Space: The Final Frontier

[CaaC (John)+]

1 minute ago, nudge said:

It's 50% go based on weather conditions for 00:27 GMT tonight! 

Cheers, I will put the tweet back in. 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Colour and movement in the skies above

A cosmic amethyst and the Perseus Cluster.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNAM/J. Toalá et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI

You can’t beat space for great snapshots, and here we present not one but four new ones.

Above is what could be called a cosmic amethyst. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have captured a bubble of ultra-hot gas at the centre of an expiring star: a planetary nebula about 7800 light-years away in our galaxy called IC 4593.

This composite image has X-rays from Chandra in purple. The bubble is from gas that has been heated to over a million degrees. These high temperatures were likely generated by material that blew away from the shrunken core of the star and crashed into gas that had previously been ejected by the star.

This image also contains visible light data from the Hubble Space Telescope (pink and green). The pink regions in the Hubble image are the overlap of emission from cooler gas composed of a combination of nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, while the green emission is mainly from nitrogen.

You can read the story in full in a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Below is a triple treat, thanks to astronomers using the Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to learn how a crowded environment affects galaxies in the Perseus Cluster, a collection of thousands of galaxies some 240 million light-years from Earth.

Credit: M. Gendron-Marsolais et al.; S. Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF; Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Left: The giant galaxy NGC 1275, at the core of the cluster, is seen in new detail, including a just-revealed wealth of complex, filamentary structure in its radio lobes.

Centre: Galaxy NGC 1265 shows the effects of its motion through the material between the galaxies. Its radio jets are bent backwards by that interaction, then merge into a single, broad “tail”. The tail then is further bent, possibly by motions within the intergalactic material.

Right: The jets of the galaxy IC 310 also are bent backwards but appear closer because of the viewing angle from Earth. That angle also allows astronomers to directly observe energetic gamma rays generated near the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/colour-and-movement-in-the-skies-above/

 

[nudge]

T-57 minutes until launch.

@CaaC (John) you're watching?

[nudge]

Weather conditions have improved massively, the launch is currently 80% GO in terms of weather conditions.

10 minutes until the propellant loading go/no go poll.

[nudge]

Propellant load has started. T-33 minutes.

[CaaC (John)+]

2 hours ago, nudge said:

T-57 minutes until launch.

@CaaC (John) you're watching?

Lay in bed watching it while reading a book. 

https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasas-spacex-crew-1-mission

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54938444

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/index.cfm

[nudge]

16 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

Lay in bed watching it while reading a book. 

I'll be tuning in again for docking, not much happening for the next 24 hours.

[CaaC (John)+]

 

 

[CaaC (John)+]

2 minutes ago, nudge said:

I'll be tuning in again for docking, not much happening for the next 24 hours.

Bloody wide awake now, going to make myself some crumpets with lots of butter and a cup of coffee, I guarantee you I will wake the wife up as she can smell the grill on a mile away, won't get any of my crumpets though, she can go back to bloody bed.    

[nudge]

1 minute ago, CaaC (John) said:

Bloody wide awake now, going to make myself some crumpets with lots of butter and a cup of coffee, I guarantee you I will wake the wife up as she can smell the grill on a mile away, won't get any of my crumpets though, she can go back to bloody bed.    

Watch Europa Report while you're at it  

[CaaC (John)+]

5 hours ago, nudge said:

Watch Europa Report while you're at it  

Beam me up, Scotty.   I bloody burnt some a wee bit. 

Edited November 16, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[nudge]

10 minutes ago, CaaC (John) said:

Beam me up, Scotty.   I bloody burnt some a wee bit. 

Picture doesn't show up

 

[CaaC (John)+]

4 hours ago, nudge said:

Picture doesn't show up

That's weird, shows up here?

Edited November 16, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[nudge]

They have Baby Yoda as the Zero G indicator on board

@Bluewolf

[nudge]

Docking to start soon... 300m to the station. 

[nudge]

Holding at Waypoint 2 for 6 minutes until sunset for better visibility during docking. 

[nudge]

They tied Baby Yoda up, monsters

[nudge]

Hard capture is complete! 

[CaaC (John)+]

 

[CaaC (John)+]

5 hours ago, nudge said:

They tied Baby Yoda up, monsters

Spot the Yoda before getting roped up 

 

[Bluewolf]

5 hours ago, nudge said:

They tied Baby Yoda up, monsters

Not surprised... If they didn't he would be touching all the controls all the time and eating all the eggs.... 

[nudge]

2 hours ago, Bluewolf said:

Not surprised... If they didn't he would be touching all the controls all the time and eating all the eggs.... 

I wouldn't be surprised if he ate the astronauts

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Rethinking the Milky Way’s evolution

Telescopes combine to reveal orbits of ancient stars.

An investigation into the odd orbits of the galaxy’s oldest stars may prompt astronomers to rethink how the Milky Way evolved.

Australian telescopes teamed up with the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite to discover that some of the galaxy’s most metal-poor stellar giants travel in surprising patterns.

“Metal-poor stars – containing less than one-thousandth the amount of iron found in the Sun – are some of the rarest objects in the galaxy,” says astronomer Gary Da Costa from the Australian National University. 

“We’ve studied 475 of them and found that about 11% orbit in the almost flat plane that is the Milky Way’s disc.

“They follow an almost circular path – very much like the Sun. That was unexpected, so astronomers are going to have to rethink some of our basic ideas.”

Da Costa was part of an international collaboration of researchers from Australia, Europe and the US. An advanced version of their study is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The stars’ orbits fell into several different patterns, most of which matched what had already been studied or predicted.  Previous research, for example, had observed these rare stars almost exclusively in the Milky Way’s halo and bulge, and this study confirmed that most of the stars had large spherical orbits around the halo.

Some, however, were orbiting retrograde – the “wrong way” – around the galaxy. Around 5% were in the process of escaping the galaxy altogether, and 50 stars were orbiting the disc of the galaxy itself.

According to lead author Giacomo Cordoni, from Italy’s University of Padova, finding metal-poor stars orbiting the disc is particularly intriguing.

“Future scenarios for the formation of our galaxy will have to account for this finding – which will change our ideas quite dramatically,” he says.

“This discovery is not consistent with the previous galaxy formation scenario and adds a new piece to the puzzle that is the Milky Way.

“Their orbits are very much like that of the Sun, even though they contain just a tiny fraction of its iron. Understanding why they move in the way that they do will likely prompt a significant reassessment of how the Milky Way developed over many billions of years.”

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/astronomy/rethinking-the-milky-ways-evolution/

 

[CaaC (John)+]

Quote

Donald Trump Just Tried to Take Credit for NASA-SpaceX Mission Launch but Twitter Won't Let Him

Twitter users came down heavily on Trump and tried to burst his bubble, saying how this was not true at all and NASA was never a 'closed up disaster' to begin with.

NASA and high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX launched four astronauts on a flight to the International Space Station on Sunday as part of the US space agency's first full-fledged mission sending a crew into orbit aboard a privately-owned spacecraft.

SpaceX’s Resilience lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:27 p.m. eastern time (0027 GMT on Monday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA's social media handle shared a video link of the launch on Twitter so that space enthusiasts and the world all over c get a glimpse of the mission launch from their homes.

Now, along with the rest of the world, incumbent US President Donald Trump was also doing the same. But forever being the tweeting enthusiast that he is, Trump made some claims about NASA before he took charge that did not sit well with the netizens. He said NASA was "a closed up disaster when we took over. Now it is again the “hottest”, most advanced, space centre in the world, by far".

 

Twitter users came down heavily on Trump and tried to burst his bubble, saying how this was not true at all and NASA was never a 'closed up disaster' to begin with. A few also advised the incumbent President to do something about the coronavirus and not score brownie points over some private company's achievements or try and snatch credit for NASA's hard work

FULL STORY & More Tweets.

 

Edited November 19, 2020 by CaaC (John)

[nudge]

No politics allowed here