Echoes

Voyager’s Jupiter and Io

AERIAL SHOTS OF SOUTH AFRICA, ZACK SECKLER

This stunning photo-essay by New York City-based photographer, Zack Seckler, took him seven consecutive days to photograph over 2,000 miles of South African terrain. The end result is a breathtaking look at Africa’s majestic landscapes, colors, and creatures that inhabit it. 

Grow with us @ Instagram.com/wetheurban

this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby

Don’t know how people deal with rough days when they can’t be surrounded by all their favourite things. It’s the only thing that’s getting me through.

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future

Edward Lorenz

This is a video of an Oksapmin woman demonstrating the Oksapmin base-27 counting system. The Oksapmin people of New Guinea use body part counting as a base for their numeral system (which may sound wild and exotic, but is really just a more detailed version of what we do, most anthropologists think base-10 number systems come from humans’ having 10 fingers) starting with the thumb, going up the arm and head to the nose (the 14th number) and going down the other side of the body to the pinky finger of the other hand (the 27th number). It does not matter which side you start counting on, so counting from right-to-left or left-to-right makes no difference. 

And if that’s not the coolest thing you’ve ever heard, I don’t know what to tell ya

The Universe's Brightest Lights Have Some Dark Origins

Did you know some of the brightest sources of light in the sky come from black holes in the centers of galaxies? It sounds a little contradictory, but it’s true! They may not look bright to our eyes, but satellites have spotted oodles of them across the universe. 

One of those satellites is our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi has found thousands of these kinds of galaxies in the 10 years it’s been operating, and there are many more out there!

Black holes are regions of space that have so much gravity that nothing - not light, not particles, nada - can escape. Most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers - these are black holes that are hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of our sun - but active galactic nuclei (also called “AGN” for short, or just “active galaxies”) are surrounded by gas and dust that’s constantly falling into the black hole. As the gas and dust fall, they start to spin and form a disk. Because of the friction and other forces at work, the spinning disk starts to heat up.

The disk’s heat gets emitted as light - but not just wavelengths of it that we can see with our eyes. We see light from AGN across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the more familiar radio and optical waves through to the more exotic X-rays and gamma rays, which we need special telescopes to spot.

About one in 10 AGN beam out jets of energetic particles, which are traveling almost as fast as light. Scientists are studying these jets to try to understand how black holes - which pull everything in with their huge amounts of gravity - somehow provide the energy needed to propel the particles in these jets.

Many of the ways we tell one type of AGN from another depend on how they’re oriented from our point of view. With radio galaxies, for example, we see the jets from the side as they’re beaming vast amounts of energy into space. Then there’s blazars, which are a type of AGN that have a jet that is pointed almost directly at Earth, which makes the AGN particularly bright.  

Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been searching the sky for gamma ray sources for 10 years. More than half (57%) of the sources it has found have been blazars. Gamma rays are useful because they can tell us a lot about how particles accelerate and how they interact with their environment.

So why do we care about AGN? We know that some AGN formed early in the history of the universe. With their enormous power, they almost certainly affected how the universe changed over time. By discovering how AGN work, we can understand better how the universe came to be the way it is now.

Fermi’s helped us learn a lot about the gamma-ray universe over the last 10 years. Learn more about Fermi and how we’re celebrating its accomplishments all year.

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

being honest with each other is underrated …. honesty brings about meaningful connections and lessens the feeling of alienation ….. thinking that we have to present the best versions of ourselves at all times is a result of living in a capitalist society that reduces us to our most “admirable” traits and not the whole spectrum of feeling which is what unites us all as human beings …..