April 2010

Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Being Crazy Awesome

April 23, 2010

in Science & Nature

The Hubble Space Telescope is 20 years old, but it never ceases to amaze me:

Thanks for showing us the universe, Hubble.

This brand new Hubble photo is of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble’s classic “Pillars of Creation” photo from 1995, but is even more striking in appearance. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air.

NASA’s best-recognized, longest-lived and most prolific space observatory was launched April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery during the STS-31 mission. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of current astronomical research from planetary science to cosmology.

See NASA, ESA and STScl’s announcement, Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery, and don’t forget to check out HubbleSite, Hubble’s official website with tons upon tons of awe-inspiring photographs of the cosmos!

The Antennae Galaxies

April 23, 2010

in Science & Nature

This image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters.

More at NASA’s gallery.

Good Earth Day

April 22, 2010

in Science & Nature

Preserve, respect and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Image taken by NASA, entitled The Blue Marble.

NASA SDO’s Tantalizing First Look at the Sun

April 22, 2010

in Science & Nature

NASA’s new Solar Dynamics Observatory has released some stunning footage and imagery of the Sun and its recent eruptive prominence. Here’s a small taste:

More at NASA SDO’s First Light page.

SDO: The Solar Dynamics Observatory is the first mission to be launched for NASA’s Living With a Star (LWS) Program, a program designed to understand the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth. SDO is designed to help us understand the Sun’s influence on Earth and Near-Earth space by studying the solar atmosphere on small scales of space and time and in many wavelengths simultaneously.

Large Eruptive Prominence Produced by the Sun

April 18, 2010

in Science & Nature

What’s happened to our Sun? Last week, it produced one of the most power eruptive prominences ever seen. Pictured above, the prominence erupted in only a few hours and was captured in movie form by NASA’s twin Sun-orbiting STEREO satellites. A quiescent solar prominence is a cloud of hot solar gas held above the Sun’s surface by the Sun’s magnetic field. Unpredictably, however, prominences may erupt, expelling hot gas into the Solar System via a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). As pictured above, many Earths would easily fit under the expanding ribbon of hot gas. Although somehow related to the Sun’s changing magnetic field, the energy mechanism that creates and sustains a Solar prominence is still a topic of research.

Source: NASA

F.lux Helps Me Sleep

April 18, 2010

in Linux,Tools,Windows

I recently stumbled upon F.lux, an application for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux that changes the color temperature of your display depending on the time of day. Although changing your color temperature is nothing new, F.lux makes it completely seamless: Just set your location and your desired color temperatures (optional), then forget about it.

From the author:

Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow? Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen? During the day, computer screens look good—they’re designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn’t be looking at the sun.

F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day. It’s even possible that you’re staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

Get it here.

Pictures of Eyjafjallajökull

April 18, 2010

in Science & Nature

Here are some amazing photographs of the current eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Iceland:

[click to continue…]

The Rosette Nebula

April 13, 2010

in Science & Nature

This image from the Herschel Space Observatory shows most the cloud associated with the Rosette nebula, a stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the Monoceros, or Unicorn, constellation. Herschel collects the infrared light given out by dust. The bright smudges are dusty cocoons containing massive embryonic stars, which will grow up to 10 times the mass of our sun. The small spots near the center of the image are lower mass stellar embryos. The Rosette nebula itself, and its massive cluster of stars, is located to the right of the picture.

Source: NASA

Hubble Confirms Cosmic Acceleration with Weak Lensing

April 12, 2010

in Science & Nature

A new study led by European scientists presents the most comprehensive analysis of data from the most ambitious survey ever undertaken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These researchers have, for the first time ever, used Hubble data to probe the effects of the natural gravitational “weak lenses” in space and characterize the expansion of the universe.

Update: The information in the video might be a little misleading; see NASA/ESA’s own press release below for the details on what has actually been discovered.

For more information, see NASA/ESA’s news release.

Perspective as Only Carl Sagan Could Give

April 10, 2010

in Life,Science & Nature

No one quite knew how to put things in perspective like Carl Sagan:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Carl Sagan delivered this speech in a commencement address on May 11th, 1996, commenting on the Pale Blue Dot photograph.

I would have enjoyed knowing him.

For most of human history we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions, and by the depth of our answers.

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