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DragonI

@dragoni

"Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie", Miyamoto Musashi
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‘It snuck up on us’: Scientists stunned by ‘city-killer’ asteroid that just missed Earth
“People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us,” one astronomer said.
www.washingtonpost.com

Reality check: Not everything revolves around the endless reports of Trump — Republican atrocities.

On Thursday, July 25, an asteroid dubbed “Asteroid 2019 OK” passed within 45,000 miles of the Earth — the moon is 238,856 miles away!  2019 OK was not spotted because it came from the direction of the Sun and travelling faster than most asteroids. 

This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had long been tracking, and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Washington Post.
According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, an estimated 57 to 130 meters wide (187 to 427 feet), and moving fast along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers (45,000 miles) of Earth. That’s less than one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”
As it approached Earth, the asteroid was traveling at about 24 kilometers per second, he said, or nearly 54,000 mph. By contrast, other recent asteroids that flew by Earth clocked in between 4 and 19 kilometers per second (8,900 to 42,500 mph).

“People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”

#asteroid 2019 ok#asteroid#wakeup#asteroid detection#near miss#earth#nasa#astronomy#lucky#pale blue dot#doom#worst of 2019
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A Tour of our Moon

Want to go to the Moon? 

Let our Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter take you there!

Our lunar orbiter, also known as LRO, has been collecting data on lunar topography, temperature, resources, solar radiation, and geology since it launched nine years ago. Our latest collection of this data is now in 4K resolution. This updated “Tour of the Moon” takes you on a virtual tour of our nearest neighbor in space, with new science updates from the vastly expanded data trove.

Orientale Basin

First stop, Orientale Basin located on the rim of the western nearside. It’s about the size of Texas and is the best-preserved impact structure on the Moon. Topography data from LRO combined with gravity measurements from our twin GRAIL spacecraft reveal the structure below the surface and help us understand the geologic consequences of large impacts.

South-Pole and Shackleton Crater

Unlike Earth, the Moon’s axis is barely tilted relative to the Sun. This means that there are craters at the poles where the sunlight never reaches, called permanently shadowed regions. As a result, the Moon’s South Pole has some of the coldest measured places in the solar system. How cold? -410 degrees F.

Because these craters are so cold and dark, water that happens to find its way into them never has the opportunity to evaporate. Several of the instruments on LRO have found evidence of water ice, which you can see in the highlighted spots in this visualization.

South-Pole Aitken Basin

South Pole-Aitken Basin is the Moon’s largest, deepest and oldest observed impact structure. Its diameter is about 2,200 km or 1,367 miles across and takes up ¼ of the Moon! If there was a flat, straight road and you were driving 60 mph, it would take you about 22 hours to drive across. And the basin is so deep that nearly two Mount Everests stacked on each other would fit from the bottom of the basin to the rim. South-Pole Aitken Basin is a top choice for a landing site on the far side of the Moon.

Tycho Crater

Now let’s go to the near side. Tycho Crater is 100 million years young. Yes, that’s young in geologic time. The central peak of the impact crater likely formed from material that rebounded back up after being compressed in the impact, almost like a spring. Check out that boulder on top. It looks small in this image, but it could fill a baseball stadium.

Aristarchus Plateau

Also prominent on the nearside is the Aristarchus Plateau. It features a crater so bright that you could see it with your naked eye from Earth! The Aristarchus Plateau is particularly interesting to our scientists because it reveals much of the Moon’s volcanic history. The region is covered in rocks from volcanic eruptions and the large river-like structure is actually a channel made from a long-ago lava flow.

Apollo 17 Landing Site

As much as we study the Moon looking for sites to visit, we also look back at places we’ve already been. This is because the new data that LRO is gathering helps us reinterpret the geology of familiar places, giving scientists a better understanding of the sequence of events in early lunar history.

Here, we descend to the Apollo 17 landing site in the Taurus-Littrow valley, which is deeper than the Grand Canyon. The LRO camera is even able to capture a view of the bottom half of the Apollo 17 Lunar Lander, which still sits on the surface, as well as the rover vehicle. These images help preserve our accomplishment of human exploration on the Moon’s surface.

North Pole

Finally, we reach the North Pole. Like the South Pole, there are areas that are in permanent shadow and others that bask in nearly perpetual light. LRO scientists have taken detailed brightness and terrain measurements of the North Pole in order to model these areas of sunlight and shadow through time.  Sunlit peaks and crater rims here may be ideal locations for generating solar power for future expeditions to the Moon.

LRO was designed as a one-year mission. Now in its ninth year, the spacecraft and the data emphasize the power of long-term data collection. Thanks to its many orbits around the Moon, we have been able to expand on lunar science from the Apollo missions while paving the way for future lunar exploration. And as the mission continues to gather data, it will provide us with many more opportunities to take a tour of our Moon. 

And HERE’s the full “Tour of the Moon” video:

We hope you enjoyed the tour. If you’d like to explore the moon further, please visit moon.nasa.gov and moontrek.jpl.nasa.gov.

Make sure to follow @NASAMoon on Twitter for the latest lunar updates and photos.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

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dragoni

🌑 🌓 🌔 🌕  ☀️ 👏👏👏

#nasa#moon#earths moon#moon tour#earthsmoon#solar system#lro#lunar reconnaissance orbiter#science#astronomy#moon geology#earth#space exploration#aristarchus plateau#aitken basin#orientale basin#lunar orbiter#shackleton crater#tycho crater#nasamoon#education
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What in the Universe is an Exoplanet?

Simply put, an exoplanet is a planet that orbits another star. 

All of the planets in our solar system orbit around the Sun. Planets that orbit around other stars outside our solar system are called exoplanets.

Just because a planet orbits a star (like Earth) does not mean that it is automatically stable for life. The planet must be within the habitable zone, which is the area around a star in which water has the potential to be liquid…aka not so close that all the water would evaporate, and not too far away where all the water would freeze.

Exoplanets are very hard to see directly with telescopes. They are hidden by the bright glare of the stars they orbit. So, astronomers use other ways to detect and study these distant planets by looking at the effects these planets have on the stars they orbit.

One way to search for exoplanets is to look for “wobbly” stars. A star that has planets doesn’t orbit perfectly around its center. From far away, this off-center orbit makes the star look like it’s wobbling. Hundreds of planets have been discovered using this method. However, only big planets—like Jupiter, or even larger—can be seen this way. Smaller Earth-like planets are much harder to find because they create only small wobbles that are hard to detect.

How can we find Earth-like planets in other solar systems?

In 2009, we launched a spacecraft called Kepler to look for exoplanets. Kepler looked for planets in a wide range of sizes and orbits. And these planets orbited around stars that varied in size and temperature.

Kepler detected exoplanets using something called the transit method. When a planet passes in front of its star, it’s called a transit. As the planet transits in front of the star, it blocks out a little bit of the star’s light. That means a star will look a little less bright when the planet passes in front of it. Astronomers can observe how the brightness of the star changes during a transit. This can help them figure out the size of the planet.

By studying the time between transits, astronomers can also find out how far away the planet is from its star. This tells us something about the planet’s temperature. If a planet is just the right temperature, it could contain liquid water—an important ingredient for life.

So far, thousands of planets have been discovered by the Kepler mission.

We now know that exoplanets are very common in the universe. And future missions have been planned to discover many more!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

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dragoni

We’re NOT Alone!

"exoplanets are very common in the universe“

#exoplanet#exoplanets#earth-like#earth like#earth like planets#nasa#science#planets#space exploration#astronomy#discovery#universe#habitable zone#kepler#kepler space telescope#kepler telescope
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Four Earth-sized planets detected orbiting the nearest sun-like star
Four Earth-sized planets orbit the nearest sun-like star, tau Ceti, which is about 12 light years away and visible to the naked eye, astronomers say.
news.ucsc.edu

❤ space exploration. #ScienceMatters

These planets have masses as low as 1.7 Earth mass, making them among the smallest planets ever detected around nearby sun-like stars. Two of them are super-Earths located in the habitable zone of the star, meaning they could support liquid surface water.
"We are now finally crossing a threshold where, through very sophisticated modeling of large combined data sets from multiple independent observers, we can disentangle the noise due to stellar surface activity from the very tiny signals generated by the gravitational tugs from Earth-sized orbiting planets," said coauthor Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.
According to lead author Fabo Feng of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, the researchers are getting tantalizingly close to the 10-centimeter-per-second limit required for detecting Earth analogs. "Our detection of such weak wobbles is a milestone in the search for Earth analogs and the understanding of the Earth's habitability through comparison with these analogs," Feng said. "We have introduced new methods to remove the noise in the data in order to reveal the weak planetary signals."
A paper on the new findings was accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal and is available online. In addition to Vogt, Feng, and Tuomi, coauthors include Hugh Jones of the University of Hertfordshire, UK; John Barnes of the Open University, UK; Guillem Anglada-Escude of Queen Mary University of London; and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute of Washington.
Source: news.ycombinator.com
#tau ceti#exoplanets#exoplanet#earth like planets#university of hertfordshire#Fabo Feng#mikko tuomi#steven vogt#uc santa cruz#astronomy#planetary astronomy#astrophysics#space exploration#discovery
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Supermassive Black Holes Orbiting Each Other

You think our galaxy is special? Ha. Our boring pinwheel of gas and dark matter might be a nice hangout for humans. But 750 or so million light years away, there’s an elliptical galaxy, Galaxy 0402+379, whose two supermassive black holes are orbiting each other from a distance of only 24 or so light years. Their combined mass is around 15 billion times that of our Sun.
a team lead by scientists from the University of New Mexico have actually spotted the black holes moving relative to one another using the Very Long Baseline Array, a system of ten radio telescopes across the US, with locations in Hawaii and the Caribbean.
“I think, to me it’s a technical tour de force to measure such small motion in the sky,” he said. “It took a dozen years of measurement with the largest telescopic array on earth.”
“I’d be happier if we found a close pair that’s faster,” he said, “So instead of waiting 30,000 years to go around once you can wait only 100 years.”
Source: Gizmodo
#black holes#supermassive black holes#cosmology#astronomy#astrophysics#big black holes#gravitational waves#very long baseline array#Galaxy 0402+379
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There have been detailed maps of the Milky Way before, but none quite so ornate as this. Researchers in the HI4PI sky survey have created a fine-grained map of our home galaxy using its most common material: neutral atomic hydrogen. Such studies have taken place before, as you might guess. However, the use of 10 billion data points from large radio telescopes (the Parkes Observatory and Effelsberg 100m) and noise-filtering algorithms have produced an image with twice the sensitivity as the previous best, and four times the angular resolution. The result? A view of the Milky Way so comprehensive that you can finally see the finer details of cloud structures in between stars -- they were too blurry before. 
Source: Engadget
#milky way#hi4pi#HI4PI map#astronomy#astrophysics#benjamin winkel
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