Hahaha, Right After I Start Out A Podcast Talking About How We’ll Never Poke The Sun, It Turns Out

Mosaic of the nebulae in the Orion Constellation

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The Cassini probe took a picture of Saturn that includes Earth in it!

Cassini has actually taken a ton of cool photos of Saturn if you want to check those out in the wake of last week’s planets podcast. 

sun depicted as a divinity petroglyph on the plateau Yagour (High Atlas mountains), Morocco.. 6000 to 8000 BC

This is one slice of an incredible high resolution, enhanced color image of Pluto, recently released by NASA. You can see the full, larger version here. 

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

What's Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays!

A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted bursts of gamma rays - some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe - coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like neutron stars and black holes. 

So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms?

Thunderstorms form when warm, damp air near the ground starts to rise and encounters colder air. As the warm air rises, moisture condenses into water droplets. The upward-moving water droplets bump into downward-moving ice crystals, stripping off electrons and creating a static charge in the cloud.

The top of the storm becomes positively charged, and the bottom becomes negatively charged, like two ends of a battery. Eventually the opposite charges build enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air - and zap! You get lightning.

Scientists suspect that lightning reconfigures the cloud’s electrical field. In some cases this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful natural particle accelerators on Earth!

When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that’s not all - thunderstorms can also produce antimatter! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron’s antimatter opposite!

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can spot terrestrial gamma-ray flashes within 500 miles of the location directly below the spacecraft. It does this using an instrument called the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor which is primarily used to watch for spectacular flashes of gamma rays coming from the universe.

There are an estimated 1,800 thunderstorms occurring on Earth at any given moment. Over the 10 years that Fermi has been in space, it has spotted about 5,000 terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But scientists estimate that there are 1,000 of these flashes every day - we’re just seeing the ones that are within 500 miles of Fermi’s regular orbits, which don’t cover the U.S. or Europe.

The map above shows all the flashes Fermi has seen since 2008. (Notice there’s a blob missing over the lower part of South America. That’s the South Atlantic Anomaly, a portion of the sky where radiation affects spacecraft and causes data glitches.)

Fermi has also spotted terrestrial gamma-ray flashes coming from individual tropical weather systems. The most productive system we’ve seen was Tropical Storm Julio in 2014, which later became a hurricane. It produced four flashes in just 100 minutes!

Learn more about what Fermi’s discovered about gamma rays over the last 10 years and how we’re celebrating its accomplishments.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Galaxy NGC 7714 After Collision : Is this galaxy jumping through a giant ring of stars? Probably not. Although the precise dynamics behind the featured image is yet unclear, what is clear is that the pictured galaxy, NGC 7714, has been stretched and distorted by a recent collision with a neighboring galaxy. This smaller neighbor, NGC 7715, situated off to the left of the featured frame, is thought to have charged right through NGC 7714. Observations indicate that the golden ring pictured is composed of millions of older Sun-like stars that are likely co-moving with the interior bluer stars. In contrast, the bright center of NGC 7714 appears to be undergoing a burst of new star formation. NGC 7714 is located about 100 million light years away toward the constellation of the Fish . The interactions between these galaxies likely started about 150 million years ago and should continue for several hundred million years more, after which a single central galaxy may result. via NASA

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Ep. 34 Stargazing - HD and the Void

Not enough people in the real world listened to my stories about my recent stargazing adventure, so I distilled my process and plans so that the process of selecting a site and using a stargazing app seems more attainable for those who have never ...

I went stargazing in early August of this year (2019) and I want to suggest a few options that will hopefully make this sort of trip accessible to people who are curious about stargazing but haven’t tried it yet. I talk through the process of finding the right time and location, selecting campsites, preparing some tools to maintain your nightvision, and using an app to figure out stars and constellations more easily.

Below the cut are the transcript, sources, and music credits. Send me any topic suggestions via Tumblr message (you don’t need an account to do this, just submit as anonymous). You can also tweet at me on Twitter at @HDandtheVoid, or you can ask me to my face if you know me in real life. Subscribe on iTunes to get the new episodes of my semi-monthly podcast, and I’d love if you could rate and review it. Go ahead and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it, too!

(The next episode is undecided, but I’m hoping to have it out for September.)

Transcript

Sources

Dark Site Finder

SkyView Lite

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: me singing ‘House of Gold’ by Twenty-One Pilots off their album Vessel

me singing a parody of ‘Mexican Wine’ by Fountains of Wayne off their album Welcome Interstate Managers

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

People think they know darkness, and that they experience darkness everyday, but they don’t, really.

Across the United States, natural darkness is an endangered resource. East of the Mississippi, it is already extinct; even in the West, night sky connoisseurs admit that it’s quicker to find true darkness by flying to Alice Springs, Australia, than traveling to anywhere in the lower forty-eight.

Ever since the nation’s first electric streetlight made its debut in Cleveland, on April 29, 1879, the American night has become steadily brighter. In his new book, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, Paul Bogard aims to draw attention to the naturally dark night as a landscape in its own right — a separate, incredibly valuable environmental condition that we overlook and destroy at our own peril.

Read More.

Solar System by Jian Guo

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