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Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.  —Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Visible light emitted from a black hole has been detected for the first time

Got a decent telescope at home? That's all you need to observe a nearby black hole.

For the first time, astronomers have observed bursts of visible light being released by a black hole as it swallows matter from nearby stars.

These flashes of light, which lasted between several minutes to a few hours, were seen coming from a black hole in the Cygnus constellation, located about 7,800 light-years away from Earth. Incredibly, some of the flashes were so bright, the team says amateur astronomers could see them with a modest 20-cm telescope.

“We find that activity in the vicinity of a black hole can be observed in optical light at low luminosity for the first time,” astronomer and lead researcher, Mariko Kimura from Kyoto University in Japan, told Charles Q. Choi at Space.com.

“These findings suggest that we can study physical phenomena that occur in the vicinity of the black hole using moderate optical telescopes without high-spec X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes.”

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The Hunter heads West

photo by rivermusic, March 14, 2016

NASA just released the most detailed photo of space ever taken 

The picture of the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy to our own, is comprised of a mind-boggling 1.5 billion pixels and was snapped from 2.5 million light years away by the powerful Hubble Space Telescope.

See it in all its glory

We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.

Gravitational waves: discovery hailed as breakthrough of the century

Once again, Albert Einstein is proven right. Read more about this discovery in The Guardian.

We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us. - Interstellar, 2014.

pls listen to this star war theory

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 2016 January 27 

An Airglow Fan from Lake to Sky 

Why would the sky look like a giant fan? Airglow. The featured intermittent green glow appeared to rise from a lake through the arch of our Milky Way Galaxy, as captured last summer next to Bryce Canyon in Utah, USA. The unusual pattern was created by atmospheric gravity waves, ripples of alternating air pressure that can grow with height as the air thins, in this case about 90 kilometers up. Unlike auroras powered by collisions with energetic charged particles and seen at high latitudes, airglow is due to chemiluminescence, the production of light in a chemical reaction. More typically seen near the horizon, airglow keeps the night sky from ever being completely dark.