M83 produces more than just amazingly awesome music. Also produces extraordinary black hole outbursts from 15 million light years away.
Black Hole Outburst in Spiral Galaxy M83
Editor’s note: this pretty image is a rotated and cropped version of the original, located here:chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/m83/. A nice one from Chandra!
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered an extraordinary outburst by a black hole in the spiral galaxy M83, located about 15 million light years from Earth.
(photo by NASA/STScI/Middlebury College/F.Winkler et al.)
My kind of prototype!
“February 27, 1975 — Employees at Rockwell International Corporations Space Division, Downey, Calif., look over a full-scale mockup of the Space Shuttle orbiter..” (via, photo via aharvey2k’s Flickr)
(via itsfullofstars)
This graphic shows a wide-field view of the Puppis A supernova remnant along with a close-up image of the neutron star, known as RX J0822-4300, that is moving at a blistering pace. The larger field-of-view is a composite of X-ray data from the ROSAT satellite (pink) and optical data (purple), from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory 0.9-meter telescope, which highlights oxygen emission. Astronomers think Puppis A was created when a massive star ended its life in a supernova explosion about 3,700 years ago, forming an incredibly dense object called a neutron star and releasing debris into space.
The neutron star was ejected by the explosion. The inset box shows two observations of this neutron star obtained with the Chandra X-ray Observatory over the span of five years, between December 1999 and April 2005. By combining how far it has moved across the sky with its distance from Earth, astronomers determined the cosmic cannonball is moving at over 3 million miles per hour, one of the fastest moving stars ever observed. At this rate, RX J0822-4300 is destined to escape from the Milky Way after millions of years, even though it has only traveled about 20 light years so far.
The results from this study suggest the supernova explosion was lop-sided, kicking the neutron star in one direction and much of the debris from the explosion in the other. The estimated location of the explosion is shown in a labeled version of the composite image. The direction of motion of the cannonball, shown by an arrow, is in the opposite direction to the overall motion of the oxygen debris, seen in the upper left. In each case, the arrows show the estimated motion over the next 1,000 years. The oxygen clumps are believed to be massive enough so that momentum is conserved in the aftermath of the explosion, as required by fundamental physics.
Astronomer Merges Meteorite With Red Wine To Give It a 4.5 Billion Year-Old Vintage
“Astronomer Ian Hutcheon combined his passions for space and wine making to create a Cabernet Sauvignon with a 4.5 billion-year-old vintage. How the hell did he do that? Hutcheon aged the red wine with a 3″ wide meteorite formed during the birth of the solar system, and which crashed into the Atacama Desert in northern Chile about 6,000 years ago.
Hutcheon claims the meteorite gives his wine a “livelier taste”, while also providing “everybody the opportunity to touch something from space”. So far he has produced 2,200 gallons of the wine at his vineyard.”
/thx Bipana
“Emily Kane has created a conceptual space advocacy group called Project Moon which explores the relationship between space industry and graphic design. The project renders a new visual aesthetic for contemporary manned space exploration. While nodding to the aesthetic and humanistic contributions to the pursuit of space, she lays out the ambiguity of the terrain ahead. The design, detailed in a palette of black, red, and periwinkle, paints out the major contributions of the past and of areas still to be further explored.
Seeing Emily’s work made me begin obsessively considering/scheming what the aesthetic of space exploration will look like in the near future. 2011 was a pretty monumental year for space: the Shuttle era ended, the International Space Station was officially completed, Earth-like planets were uncovered, commercial space exploration took huge strides and the true stellar standout – 2011 marked the 50th anniversary of human space flight. Future of space exploration is undefined and new aesthetic of space exploration is needed.
During the 1970’s and 80’s, NASA used a red logotype nicknamed the “worm”. Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn created in their words, “a more useful new logotype” as part of the National Endowment of the Arts. It was an effort to design a more modern logo for a space agency that’s forward thinking. Then the Challenger accident happened and the agency was put on hold. In the early 90′s, administrator Daniel Goldin brought back the traditional NASA blue “meatball” with its red chevron and spattering of star in an attempt to herald back to the golden age of space exploration.
Soon manned space travel will not be limited to decorated patriots in uniform flight suits, commercial space exploration is charting new ground, including the aesthetic design of space. Virgin Galatic’s Spaceport America opened this past year; I can’t wait to see what Sir Richard Branson has up his sleeves.
Alana”
Love this image.
Tycho’s Star Shines in Gamma Rays (by NASA Goddard Photo and Video)
Gamma-rays detected by Fermi’s LAT show that the remnant of Tycho’s supernova shines in the highest-energy form of light. This portrait of the shattered star includes gamma rays (magenta), X-rays (yellow, green, and blue), infrared (red) and optical data.
Credit: Gamma ray, NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration; X-ray, NASA/CXC/SAO; Infrared, NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical, MPIA, Calar Alto, O. Krause et al. and DSS
To read more go to: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/tycho-star.html
NIGHTNIGHT by DEDDY
