Ancient man once looked upon the stars and wondered what they were. ‘Windows into the afterlife?’ man wondered. The philosopher then looked up at those same stars and determined that we were at the center. The stars rose and fell in our night sky to entertain solely us. The renaissance man put telescope to sky and realized that no, these stars were not for us. These stars were far away, these planets that we’d named and kept as our own, were not ours. The universe did not belong to us, but rather the other way around. As the years passed, we kept looking up, kept learning about these stars, kept longing to touch them. We put man on the moon. We had become one (small) step closer to touching these stars, to touching these other worlds that did not belong to us. Like we reclaimed the moon, we will, one day, reclaim Mars. We will set foot on the rusty planet, and we would finally have two feet into this, this greatest journey. Our first small, infantile, steps into the universe around us. As we as a people age, our steps will become more steady, more confident. We will exponentially travel our journey. The greatest journey of humanity. The journey we first set out on while humanity itself was only first beginning. To touch these stars, to reclaim them, is to complete a trek millions of years in the making.
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Ancient man once looked upon the stars and wondered what they were. ‘Windows into the afterlife?’ man wondered. The philosopher then looked up at those same stars and determined that we were at the center. The stars rose and fell in our night sky to entertain solely us. The renaissance man put telescope to sky and realized that no, these stars were not for us. These stars were far away, these planets that we’d named and kept as our own, were not ours. The universe did not belong to us, but rather the other way around. As the years passed, we kept looking up, kept learning about these stars, kept longing to touch them. We put man on the moon. We had become one (small) step closer to touching these stars, to touching these other worlds that did not belong to us. Like we reclaimed the moon, we will, one day, reclaim Mars. We will set foot on the rusty planet, and we would finally have two feet into this, this greatest journey. Our first small, infantile, steps into the universe around us. As we as a people age, our steps will become more steady, more confident. We will exponentially travel our journey. The greatest journey of humanity. The journey we first set out on while humanity itself was only first beginning. To touch these stars, to reclaim them, is to complete a trek millions of years in the making.
Ancient man once looked upon the stars and wondered what they were. ‘Windows into the afterlife?’ man wondered. The philosopher then looked up at those same stars and determined that we were at the center. The stars rose and fell in our night sky to entertain solely us. The renaissance man put telescope to sky and realized that no, these stars were not for us. These stars were far away, these planets that we’d named and kept as our own, were not ours. The universe did not belong to us, but rather the other way around. As the years passed, we kept looking up, kept learning about these stars, kept longing to touch them. We put man on the moon. We had become one (small) step closer to touching these stars, to touching these other worlds that did not belong to us. Like we reclaimed the moon, we will, one day, reclaim Mars. We will set foot on the rusty planet, and we would finally have two feet into this, this greatest journey. Our first small, infantile, steps into the universe around us. As we as a people age, our steps will become more steady, more confident. We will exponentially travel our journey. The greatest journey of humanity. The journey we first set out on while humanity itself was only first beginning. To touch these stars, to reclaim them, is to complete a trek millions of years in the making.
of COURSE the night I wanna take pics of comet Neowise it starts to get real fuckin cloudy around sunset of COURSE fuck OFF bitch ass CLOUDS
For me it’s never been certain smells that remind me of my childhood, but rather certain shades of light. Sometimes on my walk home I’ll see the sun setting and it’ll be behind some clouds just so and the sky will be this specific shade of orange and suddenly I’m 8 years old on the beach of lake Huron and its just stopped storming and the weather is cool and the water is dark and choppy still. Sometimes I’ll be on a lunch break and the certain shade of blue sky will take me back to when I was 3 and my mother had taken me to this park in Florida that was against this big open field and I’d be sitting on the slide watching the leaves on the treeline sway in the wind. Its always certain shades of light that just fill me with an overwhelming amount of nostalgia and half-faded childhood memories
space gothic
- Around 1% of the static on your tv and radio is cosmic background radiation, leftover energy from the earliest days of existence lingering throughout the universe. You turn the dishes to the sky and tune the signal, filtering out the rest of the interference in an attempt to hear the sound from creation. You hear screaming.
- Stars shimmer as you gaze at them up in the night sky. They tell you that the twinkling is due to the distortion of the atmosphere, but you see one star flickers in Morse code. When you try to write it down no lead or ink comes out of your pencils and pens. When you try to talk about it your teeth bleed.
- Your pens float around you. Your water hovers in perfect circles. Everything is floating. You are floating. There is no gravity. You are still on Earth.
- The massive gravity of Jupiter drags in passing asteroids and comets before they can reach the inside of the solar system. Sometimes they become moons. Other times they are swallowed by the planet, buried underneath massive storms. You watch it from the telescope sometimes, gaping maws peeking out of churning storms, sucking in falling meteors. All the while the Great Red Spot remains fixed, watching you back.
- You can faintly hear music in the space station. No one is playing any music. The music comes from outside. You press your ear against the walls of the outside and listen. The music gets louder. There is no sound in space.
- They launch you up into orbit, but you cannot get back down. You jump out of the station, but you do not fall. You sit back and watch the sunrise as satellites tumble and burn up in the atmosphere, leaving you alone.
- You see the Earth from space. It is not blue.
Anonymous asked:
Yes! When stars die, they expand into massive red giants. Our own sun will do this in about 5 billion years, I believe? And when it does, the sun will expand to about where earth’s orbit is! After that, it ejects all of its outer layers into space (creating stellar nurseries for the next generation of stars). All that remains of the star is a White Dwarf. They are extremely small and dense.
When massive stars die, because of gravity and other physics, they actually explode into supernovae. We’ve recoded a bunch of these! We actually use them as a means to measure distances because supernovae (rather a specific subtype of supernovae) always have the same luminosity, so by measuring how bright a supernova was to us, we can tell the distance from it.
As a fun aside, due to the composition of our own star, it’s thought to be a 3rd generation star!
I just found the funniest Chinese propaganda disco song. It’s about Mao Zedong and it’s so??????????
A star-forming filament in Taurus
This image from the APEX telescope, of part of the Taurus Molecular Cloud, shows a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long. In it, newborn stars are hidden, and dense clouds of gas are on the verge of collapsing to form yet more stars. The cosmic dust grains are so cold that observations at submillimetre wavelengths, such as these made by the LABOCA camera on APEX, are needed to detect their faint glow. This image shows two regions in the cloud: the upper-right part of the filament shown here is Barnard 211, while the lower-left part is Barnard 213.
The submillimetre-wavelength observations from the LABOCA camera on APEX, which reveal the heat glow of the cosmic dust grains, are shown here in orange tones. They are superimposed on a visible-light image of the region, which shows the rich background of stars. The bright star above the filament is φ Tauri.
Credit: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/A. Hacar et al./Digitized Sky Survey 2.
Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.
New research shows that supermassive first-generation stars may explode in supernovae without leaving behind remnants like black holes. The work is a result of modeling the life and death of stars 55,000 to 56,000 times more massive than our sun. When such stars reach the end of their lives, they become unstable due to relativistic effects and begin to collapse inward. The collapse reinvigorates fusion inside the star and it begins to rapidly fuse heavier elements like oxygen, magnesium, or even iron from the helium in its core. Eventually, the energy released overcomes the binding energy of the star and it explodes outward as a supernova. The image above is a slice through such a star approximately one day after its collapse is reversed. Hydrodynamic instabilities like the Rayleigh-Taylor instability produce mixing of the heavy elements throughout the expanding interior of the star. The mixing should produce a signature that can be observed in the aftermath as these stars seed their galaxies with the heavy elements needed to form planets. For more, see Science Daily and Chen et al. (Image credit: K. Chen et al., via Science Daily; submitted by mechanicoolest)