Me: Majored In Aerospace Engineering To Hopefully Design Rovers That Go To Other Planets To Perform Little

The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States

NGC 1512 by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope

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

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.

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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??”

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:

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Rover's Rovers

Something I want to add: A lot of us would appreciate it if people didn't refer to the JWST as just "James Webb". He does not deserve to ha

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!

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.

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