Front Toward Enemy

pappubahry:

Saturn’s moon Prometheus and the F Ring, photographed by Cassini, 29 October 2008.

The thing that gets me, every time I see things like this, is that this is a thing that is out there, right now; it’s happening. We’ve sent a machine to Saturn, we’ve landed another on Titan, we humans can do amazing things, we can touch distances almost impossible to conceive.

How can you not want to celebrate that?

(via n-a-s-a)

n-a-s-a:

Antares & Rho Ophiuchus Region

Credit: Philip Perkins

From Io9, three new panoramas of Mars, courtesy of NASA and Curiosity.

Image (and follow the link for the video) to see a “continent-sized hurricane whip around around Saturn’s north pole.”

Continent-sized hurricane.

Saturn’s north pole.

That’s been there for years.

From Wired’s Space Science, article by Adam Mann.

subatomiconsciousness:

Superdense neutron star, emitting beams of radio waves as a pulsar, center, is closely paired with a compact white-dwarf star. Together, the two provide physicists with an unprecedented natural, cosmic “laboratory” for studying the nature of gravity. The grid background illustrates the distortions of spacetime caused by the gravitational effect of the two objects. (Credit: Antoniadis, et al.)

Once again, Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915, comes out on top.

At some point, however, scientists expect Einstein’s model to be invalid under extreme conditions. General Relativity, for example, is incompatible with quantum theory. Physicists hope to find an alternate description of gravity that would eliminate that incompatibility.

A newly-discovered pulsar — a spinning neutron star with twice the mass of the Sun — and its white-dwarf companion, orbiting each other once every two and a half hours, has put gravitational theories to the most extreme test yet. Observations of the system, dubbed PSR J0348+0432, produced results consistent with the predictions of General Relativity.

[…]

In such a system, the orbits decay and gravitational waves are emitted, carrying energy from the system. By very precisely measuring the time of arrival of the pulsar’s radio pulses over a long period of time, astronomers can determine the rate of decay and the amount of gravitational radiation emitted. The large mass of the neutron star in PSR J0348+0432, the closeness of its orbit with its companion, and the fact that the companion white dwarf is compact but not another neutron star, all make the system an unprecedented opportunity for testing alternative theories of gravity.

Under the extreme conditions of this system, some scientists thought that the equations of General Relativity might not accurately predict the amount of gravitational radiation emitted, and thus change the rate of orbital decay. Competing gravitational theories, they thought, might prove more accurate in this system.

“We thought this system might be extreme enough to show a breakdown in General Relativity, but instead, Einstein’s predictions held up quite well,” said Paulo Freire, of the Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Germany.

That’s good news, the scientists say, for researchers hoping to make the first direct detection of gravitational waves with advanced instruments. Researchers using such instruments hope to detect the gravitational waves emitted as such dense pairs as neutron stars and black holes spiral inward toward violent collisions.

read more

Spacetime is a beautiful thing.

(via n-a-s-a)

scienceyoucanlove:

Solar Storms, With a Chance of Proton Showers

This large solar flare, produced by an active region of the sun (AR9077), triggered magnetic storms and knocked out satellites when it created a solar storm on July 14, 2000. Nicknamed the Bastille Day Event, it was the third largest storm of its kind in the past 30 years, and the biggest solar radiation event since 1989. The Slinky-like loops represent magnetic field lines.

The orbiting Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) satellite captured this close-up image after the flare erupted. Recorded in extreme ultraviolet light, it covers a 230,000-by-77,000 kilometer area on the sun’s surface and shows a one-million-degree solar plasma cooling down.

(via n-a-s-a)

spaceplasma:

Vesta Full Rotation

In this movie, strung together from a series of images provided by the framing camera on NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, we see a full rotation of Vesta, which occurs over the course of roughly five hours.

Credit: JPL

(via n-a-s-a)

sci-fact:

Three years ago today, March 22, 2010, communications with the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit were lost. Ten months prior, Spirit found itself stuck in soft soil, and after eight months of unsuccessful attempts to free its wheels, it was repurposed as a stationary research platform. But in the midst of a stressful Martian winter with little sun to recharge its batteries and no way to reorient itself in preparation for hibernation, the rover was unable to maintain its minimal power requirement, and on sol 2210 of its 90 sol mission, Spirit died.

(via aworthyendeavor)

n-a-s-a:

370-million-pixel starscape of the Lagoon Nebula

Credit: ESO 

n-a-s-a:

The Moon shining over the Chilean Andes.

Credit: ESO/H.H. Heyer