Breaking News & Random Musings on Space, Technology, Sci-Fi & the View From A Writer’s Window
They’re not all space-related, but the ones that are….😍
The first two are stunningly gorgeous, but I’ve always loved that Rosetta gif of Comet 67P. Just haunting.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07684-4 (image credits at the link)
Originally posted on Twitter.
From the author's Twitter post: "One of my favorite kinds of image is one where it doesn’t look like much… until you understand what you’re seeing.
For example: Just a bunch of dots, right? But every single one of those dots *is an entire galaxy*.
And there are a lot of dots. A LOT." (Tweet)
The image is from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey. And because the survey wasn't able to look at every point in the sky, for every dot you see here, there are 200 more across the sky Herschel wasn't able to see, for a total of some 17 million galaxies.
And even that is a pittance compared to the estimated 2 trillion galaxies filling the universe.
You know, somehow I don't think I'm going to run out of story ideas anytime soon....😋
A week or two ago, everyone was going nuts over what looked like a dolphin surfing the waves of Jupiter’s atmosphere, as captured by JunoCam. I admit…I couldn’t see the dolphin. Not until this image. Check out the dolphin!
Image credit: Sean Doran / Eichstädt
Originally posted on Twitter.
“Hubble takes gigantic image of the Triangulum Galaxy”: https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1901.
“The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of a close neighbour of the Milky Way — the Triangulum Galaxy, a spiral galaxy located at a distance of only three million light-years. This panoramic survey of the third-largest galaxy in our Local Group of galaxies provides a mesmerising view of the 40 billion stars that make up one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye.”
One of those 40 billion stars, of course, is host to the Kats’ homeworld, Katoikia :D.
Am I the last person to know this? Brian May, co-founder and lead guitarist of Queen, widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, is also an astrophysicist (he received his PhD in 2007). 😯
He was a collaborator on the New Horizons mission, and now he has written a rock anthem to commemorate the Ultima Thule flyby.
I feel like such an underachiever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May
https://youtube.com/watch?v=j3Jm5POCAj8
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Originally posted on Facebook.
NASA presents Ultima Thule: it's a snowman! ⛄️
Okay, it's actually a contact binary Kuiper Belt object (this means it was once two separate objects that gently merged over a long period of time). It's the most distant "world" and the first contact binary ever visited by a human spacecraft. It's a reddish color, similar to the red regions of Pluto that New Horizons imaged so beautifully, and is 21 miles/33 kms long.
Because scientists are not science fiction writers (well, almost never), they named the bottom, larger lobe "Ultima" and the smaller, top lobe "Thule." 🤨
Expect even better images and a lot more details in coming months; New Horizons recorded gigabytes of data, but the transmission rate is ssllllooowwwww.
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Originally posted on Facebook.
28 years of showing us the universe. All the <3 for the Hubble Space Telescope!
Want to keep tabs on the New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule over the New Years holiday? Here's the rough schedule of events:
12/31, 2 pm EST: NASA press briefing
1/1, ~12:30 am EST: flyby occurs
1/1, ~10 am EST: NASA hears from New Horizons about how it went
1/1, time TBD: NASA press conference with the first images, likely fuzzy/blurry
1/2, time TBD: first high-res images received
Jan, Feb, Mar and so on: more data and images!
More details on the events and how to watch: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Where-to-Watch.php
Despite the partial government shutdown, NASA social media accounts will be active and sharing info about the flyby. And because this is 2018, there's a New Horizons mobile app for iOS and Android: https://www.space.com/42850-new-horizons-ultima-thule-flyby…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/30/18157964/nasa-new-horizons-ultima-thule-flyby-new-years-day
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Originally posted on Facebook.
