cwnl: Saturn’s Ancient Rings Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
3rd Mar 2012✧16:12183 notes
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cwnl: Lunar Eclipse Over an Indian Peace Pagoda Our Moon turned red last week. The reason was that during December 10, a total lunar eclipse occurred. The above digitally superimposed image mosaic captured the Moon many times during the eclipse, from before the Moon entered Earth’s shadow until after the Moon exited. The image sequence was recorded over a Shanti Stupa Peace Pagota near the center of New Delhi, India, where the eclipse of the Moon was nearly, but not completely, total. The red tint of the eclipsed Moon was created by sunlight first passing through the Earth’s atmosphere, which preferentially scatters blue light (making the sky blue) but passes and refracts red light, before reflecting back off the Moon. Differing amounts of clouds and volcanic dust in the Earth’s atmosphere make each lunar eclipse appear differently. The next total lunar eclipse will occur only in 2014. Image Credit & Copyright: Chander Devgun (SPACE)
1st Feb 2012✧04:00371 notes
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The Southern Arm (by mj.foto)
16th Jan 2012✧16:1556 notes
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cwnl: What Lies Beneath? Magnetar Enigma Deepens Observations with NASA’s Chandra, Swift, and Rossi X-ray observatories, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and ESA’s XMM-Newton have revealed that a slowly rotating neutron star with an ordinary surface magnetic field is giving off bursts of X-rays and gamma rays. This discovery may indicate the presence of an internal magnetic field much more intense than the surface magnetic field, with implications for how the most powerful magnets in the cosmos evolve. Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
9th Jan 2012✧08:06265 notes
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cwnl: The Search — SETI Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by spoonbard
3rd Jan 2012✧13:57200 notes
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cwnl: Table of Astronomy by inspyretash-stock
3rd Jan 2012✧12:25590 notes
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scienceisbeauty: The images above illustrate the formation formation of clusters and large-scale filaments in the Cold Dark Matter model with dark energy. The frames show the evolution of structures in a 43 million parsecs (or 140 million light years) box from redshift of 30 to the present epoch (upper left z=30 to lower right z=0). Source: Formation of the large-scale structure in the Universe: filaments, From quantum foam to galaxies: formation of the large-scale structure in the Universe, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at The University of Chicago.
1st Jan 2012✧17:51440 notes
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the-star-stuff: BIS Daedalus by Nick Stevens This is the Daedalus that was designed by the British Interplanetary Society, as a serious contender to fly to another star in under 50 years. It is 170 metres tall, unmanned, and fuelled by tritium mined from the atmosphere of Jupiter. Pellets of fuel are triggered into fusion by the ring of lasers around the base of the first and second stages.
26th Dec 2011✧16:1014 notes
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the-star-stuff: The Geysers of Triton (One of the 8 Wonders of the Solar System) (March 30, 2010) Visitors to the largest of Neptune’s moons, Triton, will be treated to an array of cryogeysers that are probably composed of nitrogen frost and dark organic compounds. The smoky-looking geysers might be heard from kilometers away as they stream more than 8,000 meters into the thin atmosphere before their tops are whisked away by prevailing winds. Methane and nitrogen ice cover this world whose surface temperature plummets to almost —200 degrees Celsius.
24th Dec 2011✧08:1016 notes
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scipsy: The picture is of our galactic center with a very weak aurora in the foreground. (Photo by: Daniel Luong-Van; via Antarctic Photo Library:)
17th Dec 2011✧10:55749 notes
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cwnl: Life May Exist Within A Super Massive Black Hole Despite being considered the most destructive force in space and absolutely uninhabitable, the conditions for life exist inside supermassive black holes, a Russian cosmologist has theorised. Going out on a scientific limb somewhat, Vyacheslav Dokuchaev has even suggested that if life did exist inside the SBH, it would have evolved to become the most advanced civilisation in the galaxy. Supermassive black holes are such powerful gravitational forces that they suck in everything around them, including light, and nothing that crosses the black hole’s ‘event horizon’ is ever seen again. But now Dokuchaev, of Moscow’s Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says existing evidence combined with new research throws up intriguing possibilities for certain types of black holes. Inside a charged, rotating black hole there are regions where photons can survive in stable periodic orbits. Dokuchaev specialises in studying those orbits and their dynamics. He speculates, in a paper published in Cornell University’s online journal arXiv, that if there are stable orbits for photons, there is no reason why there could not be stable orbits for larger objects, such as planets. The problem is that these stable orbits would only exist once you have crossed the threshold of the event horizon, where time and space flow into one another. The event horizon, at the lip of the black hole, is known as the point of no return. However, beyond the event horizon is another domain, known as the Cauchy horizon, where time and space return to stable states. It is inside the Cauchy horizon that life could exist, Dokuchaev argues in a paper published in Cornell University’s online journal arXiv, However, the type of life that could exist in those conditions - where they would be subject to massive fluctuating tidal forces - would have evolved beyond ours. The life that could exist there would likely be a civilisation ranked as Type III on the Kardashev Scale. There are three levels to the scale with one being the lowest and three the highest. Humanity is still looking to attain Level 1 status; mastery of its own planet. ‘Interiors of the supermassive black holes may be inhabited by advanced civilisations… invisible from the outside,’ he says. Though that is a spine-tingling thought, Dokuchaev’s proposition can only ever remain theoretical. Because nothing can ever escape from a black hole due to its enormous gravitational pull, we will never know if it is true.
16th Dec 2011✧04:241,530 notes
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mothernaturenetwork: Reactions to the 2011 Geminid meteor showerThe Geminid meteor shower is an annual sky show created by pieces of the asteroid 3200 Phaethon, which sheds dusty debris.
15th Dec 2011✧13:3231 notes
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cwnl: Puppis A: Ancient Supernova Revealed About 3,700 years ago, people on Earth would have seen a brand-new bright star in the sky. As it slowly dimmed out of sight, it was eventually forgotten, until modern astronomers found its remains — called Puppis A . Seen as a red dusty cloud in this image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, Puppis A is the remnant of a supernova explosion. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team
14th Dec 2011✧14:55508 notes
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cwnl: Space Tarantula! This view shows part of the very active star-forming region around the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor of the Milky Way. At the exact center lies the brilliant but isolated star VFTS 682 and to its lower right the very rich star cluster R 136. Credit: ESO/M.-R. Cioni/VISTA
29th Nov 2011✧08:21273 notes
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the-star-stuff: This is a portion of the Pelican Nebula in the constellation of Cygnus. This shows an area of dense hydrogen gas and dust being eroded by the ultraviolet radiation from nearby hot stars.  It is classically known as an ionization front. This image is 4 hours of exposure using a TEC140ED refractor telescope and a QSI583wsg ccd camera with Astrodon narrowband filters. (Credit: by Howard H Bower)
26th Nov 2011✧02:4750 notes
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Opaque  by  andbamnan