos stream through most matter as if they were light rays going through a transparent window, scarcely interacting with everything else in existence. Approximately 100 billion neutrinos are passing through every square centimeter of your body at this moment, though you won’t feel a thing.
Neutrinos were first posited as the answer to a scientific enigma. In the late 19th century, researchers were puzzling over a phenomenon known as beta decay, in which the nucleus inside an atom spontaneously emits an electron. Beta decay seemed to violate two fundamental physical laws: conservation of energy and conservation of momentum. In beta decay, the final configuration of particles seemed to have slightly too little energy, and the proton was standing still rather than being knocked in the opposite direction of the electron. It wasn’t until 1930 that physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed the idea that an extra particle might be flying out of the nucleus, carrying with it the missing energy and momentum.
“I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected,“ Pauli said to a friend, referring to the fact that his hypothesized neutrino was so ghostly that it would barely interact with anything and would have little to no mass.
More than a quarter century later, physicists Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines built a neutrino detector and placed it outside the nuclear reactor at the atomic Savannah River power plant in South Carolina. Their experiment managed to snag a few of the hundreds of trillions of neutrinos that were flying from the reactor, and Cowan and Reines proudly sent Pauli a telegram to inform him of their confirmation. Reines would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 — by which time, Cowan had died.
But since then, neutrinos have continually defied scientists’ expectations.
The sun produces colossal numbers of neutrinos that bombard the Earth. In the mid-20th century, researchers built detectors to search for these neutrinos, but their experiments kept showing a discrepancy, detecting only about one-third of the neutrinos that had been predicted. Either something was wrong with astronomers’ models of the sun, or something strange was going on.
Physicists eventually realized that neutrinos likely come in three different flavors, or types. The ordinary neutrino is called the electron neutrino, but two other flavors also exist: a muon neutrino and a tau neutrino.
As they pass through the distance between the sun and our planet, neutrinos are oscillating between these three types, which is why those early experiments — which had only been designed to search for one flavor — kept missing two-thirds of their total number.
But only particles that have mass can undergo this oscillation, contradicting earlier ideas that neutrinos were massless. While scientists still don’t know the exact masses of all three neutrinos, experiments have determined that the heaviest of them must be at least 0.0000059 times smaller than the mass of the electron.
SOURCE: www.livescience.com
COMING UP!!
(Saturday, September 18th , 2021)
“DO WE LIVE IN A FALSE VACUUM??”
Lunar Eclipse over the ESO’s VLT, Chile
Black hole physicists annoy me so much. They could literally say anything about what happens in a black hole and there is no good way of proving otherwise. They literally just play around with maths and make stuff up. "if you go through the ring singularity, you might come out elsewhere" "where?" "idk" like get a real job Paul
The two stars in the Wolf-Rayet 140 binary system produce shells of dust every eight years, as seen in this JWST image.
“Each ring was created when the stars came close together and their stellar winds collided, compressing the gas and forming dust.”
Comparing the rotations of objects in the Solar System. Just look at them lol.✨🪐
To everyone that's confused, the planet Venus rotates very very slowly, with a single revolution taking about 243 Earth days, and Mercury rotates slowly, but not as slow as Venus.
the new composite james webb image is so beautiful ive been staring at it for 10 minutes straight
featuring jupiters rings, europa (along with a bunch of other moons), the northern and southern auroras, and the great red spot
i feel like the crimew thing shows how much queer discourse dehumanizes people. crimew is an extremely cool & talented person who's like. literally embodying 'be gay do crime' in it's truest form, but the minute that people find out it is a bi lesbian, suddenly thats. all they can think of her as? like no consideration of how it Hacked The Fucking No Fly List, everyone can only focus on her lesbian identity crimes. because none of the people who do this shit can ever see "wrong" queer people as people. they treat identity discourse like it's the biggest issue in the world even to this absolutely absurd level. doesn't matter what they do for queer liberation doesn't matter if they are happy, if you Do Identity Wrong all you are in their eyes are a freak who's personally responsible for lesbophobia or transphobia or w/e. funny how that works
"If you go on T you won't look like a pretty anime boy, you're gonna look like an ugly man!" is so funny because I'm SE Asian, have been on T for 3 years with subtle (but satisfactory) changes, and definitely still have been told I look like an anime boy or a K-pop idol (because racism.) I do like to take care of my appearance and make an effort to look nice and stylish, but that's not a "pretty anime boy" or "K-pop idol" thing, I'm just A Guy who wants to look nice and pretty and cool. It's such an odd statement cause from my perspective it definitely does not consider the experience I described above, LMAO. It's assuming a "little white girl who doesn't know any better and likes anime" person, or something like that. (Just putting this out there because transmascs of color definitely need to be heard more, and transitioning on T experiences are all very very different.)
And anyways, the condescending way people talk down to trans men who do want to look like their cute/pretty fictional men transition goals is so weird... Like, what's wrong with that, anyways? Some fictional guys are really designed nicely, and may give new perspective on masculinity or maleness that people IRL may not show depending on where you live. Anyways, I think even if T changes you to be more masculine than you expected, you can still present in a way inspired by characters and styles you admire if you so like.
And the other side -- what's wrong with looking like an "ugly" man? I feel like that's saying any masculine trait is "ugly," so if you think that please reevaluate yourself. Looking more like a man Is Kind Of The Entire Point. Many transmascs will embrace that masculinity, and that's not anything bad, wrong, or poisonous. If you think it makes them look uglier or more like a predator or enemy, I want you to know that is not a very kind mindset to have toward transgender people, or to any man in general; it's rather in poor taste, and shows you are not an ally to transgender people. So if you do desire to be an ally, I urge you to reevaluate yourself and challenge yourself on what being a "man" entails, what being "masculine" entails. Because it's not inherently immorality or ugliness, it's just a gender.
This framing of masculinization as something to be warned against, that we don't know what we're getting into is not very cool, definitely ignoring we have our own agency and choices and feelings about our bodies. Like, when we go on T, often we know what it will do to us, and what kind of person we are gender-wise. We're making that choice for ourselves, absurd that we're treated like we don't know any better. We know. Don't treat it like a warning that we'll become less desirable types of people.
The first JWST image is creating quite a buzz around gravitational lensing because of the sheer amount of it in the image. Gravitational lensing makes galaxies appear warped like these:
Because spacetime curves around a massive body, light bends when it's near enough a massive object, allowing us to see very distant galaxies behind the cluster we're looking at.
Here is some recommended reading on it if you wanna learn more:
me: majored in aerospace engineering to hopefully design rovers that go to other planets to perform little science experiments and find rocks
my classmates: i want to create missiles and advanced war weaponry for the military
me:
Source: https://www.facebook.com/ghoorsfashion
Gravity is not actually a force DM for credit or removal request (no copyright infringement intended) All rights and credits reserved to the respective owner(s).© Images are used only for educational purpose. No copyright intended
by nasahubble
if you ever feel like you're not "smart enough" for STEM or didn't do that great in school, i just wanna let you know that i failed algebra 2 THREE TIMES and dropped my high school physics class the FIRST WEEK...
and NASA chose me to student research with them.
so what i'm trying to say is that STEM is for EVERYONE. if school wasn't the easiest for you and you're not the strongest in math, don't let that stop you from pursuing STEM. working hard for goals makes you a great scientist.
screw that stereotype that all STEM majors are geniuses who were building robots and knew how to work a microscope at 3 years old.
STEM IS FOR EVERYONE! BECOME A FREAKING SCIENTIST! YOU CAN DO IT!
Here's a reminder to stop shortening the James Webb Space Telescope's name to "James Webb" and instead use "JWST".
"A lot of us would appreciate it if people didn't refer to the JWST as just "James Webb". He does not deserve to have his name associated with the praise the telescope receives. He didn't do these things. What he did do was awful. I only wanna hear sentences in which "James Webb" is the subject when they're about what he did. Otherwise it erases everything that we fight to bring awareness to. All we see when people do this is praise for a man who brought so much pain to the community. It feels like people are ignoring the fight to rename it and it legitimises NASA's name choice and justifies their horrible treatment of those who spoke up. So please consider using the full name, JWST or other alternative names that have been suggested."
from this post:
ARE THERE MORE THAN 1 UNIVERSE??
Blog# 198
Saturday, June 4th, 2022
Welcome back,
What – one vast, ancient and mysterious universe isn’t enough for you? Well, as it happens, there are others. Among physicists, it’s not controversial. Our universe is but one in an unimaginably massive ocean of universes called the multiverse.
If that concept isn’t enough to get your head around, physics describes different kinds of multiverse. The easiest one to comprehend is called the cosmological multiverse. The idea here is that the universe expanded at a mind-boggling speed in the fraction of a second after the big bang. During this period of inflation, there were quantum fluctuations which caused separate bubble universes to pop into existence and themselves start inflating and blowing bubbles.
Russian physicist Andrei Linde came up with this concept, which suggests an infinity of universes no longer in any causal connection with one another – so free to develop in different ways.
Cosmic space is big – perhaps infinitely so. Travel far enough and some theories suggest you’d meet your cosmic twin – a copy of you living in a copy of our world, but in a different part of the multiverse. String theory, which is a notoriously theoretical explanation of reality, predicts a frankly meaninglessly large number of universes, maybe 10 to the 500 or more, all with slightly different physical parameters.
And then there’s the quantum multiverse. Physicist Hugh Everett came up with this idea, which is predicted by his “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics. Everett’s theory is that quantum effects cause the universe to constantly split. It could mean that decisions we make in this universe have implications for other versions of ourselves living in parallel worlds.
Originally published on www.newscientist.com
COMING UP!!
(Wednesday, June 8th, 2022)
“WHAT IS THE NEW THEORY OF GRAVITY??”
Eclipse
Today there was a partial solar eclipse visible in mid to eastern europe.
In Germany we could see how the moon covers between 20 and 30% of the sun
Supernovas, Nebulas, and Stars captured by Hubble space telescope ✨🌌 💫
