Dark Matter Is One Of My Favorite Mysteries In Astrophysics, Oh I Would Just Love To Study It. Some Are

You’re lying - those are way cooler than dumb fireworks!

I really don’t like fireworks. They’re environmentally damaging, loud, and they hide the stars!

So yeah, July 4th wasn’t too happy for me.

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A camera on the Vosges mountains in France captured these surprising “fireworks” above the horizon. Generated over intense thunderstorms, these brief and mysterious flashes have come to be known as red sprites. The transient luminous events are caused by electrical breakdown at altitudes of 50 to 100 kilometers. That puts them in the mesophere, the coldest layer of planet Earth's atmosphere. The glow beneath the sprites is from lightening under the clouds.

On the right, the video frames have captured another summertime apparition from the mesophere. The silvery veins of light are polar mesospheric clouds. Also known as noctilucent or night shining clouds, the icy clouds still reflect the sunlight when the Sun is below the horizon.

Image Credit & Copyright: Stephane Vetter (TWAN, Nuits sacrees)

This is a nice little website which I used to outline my Life of a Star series.

It’s got some good info if you want a little brief course on stars (though my series is definitely way more detailed).

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I’m so hype for this telescope though

They say it might be able to see back to when the first stars were born - how exciting!

Eat shit Hubble telescope

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The launch of the James Webb Telescope – the successor of the Hubble Telescope – has been delayed until 2021 but damn it’s going to be awesome.

I mean, that is true. Atoms would really like communism (aside from Noble gases, of course).

Fluorine be like SHARING IS CARING

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Hydrogen bond vibes

Beautiful :o

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Clearest Picture of mercury ever taken

via reddit

OTHER PEOPLE: Oh no - that’s not good!

ME: Woah cool!!!!!!

Also, spaghettification here I come!!!

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When can I move???

That’s so gorgeous though. I hate artificial lighting. These pictures seem so extraordinary and gorgeous but most people don’t know that the sky EVERYWHERE is gorgeous but our lighting just ruins it. 

I remember one time when I went out in the middle of Arizona and I could just barely see the Milky Way. It’s quite a sight. I wish we were able to see it every night.

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Summer Milky Way at Boddington, Western Australia

Nikon d5500 - 50mm - ISO 3200 - f/2.8 - Foreground: 9 x 15 seconds - Sky: 26 x 30 seconds - iOptron SkyTracker - Hoya Red Intensifier filter

Wow, Mars is one of the closest planets to us xD

Just shows you how massive space really is

(Maybe even infinitely so)

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This is what the Earth looks like from the surface of our red neighbour, Mars!

Happy Earth day everyone 🌎🌍🌏 Hope you’re all staying safe!!

Image Credit: NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover

That’s a great explanation of particle physics xD

But really, this stuff is so interesting! I love reading about stuff like this - so good work NASA!

If you liked the four forces governing the universe, you might like this book I just finished reading for the seventh time (Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry”). It talks about these forces and a lot of other really cool concepts, like dark energy and chemistry-related-to-space.

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May the Four Forces Be With You!

May the force be with you? Much to learn you still have, padawan. In our universe it would be more appropriate to say, “May the four forces be with you.”

There are four fundamental forces that bind our universe and its building blocks together. Two of them are easy to spot — gravity keeps your feet on the ground while electromagnetism keeps your devices running. The other two are a little harder to see directly in everyday life, but without them, our universe would look a lot different!

Let’s explore these forces in a little more detail.

Gravity: Bringing the universe together

If you jump up, gravity brings you back down to Earth. It also keeps the solar system together … and our galaxy, and our local group of galaxies and our supercluster of galaxies.

Gravity pulls everything together. Everything, from the bright centers of the universe to the planets farthest from them. In fact, you (yes, you!) even exert a gravitational force on a galaxy far, far away. A tiny gravitational force, but a force nonetheless.

Credit: NASA and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing and B. O'Shea, M. Norman

Despite its well-known reputation, gravity is actually the weakest of the four forces. Its strength increases with the mass of the two objects involved. And its range is infinite, but the strength drops off as the square of the distance. If you and a friend measured your gravitational tug on each other and then doubled the distance between you, your new gravitational attraction would just be a quarter of what it was. So, you have to be really close together, or really big, or both, to exert a lot of gravity.

Even so, because its range is infinite, gravity is responsible for the formation of the largest structures in our universe! Planetary systems, galaxies and clusters of galaxies all formed because gravity brought them together.

Gravity truly surrounds us and binds us together.

Electromagnetism: Lighting the way

You know that shock you get on a dry day after shuffling across the carpet? The electricity that powers your television? The light that illuminates your room on a dark night? Those are all the work of electromagnetism. As the name implies, electromagnetism is the force that includes both electricity and magnetism.

Electromagnetism keeps electrons orbiting the nucleus at the center of atoms and allows chemical compounds to form (you know, the stuff that makes up us and everything around us). Electromagnetic waves are also known as light. Once started, an electromagnetic wave will travel at the speed of light until it interacts with something (like your eye) — so it will be there to light up the dark places.

Like gravity, electromagnetism works at infinite distances. And, also like gravity, the electromagnetic force between two objects falls as the square of their distance. However, unlike gravity, electromagnetism doesn’t just attract. Whether it attracts or repels depends on the electric charge of the objects involved. Two negative charges or two positive charges repel each other; one of each, and they attract each other. Plus. Minus. A balance.

This is what happens with common household magnets. If you hold them with the same “poles” together, they resist each other. On the other hand, if you hold a magnet with opposite poles together — snap! — they’ll attract each other.

Electromagnetism might just explain the relationship between a certain scruffy-looking nerf-herder and a princess.

Strong Force: Building the building blocks

Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The strong force is where things get really small. So small, that you can’t see it at work directly. But don’t let your eyes deceive you. Despite acting only on short distances, the strong force holds together the building blocks of the atoms, which are, in turn, the building blocks of everything we see around us.

Like gravity, the strong force always attracts, but that’s really where their similarities end. As the name implies, the force is strong with the strong force. It is the strongest of the four forces. It brings together protons and neutrons to form the nucleus of atoms — it has to be stronger than electromagnetism to do it, since all those protons are positively charged. But not only that, the strong force holds together the quarks — even tinier particles — to form those very protons and neutrons.

However, the strong force only works on very, very, very small distances. How small? About the scale of a medium-sized atom’s nucleus. For those of you who like the numbers, that’s about 10-15 meters, or 0.000000000000001 meters. That’s about a hundred billion times smaller than the width of a human hair! Whew.

Its tiny scale is why you don’t directly see the strong force in your day-to-day life. Judge a force by its physical size, do you? 

Weak Force: Keeping us in sunshine

If you thought it was hard to see the strong force, the weak force works on even smaller scales — 1,000 times smaller. But it, too, is extremely important for life as we know it. In fact, the weak force plays a key role in keeping our Sun shining.

But what does the weak force do? Well … that requires getting a little into the weeds of particle physics. Here goes nothing! We mentioned quarks earlier — these are tiny particles that, among other things, make up protons and neutrons. There are six types of quarks, but the two that make up protons and neutrons are called up and down quarks. The weak force changes one quark type into another. This causes neutrons to decay into protons (or the other way around) while releasing electrons and ghostly particles called neutrinos.

So for example, the weak force can turn a down quark in a neutron into an up quark, which will turn that neutron into a proton. If that neutron is in an atom’s nucleus, the electric charge of the nucleus changes. That tiny change turns the atom into a different element! Such reactions are happening all the time in our Sun, giving it the energy to shine.

The weak force might just help to keep you in the (sun)light.

All four of these forces run strong in the universe. They flow between all things and keep our universe in balance. Without them, we’d be doomed. But these forces will be with you. Always.

You can learn more about gravity from NASA’s Space Place and follow NASAUniverse on Twitter or Facebook to learn about some of the cool cosmic objects we study with light.

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

Neptune!

Mercury will always be my favorite planet (closest to the Sun, underappreciated, proved Einstein’s general relativity, among other things) but I think Neptune’s the most beautiful. Look at that hue!

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neptune.