The Crab Nebula is the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion. Around in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers identified a large bright object that suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. The explosion was so bright that it was even visible during the day time.
700 years later the super nova remnant faded in brightness as it expanded and was nearly forgotten. The Super Nova Remnant was rediscovered in 1758 ( officially re-recorded) by Charles Messier while he was creating a catalog of mysterious objects that looked like comets but were not.
We now know that the beautiful Crab Nebula is the magnificent result of the death of a star, which was unknown to Charles Messier and the Chinese Astronomers that discovered the Object. Now, thanks to space telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, we can image the Nebula in great detail. The bottom left image is of a small region of the Crab Nebula. It shows “Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in its intricate filamentary structure” and gives scientists a better understanding of the death of stars. The image to the bottom left shows combined visible light data from Hubble and x-ray data from Chandra.
Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra
Scheelite with Pink Apatite on Muscovite
Locality: Mt Xuebaoding, Pingwu Co., Mianyang Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China.
Gateway to the Unknown Arches National Park, UT Credit: Jeff Berkes
Not cars but…
X-57 Electric Plane (nicknamed Maxwell). NASA has announced an experimental electric airplane called the X-57, which could reduce flight times and carbon emissions for passenger planes in the future. The plane, which will test the space agency’s new propulsion technology, is nicknamed after James Clerk Maxwell, the 19th century Scottish physicist who worked in the field of electromagnetism. The space agency’s Scalable Convergent Electric Propulsion Technology Operations Research project plans to build the plane by modifying the existing Italian-designed Tecnam P2006T twin-engine light aircraft. The X-57 will use a long skinny wing embedded with 14 electric motors. Twelve of the motors will be positioned on the leading edge of the plane for take offs and landings, while the larger motor on each wing tip will be used while at cruise altitude. It will be powered only by batteries, eliminating carbon emissions altogether. NASA hopes to demonstrate that X-57 technology could benefit travellers by reducing journey times, aircraft noise and fuel usage, as well as reducing operational costs for small airplanes by as much as 40%. While fuel-powered planes typically need to fly slower in order to get the best fuel efficiency, electric propulsion could help to tackle this problem, according to the space agency. X-57 is part of NASA’s decade-long New Aviation Horizons initiative, which will see it develop as many as five larger X-Planes with the aim of eventually producing them commercially.
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Auroras on Jupiter [NASA/ESA Hubble]
Afraid of Global Warming? Well, now there’s Galactic Warming from our dear friends, those super-massive black holes lurking just about everywhere a galaxy has sprouted up.
These wacky systems are so extreme as to completely skip out of many generations of new stars, leaving a severe stellar age gap in these galaxies, given an entirely new class called “red geysers”.
[First two images are gifs from “Space Engine”, the second is a rendering of the red geyser Akira galaxy sapping off of Tetsuo, it’s neighbor ]
Just Space, math/science and nature. Sometimes other things unrelated may pop up.
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