Northern Lights

Picture of the day 2 - November 16, 2018.

Tidally locked desert-like world with green vegetation growing between the hellishly hot day-side desert, and the endless ice of the night side.

Insight System - Post 1

First post of the Insight System.

The Insight system (named after the newest Mars lander) is a wide-spaced binary system consisting of a yellow G1V type star (Insight A) and a dimmer orange K5V type star (Insight B), that orbit each other in an elliptical orbit at an average distance of 192.3 AU. Both stars complete 1 orbit around each other every 2,432 years.

Insight A is 1.6 times brighter than our sun, and Insight B is only 1/6th the brightness of our sun.

Both stars have their own solar systems.

My first post if of the 6 planets orbiting the dimmer star Insight B.

First Planet Insight B-I (1.1 Earth masses)

Second Planet Insight B-II (5.3 Earth Masses)

Third Planet Insight B-III (11.7 Jupiter Masses)

Fourth Planet Insight B-IV (0.20 Jupiter Masses)

Fifth Planet Insight B-V (0.27 Earth masses)

Outer-most planet Insight B-VI (1.42 Jupiter Masses)

More pictures to come soon.

Using All of Our Senses in Space

Today, we and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the detection of light and a high-energy cosmic particle that both came from near a black hole billions of trillions of miles from Earth. This discovery is a big step forward in the field of multimessenger astronomy.

But wait — what is multimessenger astronomy? And why is it a big deal?

People learn about different objects through their senses: sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell. Similarly, multimessenger astronomy allows us to study the same astronomical object or event through a variety of “messengers,” which include light of all wavelengths, cosmic ray particles, gravitational waves, and neutrinos — speedy tiny particles that weigh almost nothing and rarely interact with anything. By receiving and combining different pieces of information from these different messengers, we can learn much more about these objects and events than we would from just one.

Lights, Detector, Action!  

Much of what we know about the universe comes just from different wavelengths of light. We study the rotations of galaxies through radio waves and visible light, investigate the eating habits of black holes through X-rays and gamma rays, and peer into dusty star-forming regions through infrared light.

The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which recently turned 10, studies the universe by detecting gamma rays — the highest-energy form of light. This allows us to investigate some of the most extreme objects in the universe.

Last fall, Fermi was involved in another multimessenger finding — the very first detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source, two merging neutron stars. In that instance, light and gravitational waves were the messengers that gave us a better understanding of the neutron stars and their explosive merger into a black hole.

Fermi has also advanced our understanding of blazars, which are galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers. Black holes are famous for drawing material into them. But with blazars, some material near the black hole shoots outward in a pair of fast-moving jets. With blazars, one of those jets points directly at us!

Multimessenger Astronomy is Cool

Today’s announcement combines another pair of messengers. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory lies a mile under the ice in Antarctica and uses the ice itself to detect neutrinos. When IceCube caught a super-high-energy neutrino and traced its origin to a specific area of the sky, they alerted the astronomical community.

Fermi completes a scan of the entire sky about every three hours, monitoring thousands of blazars among all the bright gamma-ray sources it sees. For months it had observed a blazar producing more gamma rays than usual. Flaring is a common characteristic in blazars, so this did not attract special attention. But when the alert from IceCube came through about a neutrino coming from that same patch of sky, and the Fermi data were analyzed, this flare became a big deal!

IceCube, Fermi, and followup observations all link this neutrino to a blazar called TXS 0506+056. This event connects a neutrino to a supermassive black hole for the very first time.  

Why is this such a big deal? And why haven’t we done it before? Detecting a neutrino is hard since it doesn’t interact easily with matter and can travel unaffected great distances through the universe. Neutrinos are passing through you right now and you can’t even feel a thing!

The neat thing about this discovery — and multimessenger astronomy in general — is how much more we can learn by combining observations. This blazar/neutrino connection, for example, tells us that it was protons being accelerated by the blazar’s jet. Our study of blazars, neutrinos, and other objects and events in the universe will continue with many more exciting multimessenger discoveries to come in the future.

Want to know more? Read the story HERE.

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

Pictures of the day 2 - December 2, 2018

Insight System - Fourth Planet (Insight B-IV)

Insight B-IV is a Saturn-Like planet with an extensive tan-colored ring system. The planet is 53,870 kilometers in radius and has a mass of 62.7 Earth’s. This small gas giant orbits Insight B at an average distance of 0.56 AU and completes and orbit once every 184.9 Earth days. A day on the planet lasts 16 hours and 24 minutes.

Weather on the planet is quite active with numerous storm systems ranging across the planet constantly. The temperatures averages -94 F.

A total of 26 moons orbit Insight B-IV, but only one of those, the third satellite is a large rounded object. Its lone large moon has a radius of 1,132 kilometers, and a mass one quarter that of our moon.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight B-IV

Active atmosphere

Lonely moon

Duality

Insight B-IV-M3 (only large moon)

Lunar Surface

Between the rings

Picture of the day - November 11, 2018

Inner planet loosing its atmosphere viewed from the surface of an asteroid moon.

Picture of the day 2 - November 28, 2018

Cratered surface of a small burnt dwarf planet. Fissures run through the surface from the core cooling and the crust shrinking.

Picture of the day - November 20, 2018

Dark red nebula rises over a dim set of rings orbiting a gas giant.

Like the gaping mouth of a gigantic celestial creature, the cometary globule CG4 glows menacingly in this image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Although it looks huge and bright in this image it is actually a faint nebula and not easy to observe. The exact nature of CG4 remains a mystery.

Credit: ESO

Picture of the day 2 - December 8, 2018.

The sun begins to set over a large lunar crater. Image from the surface of one of Insight B-VI’s smaller outer moons.

New Blogs - Coming Soon

To all my followers. I am creating some new blogs to include different interests of mine besides just astronomy and space engine. The first blog will be about rabbits and sharks. I know it sounds like an odd mix, but it covers both my favorites from land and the sea and will include pics of my two buns. A few other possible blogs I might start include general interests, sci-fi stuff, and maybe just thought for the day type material.

The rabbits and sharks blog should be up and running soon.