I Love Space - Tumblr Posts
I love space so much. The eclipse is so cool. This is an amazing day i cant comprehend any information right noe, everythis is AAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAA
Why did nobody tell me that the Milky Way (our galaxy) was gonna collide with Andromeda (another galaxy) in 4 billion years ???????¿??
Me when space
Me when someone mentions space
Space when I
When space
When I see space I
I love space
hello! i've got some GROUNDBREAKING space news for you!
scientists have uncovered evidence for a gravitational wave background (GWB) in our universe, and the way they went about it is fascinating.
To fully understand what's going on here, we need to go into a bit of background information.
First of all: what are gravitational waves? gravitational waves are often called 'ripples' in spacetime, often caused by extremely energetic processes such as black holes colliding, or two neutron stars orbiting each other closely.
So, how did scientists figure this out? They used 67 pulsars (known as the Pulsar Timing Array) throughout the Milky Way, practically creating a galaxy-sized telescope in order to study this.
Pulsars are the extremely dense cores of massive stars, left over after they go supernova. These are fascinating on their own, but for this project, they had an essential feature: Pulsars rapidly rotate (think up to hundreds of rotations per second), spewing radiation out in pulses from their magnetic poles. For some pulsars, these radiation jets cross Earth's line of sight, and we get incredibly constant bursts of radio signals, which can be catalogued and used as a sort of standard, universal clock.
Here is a link to a gif showing the rotation of a pulsar. Please be warned for flashing and eyestrain.
For 15 years, a team of astronomers working for the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), used radio telescopes around the globe to track minuscule changes in the signal patterns from pulsars. The changes they found are due to the slight movement of spacetime between us and the pulsars, stretching and compressing the paths of their radio waves as extremely low frequency gravitational waves pass through the universe (yes, that includes you. your atoms, as well as the atoms making up everything around you, are very slowly shifting position, dancing along to the heartbeat of the universe).
At the moment, scientists are still debating what could have caused this gravitational wave background, but some there are some leading theories: the GWB could be caused by trillions of binary black hole systems (black holes orbiting each other) throughout the universe. It could also be due to cosmic inflation, or even the big bang itself. Scientists just don't know yet, but the opportunities this discovery opens up are incredible.
The knowledge of the GWB could help us better understand the formation of early galaxies, or even help us understand the origin of the universe.
Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.
I think one big reason why we don't consider the stars as important as before (not even pop-astrology anymore cares about the stars or the sky on itself, just the signs deprived of context) is because of light pollution.
For most of human history the sky looked between 1-3, 4 at most. And then all of a sudden with electrification it was gone (I'm lucky if I get 6 in my small city). The first time I saw the Milky Way fully as a kid was a spiritual experience, I was almost scared on how BRIGHT it was, it felt like someone was looking back at me. You don't get that at all with modern light pollution.
When most people talk about stargazing nowadays they think about watching about a couple of bright dots. The stars are really, really not like that. The unpolluted night sky is a festival of fireworks. There is nothing like it.
Follow, follow the Sun / And which way the wind blows / When this day is done 🎶 Today, April 8, 2024, the last total solar eclipse until 2045 crossed North America.
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There are very, very few things I think are more inherently beautiful than the ISS. More earth and star tracks from the space station here.
GUYS I MEAN COME ON HOW COOL IS THIS.
NASA Data Sonification: Black Hole Remix
In this sonification of Perseus. the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted outward from the center. (source)
we need to stop being so desperate about finding aliens. we need to play hard to get, pretend like we couldn’t care less. watch them come rushing into our atmosphere
night sky agere outfit board
- this is a sfw age regression post, so sfw interaction only! -
Space is a lesbian that’s why it’s a GALaxy
