Pictures Of The Day - December 28, 2018

Sagittarius Triplet

The northern pole of a large moon orbiting the blue gas giant. The clouds like structures visible are two galaxies in the process of colliding.

The burning sun begins to set behind a large volcano.

In honor of NASA’s successful landing of the InSight Lander, here are a couple of Space Engine pictures of Mars centered on the Elysium Planitia.

Had to take a second closer picture since Phobos got in the way of the first picture.

High Resolution Pictures

Picture 1

Picture 2

O’Sirus System - Post 1 (Hellish Moon)

We have gone deeper in the Triangulum Galaxy.  We are now only 1,473 light years from the NGC 604 Nebula. Our next system is the O’Sirus System, a dim Orange Dwarf orbited by 12 planets, including 1 world that supports life.

The lone satellite orbiting the third planet.  Roughly a third of Earth’s mass with a super-heated water vapor atmosphere. Atmospheric temperatures reach up to 1,000 K (1,340 °F), and glowing clouds of Titanium Dioxide hoover over the moon. The sun is only a K9V type star, but at only 0.11 AU, it covers an area of the sky 7.5 times larger than a Full Moon on Earth.

Space Engine System ID: RS 1229-171-8-11850488-229

High Resolution Pics

Picture 1 - Volcanic moon with glowing metallic clouds.

Picture 2 - Atmospheric Haze

Picture 3 - The Surface

Picture 4 - Lunar Sky

Picture 5 - Eclipse

Pictures of the Day - February 12, 2019 (Late Post)

Stormy atmosphere of a gas giant. The planet orbits a binary pair of stars consisting of a white F-Type star and a bright blue B-type star

Blue Titan

Picture of the day - October 12, 2018.

Blue-tinted Titan-Like world with liquid methane oceans and an extensive ring system.

Tumblr Changes - My Thoughts

I know this post is not about space and astronomy, but I wanted to voice my thoughts about the upcoming ban on Tumblr and how the automatic algorithms are going to affect everyone on there.

First off, I do not post or follow any NFSW Tumblr, so the primary ban does not affect either my Space Engine Tumblr or Rabbit and Shark Tumblr or other Tumblr’s that I follow in that regard, but the algorithms Tumblr has created are already beginning to affect my space engine posts. I mean seriously, how are my pictures of planets, alien landscapes and nebulas being flagged as adult material?

I understand that there are nearly 450 million users on here, but Tumblr has just 400 or so employees and for their employees to go through perhaps billions of images is not practical so they had to write a program to do the work for them. Auto-flagging images however, is a major problem for us non-NFSW Tumblrs, and we are only just now seeing the start of this problem. Eventually it is going to get to the point that we all have to wait weeks even months for our “sensitive marked” pictures to be marked as safe, since an actual person will have to review it.

Final conclusion. This ban and the way it is being implemented is a bad idea, and to be honest I also think an assault on free speech. More importantly, Tumblr better fix its auto-identification programs before a lot of us leave out of frustration when pictures of planets, rabbits, and sharks are all marked as adult.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AND REPOST.

Hot Jupiter

Planets in our own solar system have a wide range of properties. They are distinguished by two basic properties, their size and their orbit. The size determines if the planet can have a life-sustaining atmosphere. The orbit affects the surface temperature and whether there could be liquid water on the planet’s surface.

Hot Jupiters are a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but that have very short orbital period (P<10 days). The close proximity to their stars and high surface-atmosphere temperatures resulted in the moniker “hot Jupiters”.

Hot Jupiters are the easiest extrasolar planets to detect via the radial-velocity method, because the oscillations they induce in their parent stars’ motion are relatively large and rapid compared to those of other known types of planets.

One of the best-known hot Jupiters is 51 Pegasi b. Discovered in 1995, it was the first extrasolar planet found orbiting a Sun-like star. 51 Pegasi b has an orbital period of about 4 days.

There are two general schools of thought regarding the origin of hot Jupiters: formation at a distance followed by inward migration and in-situ formation at the distances at which they’re currently observed. The prevalent view is migration.

Migration 

In the migration hypothesis, a hot Jupiter forms beyond the frost line, from rock, ice, and gases via the core accretion method of planetary formation. The planet then migrates inwards to the star where it eventually forms a stable orbit. The planet may have migrated inwar.

In situ

Instead of being gas giants that migrated inward, in an alternate hypothesis the cores of the hot Jupiters began as more common super-Earths which accreted their gas envelopes at their current locations, becoming gas giants in situ. The super-Earths providing the cores in this hypothesis could have formed either in situ or at greater distances and have undergone migration before acquiring their gas envelopes.

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