Category: space

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Look at These Awe-Inspiring Photos of the Final Solar Eclipse of the Decade

On December 26, people from Saudi Arabia to Guam scrambled to take pictures of the final solar eclipse to grace the Earth this decade.

Unlike in some eclipses, you’ll notice that the moon didn’t totally black out the sun. Instead, it covered the majority of the sun, leaving a visible “ring.” This type of event is called a “ring of fire,” or annular, eclipse.

The NOAA provided more information about the moon’s path on the 26th.

Images of the eclipse are stunning, especially against the backdrop of beautiful landscapes such as these sand dunes.

A photographer in Guam was able to capture the moon’s movements against the ocean tide.

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Solar Eclipse 2019 in Guam. I still can’t believe I got to witness this eclipse. Before anything, I want to thank @natgeotraveler_korea for believing in my crazy idea. @Saerom.h will be writing a story about our experience for the magazine and can’t wait to share it with you all. It’s been a long 6 months to prep, but it was all worth it. Two years ago, I missed the solar eclipse that was passing by the US, but I finally got my opportunity, and the day couldn’t have gone any better… And a big thank you to Guam and it’s people for making my time here even more memorable. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Eclipse Solar 2019 en Guam. Todavía no puedo creer que haya presenciado este eclipse. Antes que nada, quiero agradecer a @natgeotraveler_korea por creer en mi loca idea. @Saerom.h escribirá una historia sobre nuestra experiencia para la revista y no puedo esperar para compartirla con todos ustedes. Han sido largos 6 meses para preparar, pero valió la pena. Hace dos años, perdí la oportunidad de ver el eclipse solar que pasaba por los Estados Unidos, pero finalmente tuve mi oportunidad y el día no pudo haber sido mejor… Y también, muchas gracias a Guam y gente por haber hecho mi estadía mucho más memorable.

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This picture gives us a different point of view from India.

Some lucky travelers were able to fly right past the eclipse as well!

Residents of India, Pakistan, parts of Africa, and China will get to see the first solar eclipse of the new decade, which will pass by them in June 2020.

These images are out of this world!

Did you catch the eclipse? Share your thoughts with us below.

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Stars Are Disappearing and Scientists Aren’t Ruling out Aliens as a Cause

There have been a few stories lately when scientists and other suit-and-tie types have been unwilling to say aliens aren’t behind one thing or another – which I guess is the safest course, because no one likes to be proven wrong.

I mean, if a situation actually arose in which aliens were discovered, I doubt people would be running around pointing fingers at all of the folks who said aliens were a fantasy. But what do I know.

…But back to the story at hand, and the hundred-plus stars that have disappeared from the map.

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なんとか見れる形に現像できただろうか？ その2 . . .•*¨*•.¸¸☆*･ﾟ•*¨*•.¸¸☆*･ﾟ やっぱり星空撮っている時間好きだなぁと改めて思う. . . •*¨*•.¸¸☆*･ﾟ•*¨*•.¸¸☆*･ﾟ なんかとんでもなく忙しい… 明日無事に仕事が納められるるのか… とりあえず…あと10分寝よう🤣 . . . #岡山県 #井原市 #美星町 #美星天文台 #岡山へ行こう #星活 #星空撮影 #星景ら部 #天の川 #milkyway #nightphotography #nightsky #night_gram #night_shots #japan_night_view #best_moments_night #stars #setouchigram92 #colore_de_saison #瀬戸内カメラ部 #star_hunter_jp #team_jp_西 #Lovers_Nippon #photo_shorttrip #eosm3 #サムヤン12mmf2 #キリトリセカイ #その瞬間に物語を #ダレカニミセタイソラ

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Yes, it turns out that the night sky, which has remained static enough to guide seamen and pirates and explorers for eons, is changing.

The Vanishing and Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations Project (VASCO) compares 70-year-old surveys with recent images of the night sky to document what has changed, and after years of painstaking work (there are a lot of stars, after all), they’ve published their results in the Astronomical Journal.

The 100-odd stars that were documented to have disappeared could represent short-lived flashes in the night, or they could be actual stars that disappeared.

The researchers hope their results, and results to come, will be relevant to astronomy and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).

“VASCO is a project that is both a SETI project and a conventional astrophysics project,” explained Beatriz Villarroel, a researcher at the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics and one of the report’s coauthor. “Even if we do SETI and have SETI questions, we are also interested in publishing other results that we find along the way.”

The disappeared pinpricks of light are curious because when stars die, their last burst of glory is usually hard to miss – people saw and wrote about them long before there were telescopes – so if they can also just wink out without fanfare, well, we want to know why.

And to that end, some of the researchers don’t think we should rule out something like another advanced civilization blocking stars with their solar panels to gather energy.

For her part, Villarroel is on board.

“If we should look for aliens, maybe we should actually look for something that would be truly absurd to find.”

The research is being conducted by a team of 20 astronomers and astrophysicists who have compared 70 years worth of sky images taken by the US Naval Observatory and the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System.

They used software to analyze 600 million light sources that should have appeared in the earliest and most recent sets of data. At first,  the number of potential missing stars numbered around 150,000, but was winnowed down to 24,000 after some additional cross-referencing.

In the end, Villarroel is confident the 100 stars they presented are, indeed, missing.

“We have done the best work to remove anything that resembles any artifacts.”

If they are – or were – brief flashes that just happened to show up on the old US Navy surveys, they were likely red dwarf flares, variable stars that dimmed, or the afterglow of a gamma ray burst.

If they really were enduring light sources that disappeared without fanfare, Villarroel – and others – would be much more excited. SETI enthusiasts have speculated about how alien civilizations with advanced engineering power could shield a star from view.”You would have to exclude all-natural things, and then there might also be new natural phenomena that we don’t know about can be more exciting.”

If this is totally blowing your skirt up, the scientists at VASCO plan to implement a citizen science project that lets civilians help search through the rest of the 150,000 candidates.

You know you want to be the one who discovers the spot where technologically advanced aliens are hiding….

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This Is How to Tell the Difference Between Stars and Planets Just by Looking

This seems like it would be difficult – until, that is, you remember that classic lullaby that put us all to sleep.

Remember “Twinkle, twinkle little star”?

Yep. Stars twinkle, and planets don’t.

With the exception of our solar system’s sun, stars are all so far away that astronomers talk about their distance from Earth in terms of lightyears, or the distance light can go in one Earth year.

Considering light moves at about 186,000 miles per second, a lightyear is pretty freaking far.

The closest star to our sun is called the Alpha Centauri, and it’s 4 lightyears away from our planet. Because it takes a star’s light several lightyears to get to Earth, we see it as a small point in space.

But before we can see it from the surface of Earth, starlight is refracted. This refraction is influenced by every change in density and temperature in every media that the light passes through.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Planets are much closer to us than stars. A planet’s light (which is really sunlight reflected back to us) gets refracted to a much lesser degree because it travel a much shorter distance. Planets usually appear bigger (because they’re closer), and their light twinkles significantly less.

Actually, planetary light looks basically steady.

Of course, if you catch a planet a bit lower in the sky – maybe so you’re looking at it through the horizon – you’ll have a harder time telling it apart from a star. If light is traveling through the horizon, that means it’s going through a lot more atmosphere before it reaches your eyes than if it were directly overhead. That causes more light refraction, and, thus, more twinkling.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

It’s easier to tell stars and planets apart later because there’s less light refraction when you’re looking directly up.

If this trick gives you trouble at the beginning, keep practicing and tou’ll be able to tell the planets and stars apart in no time.

Are you going to try this simple trick? Share your results with us in the comment area, if you’d like.

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Magnetars: A Magnet so Strong, They Could Tear Your Body Apart

This is kinda crazy…

Some magnets are so weak they can barely keep a photo on the refrigerator. Meanwhile, there are magnetars: the strongest known magnets in the universe. Sadly, you can’t buy these at your local grocery store.

A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an unbelievably powerful magnetic field. Though they have the strongest magnetic pull of any known object in the universe, they are surprisingly small. They’re also very mysterious.

So, where do magnetars come from? Curiosity explains: When a star dies, it explodes into a supernova, collapsing in on itself in a giant extravagant display of light before fading away. If the star was large enough, it will then create a neutron star in its place. A neutron star is so small that it’s often just the size of a small city (for a star, that’s tiny!). However, it’s also incredibly dense. Just one teaspoon weighs at least one billion tons. All this matter spins around hundreds of times per second, creating a magnetic field that is a trillion times stronger than the Earth’s own.

And then there are magnetars. Magnetars are an especially magnetic type of neutron star. Nobody really knows why they’re so magnetic, but they are. They’re roughly 1000 trillion times more magnetic than Earth.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

This magnetic field is so strong that just coming within 600 miles of it would destroy your nervous system and even change your molecular structure. If you came closer, the gravitational force would destroy you at the atomic level. These stars can also wreak havoc on planets like the Earth.

Thankfully, the closest magnetar to us is much too far to do such damage, and they’re also incredibly rare. Scientists have been on the lookout for magnetars since 1979, but while they’ve found over 2000 neutron stars, fewer than 25 have been confirmed as magnetars.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Still, it’s fascinating to know that they’re out there somewhere!

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The Curiosity Rover Found Oxygen Behavior on Mars That Is Baffling Scientists

The Curiosity rover has been in Mars’ Gale Crater in 2012, and since then, has been studying all things Martian, so we can know more about the planet’s past.

Well, what we now know, more than anything, is how much we don’t understand about what’s happening out there.

Case in point: the rover’s tunable laser spectrometer (or Sample Analysis at Mars, SAM) recently found a huge amount of methane–the largest since landing there.

Photo Credit: NASA

Followed closely by the discovery that oxygen is behaving in a way scientists don’t quite understand.

In the past six years, SAM has determined the following about the atmosphere of Mars: 95 percent is carbon dioxide, 2.6 percent molecular nitrogen, 1.9 percent argon, 0.16 percent oxygen and 0.06 percent carbon monoxide.

Mars has seasons sort of like Earth, but they happen because the air pressure changes when carbon dioxide gas freezes at the poles during winter. This event causes the air pressure to lower. When the carbon dioxide eventually evaporates and is redistributed into the atmosphere, the air pressure rises for a Mars spring and summer.

Photo Credit: NASA

Nitrogen and argon followed a similar pattern.

Oxygen, however, didn’t.

It actually rose and peaked at 30 percent during spring and summer, then lowered to normal levels in fall.

Photo Credit: NASA

This pattern has repeated itself since Curiosity started monitoring. The only difference was that the levels of oxygen rising and falling varied.

Is the oxygen being created by something? What’s causing it to fall?

According to CNN, one of the authors of a new paper covering the seasonal variations, Sushil Atreya, said the data was “mind boggling.”

Photo Credit: NASA

The scientists involved in the study were so puzzled they even had the rover checked out for operational issues. But Curiosity was working as usual.

Melissa Trainer, study author and planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said:

We’re struggling to explain this. The fact that the oxygen behavior isn’t perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it’s not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink (of elements into the soil) that we can’t yet account for.

So, what about the huge amount of methane?

The Tunable Laser Spectrometer on NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover
Photo Credit: NASA

On Earth, most of our methane is created by living things, but also by rocks and water. Mars has plenty of rocks and water.

Principal Investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, noted that current measurement systems cannot determine the exact source of methane. What they do know, however, is that the methane fluctuates with the seasons as widely as oxygen.

Could the strange behavior of the two gases be related somehow?

Atreya believes so, although no one can figure out how.

In the meantime, the team invites any and all Martian experts to chime in.

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Why Is the Sun Hot If Space Is so Cold?

The solar system is pretty extreme as far as temperatures go. At its core, our sun registers at around 27-million degrees Fahrenheit, but its surface is no slouch temperature-wise either: it’s clocks in at about 10,000 degrees.

So is it kind of weird that in outer space, away from the sun and the mild atmosphere of Earth, the temperature measures -455 degrees?

What’s really going on out there?

Let’s go over some basic physics. Heat is actually energy, radiating as an infrared wave (like light, but below the spectrum of what’s visible to human eyes) that moves from its source (ie, the sun) to…everything else. As infrared radiation comes into contact with molecules, it imparts some of its energy, causing them to become excited and heat up. But only the matter in the path of the radiation will heat up –any matter outside of the path will remain cold. Any void the energy travels through will also remain cold because there’s nothing in it to get warmer.

Consider the planet Mercury. As the planet turns and night falls, the newly dark surface plunges in temperature to 1000 degrees colder than the radiation-exposed day side.

Photo Credit: NASA

Earth, in contrast, feels warm even if you’re standing in the shade. Summer nights stay warm too. Even night during the wintertime in Canada is warmer than most other places in our solar system at night (withe some exceptions, notably Venus). This is due to the sun’s radiation causing convection and conduction.

When radiation hits molecules, the molecules pass that energy to others next to them, which then pass their extra energy on to their neighbors. This chain reaction is conduction. Areas outside of the path of radiation are warmed this way – so night stays warm (relatively speaking).

But in empty space there are fewer molecules that are too far apart to transfer energy if they are heated. Conduction, under these circumstances, can’t happen. This is the void issue we touched on earlier.

Convection, the process by which heat moves via a fluid (ie air or water), also can’t happen in low-gravity, molecule-scarce space.

Engineers at NASA takes all this in consideration when they are designing spacecraft for exploration. Out in space, probes and other equipment are exposed to temperatures either boiling hot or icy cold, depending on where they’re traveling in relation to the path of the sun’s radiation.

The closest any spacecraft has gotten to the sun was the Parker Solar Probe, which came within 15 million miles. This was only possible because of the specially designed heat shield that kept the rest of the probe cool.

Photo Credit: NASA

The ability to adjust to the rising and dropping in temperatures to the tune of hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit is a necessity for surviving the extremes of space.

Luckily, our balmy little home planet manages it for us surprisingly well.

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People Share the Life Mysteries They Wish They Could Get Answered

Life is full of mysteries. I’m talking about all kinds of things that we really wish we had the answers to.

They could be big, they could be small. They might have something to do with how the universe works, or they might be specific only to you.

AskReddit users revealed what mysteries and questions they want to know…

1. You’re not alone on this one.

“What’s in the Vatican’s secret library?”

2. Maybe a ghost?

“What the hell happened to make my dog terrified of the bed for 3 days last year.”

3. Outer space…

“I would love to know if we have in some form been contacted. Maybe some higher forces know and didn’t tell us or it just went right by us because we were unable to receive the message due to technology. I think there’s a pretty decent possibility that that has happened.”

4. I’d like to know this one, too.

“Who was the Zodiac Killer and what was his complete story.”

5. That’s a real conundrum.

“What kind of job I could actually get and enjoy and still be able to live my life comfortably. Seems to be the impossible question.”

6. Definitely a weird story.

“What happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?”

7. Is anybody out there?

“If there is other intelligent life out there somewhere. I know that we probably will never see another intelligent life form, but it would be nice to know. It is neato some of the radio telescope stuff they are able to do now and look for atmosphere contaminants that could signal intelligent life. Would likely be the best we can do.”

8. Who did it?

“Who killed Jon Benet Ramsey? Also Madeline McCann. I really don’t think those cases will ever be solved and it drives me crazy.”

9. The real story.

“I’d like to have a true and factual account of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.”

10. Before and after.

“What existed before our universe exploded into existence and how is it going to end??”

11. A true crime mystery.

“Who was Jack the Ripper?”

12. One of the big questions.

“What actually happens after you die?”

13. That’s heavy.

“If there was anything I could have done to save my daughter from being murdered by her ex-boyfriend.”

14. An interesting question.

“How many times has humanity been reset by disaster.”

15. Looking for a partner.

“Who is out there that would be a good husband and want me as much as I want them. I’d move anywhere and change my job and life circumstances to find a partner.”

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NASA Wants to Send a Probe to Venus’ Infernal Surface

Even though we’ve had our eyes on the Mars prize for some time, a different team of researchers is actually working on getting to Venus.

Venus gets closer to Earth in its orbit than any other planet, yet we have precious little information about the surface – except that it’s close to a living hell.

In 1966, a Soviet space probe crash-landed on the surface, where it lasted a few hours before being destroyed. Now NASA’s Long-Lived In-situ Solar System Explorer, or LLISSE, is looking to last a full 60 days in the reactive atmosphere, crushing pressure and blasting heat found on Venus’ surface. In fact, each probe has to be specially designed to withstand the high temperatures and pressure.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Called Earth’s evil twin, Venus is roughly the same size and mass of our home planet. Scientists say it was once water-rich, potentially with the elements necessary for life. But it has since turned into a hell planet with scorching, lead-melting temperatures, pressure comparable to what’s found at the bottom of our deepest oceans and winds whipping like tornados. During the day, sulphuric acid blocks the sun’s rays. The nights each last one hundred Earth-days.

One theory about what happened to make Venus so inhospitable is that, over time, the once huge, shallow ocean evaporated, releasing the super-light hydrogen atoms into space. As hydrogen disappeared, all the carbon-dioxide left in the atmosphere created an out-of-control greenhouse effect. Basically, turbo-charged climate change run utterly amok.

But we really don’t know.

And we can’t know, until we put some equipment on the surface.

Small as a ten-inch cube, LLISSE will piggyback on other space-going craft and then get dropped onto Venus. The unit is made of super hard silicon carbide – also used in sandpaper and lab-made diamonds – to protect it against sulphuric crystals. Like a missile, it will be powered by a heat-activated thermal battery for its 60-day life.

Photo Credit: NASA

NASA engineers need the unit powered for that long to see the change from day to night on Venus. Each Venus day lasts almost four Earth-months. If the unit can get placed late in the day, and if it can stay powered long enough, we’ll be get critical data on the transition for the first time.

Eventually, LLISSE will be used as part of a joint Venus project with the Russian space agency, but, as of right now, it looks as if nothing is getting to the next planet over before 2026. Frankly, it’s not even sure if LLISSE will ever get a trip into space at that point.

But the technology is already here, and Venus isn’t going anywhere.

A visit next door is just a matter of a few more Venus days.

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This Is How the Earth Got Its Name

It’s pretty obvious, especially if you’ve ever read any Greek and Roman mythology, how most of the planets (Mercury, Mars, Venus, Saturn, and the rest) in our solar system got their names, but what about Earth?

There’s no Roman or Greek god named Earth, I’m pretty sure.

Image Credit: Pixabay

You might not know that there’s a different word for our planet in other languages – terra (Portuguese), dunya (Turkish), and aarde (Dutch), to name a few – but that each word is, like Earth, derived from a root word meaning ‘ground,’ or ‘soil.’

The use of the word ‘earth’ goes back around 1,000 years (that we know of), to when English was evolving from Anglo-Saxon as Germanic tribes spread from Europe into Britain. The Anglo-Saxon word for ‘earth’ was ‘erda‘ and the German equivalent ‘erde,’ both meaning ground or soil.

Image Credit: Pixabay

In Old English, the words became ‘eorthe‘ or ‘ertha.‘ Over the next millennium, we get the word ‘earth’ to mean soil – eventually it came to mean the planet as a whole.

Earth is definitely the only planet name that was never connected to Greco-Roman mythology, which might perhaps be because the other planets were discovered over time, whereas people have always lived on the earth. Translations of the Bible also support the fact that our planet was never referred to by any word that meant something other than the land itself.

Image Credit: Pixabay

And now you know – just wait until you can drop some of this etymology at your next dinner party!

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