"We Love Our Black Hole"

First crying-roses term of the year lets gooo

⁺⊹ . ｡. :☆ Alderlactea ☆: .｡.⊹ ⁺

Alderlactea [Alder-lac-tia] is an aldernic term for when one has, or wishes to have, a body that is, partially or fully, made of stars, starry or galactic.

Flag ID

[Flag ID: A flag with 7 similarly sized horizontal stripes. From top to bottom, the colours are dark blue, dark purple, dark magenta, muted salmon, gold, light yellow and white. The flag has a golden orange in the centre outlined with muted salmon. End ID.]

by 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!

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

Was out filming with the telescope and first of all, I have it on the porch, which is shared with our neighbors. One of them came out and saw me with the telescope and I was like straddling it because it’s the only way I can use the viewfinder on that thing and conversation was just:

Him: uhhh-

Me: don’t

Him: -yes ma’am

And then I met our other neighbors, some drunk girls, who thought it was a /cannon/. So I put it on the Moon and was like “wanna see?” And they were about as excited as your typical 4 year olds to see the moon and when I told them they could take pictures through the eyepiece (the eyepiece I was using was a wide angle plossl) they could not have been more excited

M15 // Phil Hoppes

"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

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 :

phys.org

Astronomers solve the 60-year mystery of quasars, the most powerful objects in the universe

Scientists have unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of quasars—the brightest, most powerful objects in the universe—by discovering that th