Anonymous asked:
Literally the biggest thing I got out of my 2 year college physics classes (apart from thinking about friction whenever I drive and the vast loneliness of space) was how stupid astrology is
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This doesn’t look like much, but these are RR Lyrae variable stars! They’re 10,500 light years way! I took about half of these pictures, and my classmates took the other half. I took the data and ran it through a few Python programs and made them into a gif! The observing period here was unfortunately only about 2 hours, but we got some good data!
The two stars here that are RR Lyrae variable stars are V* BH Peg and V* BG Peg (circled in the image below, BH Peg is the top star and BG Peg is the bottom).
RR Lyrae Variable stars are stars that are nearing the end of their life, and their luminosity changes periodically. There are non-RR Lyrae Variable stars that can have periods of years, or they may fluctuate irregularly.
RR Lyraes are really cool though! RR Lyraes are pulsating aging stars with a mass of around half the Sun’s. They’re thought to have previously shed mass during the Red-Giant Branch phase, and consequently, they were once stars with similar or slightly less mass than the Sun. Because of this, they’re super easy to use to gauge distances in our galaxy and local globular clusters (blobs of stars). But what’s even crazier is that they have periods of between 40 and 0.3 days. That’s super fast, cosmically speaking!
Oh! and the bottom star is an Eclipsing Binary! That means that one blob is actually two stars, and because of our vantage point from earth, they cross in front of each other!
V* BH Peg has a period of 0.6 days, and V* BG Peg has a period of 1.9 days.
Like day one of my astronomy 101 in freshman year my prof went on a tirade about how astronomy should have been given the name “astrology” because astrology in latin is essentially “study of the stars” while astronomy is something along the lines of “physical universe beyond our atmosphere” and we had to pick that because the idk whoever did astrology first were hogging the title
So some of you asked what kind of videos I would recommend for people who want to just be blown away by how uncomprehendable and weird and amazing the universe is so I made a playlist! It has videos from a bunch of channels and I will add more videos as I find them in the future :)
They’re in no particular order, but the videos that are multi-part videos are organized to play one after another
Anonymous asked:
Hey do u know any cool YouTube channels about space and astronomy? I've been searching for one that does little animations for every video but I can't find them
Scishow space is great and there’s also the parent channel scishow
Minutephysics and the person who runs numberphile has a physics channel called 60symbols or something like that and uhhh Kurzgesagt
Why isn’t anybody on my dash, like, super pumped about the Orion launch this morning? This ship is built to go farther than any manned ship ever built before. This is the ship that takes humans to deep space. This is the ship that takes humans to Mars. It had its test launch this morning and its kind of a big deal because this is the ship that’s gonna bring in a new era of space travel. Welcome to the Mars age.
Nothing is illegal in space
Seriously my favorite picture of all time
rule no. 1: always reblog
yes light a blunt in space because an open flame in a 100% oxygen environment is a totally great idea and nothing could ever go wrong
Pretty sure they aren’t 100% oxygen anymore singe Apollo 1.
I’m pretty sure it has to be because if it was 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen like it is on Earth they wouldn’t be able to breathe because it’s not pressurized as much. At least thats how they do it with space suits. I’m not sure if they pressurize the shuttles enough for it to be the 20/80 comp.
From this STS-112 Q&A session:
Ted from Chapel Hill
What is the composition and pressure of the atmosphere inside the space station?
Well the pressure is just the same as here on the ground, 14.7 psi. And the composition is just the same as air. We have, inside the air revitalization systems, what they call a major constituent analyzer that looks at the composition of the air, and then we have the capability to adjust it to make sure it stays just as same as it is here on the ground. Nitrogen, oxygen and all the other stuff.
Okay yeah here’s a chart I found as well on the MIT site
One of my old physics profs is such a sweetie. He remembered from when I had his class that I was interested in observational astronomy stuff and so sometimes out of the blue he’ll email me (and some of the other astro students) various space articles and videos for us to look at despite him being a nuclear astrophysicist himself and it’s so sweet especially because he’ll email us at like 2am and be like “look at this article I found! I thought you guys might like it! :)” like what a sweetie also go to bed it’s 2am
I’ve been working on editing space images into “space porn”, specifically working with tilt shift. The photos were taken by Hubble but I processed and edited them into what they look like now. I emailed them to my old astro prof who thought they were “ethereal and god damn gorgeous” so I thought I’d post them lol
I’ve been working on editing space images into “space porn”, specifically working with tilt shift. The photos were taken by Hubble but I processed and edited them into what they look like now. I emailed them to my old astro prof who thought they were “ethereal and god damn gorgeous” so I thought I’d post them lol
Satellite Meets Comet In Historic Rendezvous
This is a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. A satellite called Rosetta rendezvoused with it today, Aug. 6, after traveling 4 billion miles for more than 10 years.
The European Space Agency craft now sits 62 miles from the icy 2.5-mile-long comet (see a visualization of the mission here) about midway between Mars and Jupiter. The two will travel together on the comet’s orbit as it approaches the sun.
Rosetta, which also includes a number of NASA instruments, will for the first time in history study a comet up close, put a lander on the surface and monitor changes as it approaches the sun. Among other science to be done, the craft’s Philae lander will drill almost 8 inches into 67P, another first.