Inter-stellxr-blog - Lost Among The Stars

clouds on mars, photographed by mars express, 16th january 2014.

around 43°s 258°e, one the eastern icaria planum. details from a sequence of 5 monochrome images, colourized with a bit of art and a bit of science.

image credit: esa. animation & colourization: ageofdestruction.

Meteorite Shower Over McCloud Falls, California

js

People: you should talk more

Me: *tries to talk*

- gets interrupted

- gets ignored

- gets talked over

- no one pays attention

- no one cares

Mostly Mute Monday: The Glory of Saturn’s Rings

“Saturn is remarkable in a number of ways; among all the planets we know of, it’s the least dense, and also the only one with a spectacularly visible set of rings. Composed of icy, dust-like material, these rings are not solid at all, but made up of particles that pass each other, stick together briefly and then fly apart once again.

Snowballs and planetesimals coalesce, only to be torn apart by tidal forces exerted by Saturn and its passing moons. Gaps in the inner rings are caused by the gravitational presence of moons themselves, while many of the outer rings — like Saturn’s E-ring, below — are actually caused by the moons themselves.”

From their discovery in the 1600s, Saturn’s rings have been a source of wonder and puzzlement to skywatchers everywhere. The only ring system visible through most telescopes from Earth, Saturn’s main rings at more than 70,000 km long, yet no more than 1 km in thickness. Once thought to have only two gaps in them, the Cassini spacecraft has revealed over a thousand, teaching us that Saturn’s rings are likely as old as the planet itself, and will likely continue to exist for as long as our Sun shines.

A Quadruple Sky Over Great Salt Lake

What’s Enceladus?

Before we tell you about Enceladus, let’s first talk about our Cassini spacecraft…

Our Cassini mission to Saturn is one of the most ambitious efforts in planetary space exploration ever mounted. Cassini is a sophisticated robotic spacecraft orbiting the ringed planet and studying the Saturnian system in detail.

Cassini completed its initial four-year mission to explore the Saturn System in June 2008. It has also completed its first mission extension in September 2010. Now, the health spacecraft is making exciting new discoveries in a second extension mission!

Enceladus

Enceladus is one of Saturn’s many moons, and is one of the brightest objects in our solar system. This moon is about as wide as Arizona, and displays at least five different types of terrain. The surface is believed to be geologically “young”, possibly less than 100 million years old.

Cassini first discovered continually-erupting fountains of icy material on Enceladus in 2005. Since then, the Saturn moon has become one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for present-day habitable environments.  

Scientists found that hydrothermal activity may be occurring on the seafloor of the moon’s underground ocean. In September, it was announced that its ocean –previously thought to only be a regional sea – was global!

Since Cassini is nearing the end of its mission, we are able to make a series of three close encounters with Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.

Close Encounters

On Oct. 14, Cassini performed a mid-range flyby of Enceladus, but the main event will take place on Oct. 28, when Cassini will come dizzyingly close to the icy moon. During this flyby, the spacecraft will pass a mere 30 miles above the moon’s south polar region!

This will be the deepest-ever dive through the moon’s plume of icy spray, where Cassini can collect images and valuable data about what’s going on beneath the frozen surface.

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

Lunar Eclipse Super Moon - 28th September 2015

Tumblr  / Facebook / Instagram / More Night Scenes

NASA just released a brand new equirectangular projection of Jupiter, so I thought it would be fun to revisit the surface of some planetary bodies … IN CONTINUOUSLY LOOPING GIF FORM.

So here’s

Mercury

Venus

Earth

Earth’s moon

Mars

Jupiter

Ganymede (one of Jupiter’s moons)

Pluto

Credit: NASA/JPL, USGS

This is what happens when Two Black Holes Collide.

This is the animation of the final stages of a merger between two black holes. What is particularly interesting about this animation is that it highlights a phenomenon known as Gravitational Lensing.

What is Gravitational Lensing?

Mass bends Light. What? 

Yeah, mass can bend Light. The gravitational field of a really massive object is super strong. And this causes light rays passing close to that object to be bent and refocused somewhere else.

The more massive the object, the stronger its gravitational field and hence the greater the bending of light rays - just like using denser materials to make optical lenses results in a greater amount of refraction.

Here’s an animation showing a black hole going past a background galaxy.

This effect is one of the predictions of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity 

PC: cfhtlens, Urbane Legend