Coolest Animation of a Variable Red Star in Action (V838 Monocerotis)

By on Jan 29, 2013 in Pictures | 0 comments

V838 Monocerotis is located 20,000 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. It’s one of the most interesting red variable stars (variable star is a star whose brightness fluctuates as seen from Earth) because at first astronomers thought this was a classic case of a nova but in fact it’s something completely different and to make matters even juicier, they aren’t even sure why! This red star is 5-10 times the mass of our own Sun and has been seen rapidly heating up and expanding in matter of months! This is rarely seen with stars and is telling about how fast this is all happening.   Source: http://observatory.open.ac.uk/data_store/fun_stuff/v838_monocerotis.html Make sure to check out the smoother animation in the source link! It’s even better!

What are Blazars?

By on Jan 21, 2013 in For Your Information | 1 comment

  For most people they have only heard of cool space terms like black holes, supernovas or maybe even quasars. Well blazar isn’t a common term you’ll hear a lot and it’s actually not very different from a quasar. The picture above is essentially a blazar. It has an intensely bright central nucleus (or part of a classification called “active galactic nuclei” or AGN) containing a supermassive black hole. What’s really crazy about blazars is that the emitted light which sometimes includes extremely high energy gamma rays, can be over a hundred million times more energetic than the highest energy X-rays that the Chandra X-ray Observatory can study. Now just imagine a swirling disk filled with massive amounts of energy. We are talking about high energy gamma rays shooting out at 99% the speed of light! Also to make you feel even more uneasy, blazars...

Parting Moon Shots from GRAIL Mission

By on Jan 11, 2013 in Video | 0 comments

Parting Moon Shots from GRAIL Mission

Mind Blowing Neutron Star’s Spin

By on Jan 8, 2013 in Video | 0 comments

  This movie from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a fast moving jet of particles produced by a rapidly rotating neutron star, and may provide new insight into the nature of some of the densest matter in the universe. The star of this movie is the Vela pulsar, a neutron star that was formed when a massive star collapsed. The Vela pulsar is about 1,000 light years from Earth, spansis about 12 miles in diameter, and makes over 11 complete rotations every second, faster than a helicopter rotor. (NASA) This is an incredible video of a neutron star’s spin and is a reminder to how insane nature can be.

Just Watch This. A Flight Through the Universe

By on Jan 7, 2013 in Video | 0 comments

Watching this makes you feel like a spiritual being travelling through the cosmos. Amazing how even a galaxy as big as our own can just be a point of light in the sky.  

New Clues for the History of Water on Mars

By on Jan 5, 2013 in Breaking News | 0 comments

Recently news broke out when a martian meteorite (founded in the Moroccan dessert in 2011) revealed information about water on Mars. Professor Agee (lead scientist on this research paper) is arguing that this meteorite, nicknamed “Black Beauty”, is a very special rock because it has characteristics of a basaltic breccia rock (or a rock that has fragments of other rocks combined together by a volcano) and that there is 10 times amount of water bounded to the rock than what is normally found in other Martian rocks. This meteorite has also been classified to date back to 2 billion years old which gives us an idea of when there could have been water. However, how do we know this rock truly indicates these findings? Well other martian rocks found back in 2005 have shown how they can be chemically altered by liquid water. Black Beauty matches those findings as well.  This is the...

Most Beautiful Space Picture You’ll See Today

By on Dec 19, 2012 in Pictures | 0 comments

  How humble a beautiful gas cloud in space looks. Amazing.   This is one of the most beautiful space pictures I have seen. To be honest I haven’t seen even that many animations of gas clouds but just wow. What makes this really cool is that you are looking at a gas cloud that expands over 100 light years! This is where the birth of a star begins. This is its story that has yet unfolded. The attraction of the gravity from the mass of the hydrogen gas and the dirt will form a star. Depending on how much clumps together will of course depend on the size of the star. This is how it starts. This is how we started. Our humble beginnings.      

Cool Facts About Geminids Meteor Shower

By on Dec 13, 2012 in Events | 0 comments

  Tonight and tomorrow night you will be able to see the Geminids meteor shower. It’s where we see a meteor shower pass through the constellation Gemini. You can see anywhere from 60-120 meteors per hour! Here let’s get started with some interesting facts about why I LOVE the Geminids meteor shower:   1) An Unexplained Meteor Shower   One mind boggling thing about this meteor shower is that it’s UNLIKE no other! Usually most meteor showers are caused by debris from comets passing by (far away). This one has a parent asteroid called 3200 Phaethon. You would think that it’s this strange rock that’s causing all these meteors but actually it only makes up a very small fraction. It’s very very strange. They believe that this rock might have been broken off another larger asteroid and all the debris may have came along for the ride....