Reading About The Voyager Golden Record Again Will Heal Me

Caldwell 92 by NASA Hubble

Happy Valentines day

space is weird

Comet Lovejoy’s long needle-like tail by Fritz Helmut Hemmerich

Waltzing dwarfs

This seemingly unspectacular series of dots with varying distances between them actually shows the slow waltz of two brown dwarfs. The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years with the Hubble Space Telescope. Using high-precision astrometry, an Italian-led team of astronomers tracked the two components of the system as they moved both across the sky and around each other. The observed system, Luhman 16AB, is only about six light-years away and is the third closest stellar system to Earth — after the triple star system Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Despite its proximity, Luhman 16AB was only discovered in 2013 by the astronomer Kevin Luhman. The two brown dwarfs that make up the system, Luhman 16A and Luhman 16B, orbit each other at a distance of only three times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and so these observations are a showcase for Hubble’s precision and high resolution.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Bedin et al.

Caldwell 103 by NASA Hubble

May 11, 2009 — The Space Shuttle Atlantis blasts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, heading to orbit for an 11-day mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

(NASA)