Space! Ft. NASA

Space! ft. NASA

It was a big year in our part of the cosmos. We’ve invited our friends at @nasa to recap all the stunning scientific advances that gave us a deeper glimpse into the galaxy around us this year.

JWST Showed Us Space with New Eyes

In July 2022, we saw the first full-color images and data from the largest and most powerful space observatory ever made: the James Webb Space Telescope. This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” is speckled with glittering stars, and called the Cosmic Cliffs. It’s the edge of the star-birthing Carina Nebula. Usually, the early phases of star formation are difficult to capture, but the infrared Webb can peer through cosmic dust thanks to its extreme sensitivity, spatial resolution, and imaging capability.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Artemis I Flew Us Beyond the Moon

NASA’s most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), lifted off for the first time on November 16, 2022, launching the Orion spacecraft on a journey around the Moon. Orion has now traveled farther from Earth than any other spacecraft designed to carry humans to deep space and safely return them to Earth. The Artemis I mission is the first part of a new era of deep space exploration. The program is designed to take astronauts back to the Moon and eventually on to Mars.

Credit: NASA

This One’s for the Dinosaurs

NASA’s DART mission successfully redirected an asteroid—the first time humanity has ever changed the orbit of a celestial object in space. On Sept. 26, 2022, the vending-machine-size spacecraft slammed into the stadium-size asteroid Dimorphos, slightly shortening its orbit around its much larger companion asteroid Didymos. Neither asteroid posed a threat to Earth before or after the test. The objective was to test this “planetary defense” technique, should an asteroid ever pose a threat. Note: there are no known asteroid threats to Earth for at least the next 100 years, but NASA is keeping an eye on the skies, just in case.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL

Be sure to follow @nasa for more!

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astrophysics-georg

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"average person knows 3 astrophysics things" actualy just statistical error. average person knows 1 astrophysics thing. Astrophysics Georg, who lives in space and knows 10,000 astrophysics things, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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astrophysics-georg

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abc.net.au

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Eclipse

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astrophysics-georg

2 years ago

hi are you really an astrophysicist can you tell me like your favorite facts. not in like a quiz way i just think it's a neat field. thank you !

everyone knows about how interstellar paid for simulation on what a black hole would look like but few people know how the hair animation on tangled later got used for simulations of magnetic field lines in the sun. the problem with magnetic field lines in the sun is, imagine a magnetic, which is a nice shape. now set it on fire and melt it and put it in a blender. and that's a little bit like the sun.

this was presaged some decades ago by a physicist using skills to draw simulations of magnetic field lines using the skills in drawing hair that he learned sketching models at the local nudie bar.

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astrophysics-georg

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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

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