Jupiter And Saturn Appear To The Naked Eye As A Single Star, Dubbed The "Christmas Star," Last Seen 800

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.

Happy Valentine's Day, Kimmy!

Happy Valentine’s Day 💗💜💗

Here’s round 2 of funny space themed Valentine’s Day cards to send to the people you love (or for yourself because you should love yourself too) 💞

New Release! Pathway to the Stars: Part 4, Universal Party

New Release! Pathway to the Stars: Part 4, Universal Party

I am pleased to announce a NEW RELEASE to my Space Opera series. It is now available on Amazon in ebook and paperback formats! 

Pathway to the Stars: Part 4, Universal Party

Autographed copies of printed material are available for direct purchase on the author website at:

https://www.ftb-pathway-publications.com

Thank you, Kim, for putting this together!

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Further than Before: Nutrition and Exercise

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Further than Before: Neuroscience

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Further than Before: Biotechnology

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Further than Before:…

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Lauge - Ephemeral Flower (Cloud Garden Mix) [SpaceAmbient]

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New FTB Promo Video! Promo video put together by my wonderful spouse. Thank you, Kimmy! #FurtherthanBefore #PathwaytotheStars #ScifiFantasy #neuroscience#physics…

Constellations: Andromeda

Andromeda is most prominent during autumn evenings in the Northern Hemisphere, along with several other constellations named for characters in the Perseus myth.

Its brightest star, Alpha Andromedae, is a binary star that has also been counted as a part of Pegasus, while Gamma Andromedae is a colorful binary and a popular target for amateur astronomers. Only marginally dimmer than Alpha, Beta Andromedae is a red giant, its color visible to the naked eye. The constellation’s most obvious deep-sky object is the naked-eye Andromeda Galaxy (M31, also called the Great Galaxy of Andromeda), the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and one of the brightest Messier objects. 

In this image of the Andromeda Galaxy, Messier 32 is to the left of the center.

Several fainter galaxies, including M31’s companions M110 and M32, as well as the more distant NGC 891, lie within Andromeda. The Blue Snowball Nebula, a planetary nebula, is visible in a telescope as a blue circular object. 

NGC 891, as taken with amateur equipment

Along with the Andromeda Galaxy and its companions, the constellation also features NGC 891 (Caldwell 23), a smaller galaxy just east of Almach. It is a barred spiral galaxy seen edge-on, with a dark dust lane visible down the middle. 

In addition to the star clusters NGC 752 and NGC 7686, there is also the planetary nebula NGC 7662.

Each November, the Andromedids meteor shower appears to radiate from Andromeda. The shower peaks in mid-to-late November every year, but has a low peak rate of fewer than two meteors per hour. Astronomers have often associated the Andromedids with Biela’s Comet, which was destroyed in the 19th century, but that connection is disputed. source

New Podcast: Starts With A Bang #35 - Do We Live In A Multiverse

There’s been a lot of speculative ideas put forth about the Multiverse, and I dare say that a great many of them are nothing more than wishful thinking. But that doesn’t mean the Multiverse itself is ill-motivated at all. Rather, if you take two of our best theories that have been well-confirmed in a wide variety of different ways, you’re going to find that you arrive at a bizarre but unavoidable picture: one of an inflating spacetime, eternal to the future, where regions that look like our Universe, complete with a hot Big Bang, are spawned continuously.

The evidence might not be there, observably, to confirm or deny the existence of a Multiverse. But as a theoretical consequence, it certainly has a motivation that’s far stronger than practically anyone realizes. Here’s the cosmic story.

“Why is there a blue bridge of stars across the center of this galaxy cluster? First and foremost the cluster, designated SDSS J1531+3414, contains many large yellow elliptical galaxies. The cluster’s center, as pictured above by the Hubble Space Telescope, is surrounded by many unusual, thin, and curving blue filaments that are actually galaxies far in the distance whose images have become magnified and elongated by the gravitational lens effect of the massive cluster. More unusual, however, is a squiggly blue filament near the two large elliptical galaxies at the cluster center. Close inspection of the filament indicates that it is most likely a bridge created by tidal effects between the two merging central elliptical galaxies rather than a background galaxy with an image distorted by gravitational lensing. The knots in the bridge are condensation regions that glow blue from the light of massive young stars. The central cluster region will likely undergo continued study as its uniqueness makes it an interesting laboratory of star formation.”

via APOD/NASA;  Image Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Tremblay (ESO) et al.; Acknowledgment: Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) - ESA/Hubble Collaboration

That's beautiful! :)

Milky way over Mount Hood from Laurence Lake, Oregon