Today I Learned About A Couple That Decided To Rebuild Their Deserted Piece Of Land Of 600 Hectares In

NASA has released new images of Jupiter, taken by the Juno Spacecraft.

Appearing like trenches dragged into the earth, sunken lanes, also called hollow-ways or holloways, are centuries-old thoroughfares worn down by the traffic of time. They’re one of the few examples of human-made infrastructure still serving its original purpose, although many who walk through holloways don’t realize they’re retracing ancient steps.

- Allison Meier in Atlas Abscura

Be chaotic, and never know anything

One of my favorite “never thought of that, but makes sense” facts is that the moon looks upside-down if you see it from the other hemisphere. 

When my friend from Brazil landed in the US for the first time, she stepped off the plane and saw an upside-down moon, which is more than a little alarming when you’re jetlagged and nervous about moving to a new country.

fuck the zodiac tell me which sin rules your personality

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.

I love solving mathematical problems. They calm me and cheer me up. They are like meditation to me.

I’m missing them a lot this week. I'm currently writting a paper and is quite urgent, so I don't have time for them. It isn't that I hate writting, I actually quite enjoy it. But it's been a terrible week and I miss my maths.

I think schools need to emphasize more that they aren’t teaching specific facts but rather skill sets

are you gonna remember your algebra formulas ten years from now? Probably not. Are you going to be able to use basic logic to solve problems? Well hopefully with some solid logic practice, such as math, yeah!

did Shakespeare really mean that all of the themes of dark and light in his plays indicated internal struggle and opposing forces? Who knows! Is the ability to critically analyze a piece of writing and see larger trends and symbols useful? Hell yes!

Schools should really be upfront with students that no, this isn’t going to be wholly applicable, but any amount of school will develop your self-discipline and  overall versatility- and that’s a good thing