Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What's that in front of the Sun? The closest object is an airplane, visible just below the Sun's center and caught purely by chance. Next out are numerous clouds in Earth's atmosphere, creating a series of darkened horizontal streaks. Farther out is Earth's Moon, seen as the large dark circular bite on the upper right. Just above the airplane and just below the Sun's surface are sunspots. The main sunspot group captured here, AR 2192, was in 2014 one of the largest ever recorded and had been crackling and bursting with flares since it came around the edge of the Sun a week before. This show of solar silhouettes was unfortunately short-lived. Within a few seconds the plane flew away. Within a few minutes the clouds drifted off. Within a few hours the partial solar eclipse of the Sun by the Moon was over. Fortunately, when it comes to the Sun, even unexpected alignments are surprisingly frequent. Perhaps one will be imaged this Saturday when a new partial solar eclipse will be visible from much of North and South America. APOD editor to speak: in Houghton, Michigan on Thursday, October 12 at 6 pm

Photo by Doyle and Shannon Slifer

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This picture of Andromeda shows not only where stars are now, but where stars will be. The big, beautiful Andromeda Galaxy, M31, is a spiral galaxy a mere 2.5 million light-years away. Image data from space-based and ground-based observatories have been combined here to produce this intriguing composite view of Andromeda at wavelengths both inside and outside normally visible light. The visible light shows where M31's stars are now, highlighted in white and blue hues and imaged by the Hubble, Subaru, and Mayall telescopes. The infrared light shows where M31's future stars will soon form, highlighted in orange hues and imaged by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared light tracks enormous lanes of dust, warmed by stars, sweeping along Andromeda's spiral arms. This dust is a tracer of the galaxy's vast interstellar gas, raw material for future star formation. Of course, the new stars will likely form over the next hundred million years or so. That's well before Andromeda merges with our Milky Way Galaxy in about 5 billion years.

"A group of three researchers earned the 2023 Nobel Prize in physics for work that has revolutionized how scientists study the electron – by illuminating molecules with attosecond-long flashes of light .... Atto is the scientific notation prefix that represents 10-18, which is a decimal point followed by 17 zeroes and a 1. So a flash of light lasting an attosecond, or 0.000000000000000001 of a second, is an extremely short pulse of light. In fact, there are approximately as many attoseconds in one second as there are seconds in the age of the universe". More at The Conversation ➜

I am tiring,
when faced with those,
who attempt to play,
"head" games.

"Suck up's" are nearby,
buddying up with those
who had a position here.
Enough already. Pay no homage.

There are some "smooth talkers",
here, all men. Some naive women,
who don't recognize when
someone is "hitting on" them.

I suppose there are some
games they played before,
coming here.
I've heard most of them.

I am certain, this isn't the only
place where this occurs. Nevertheless,
I find it amusing, but also sad these
type of games being played at
this time of life.
How old am I?

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How big is our universe? This question, among others, was debated by two leading astronomers in 1920 in what has since become known as astronomy's Great Debate. Many astronomers then believed that our Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe. Many others, though, believed that our galaxy was just one of many. In the Great Debate, each argument was detailed, but no consensus was reached. The answer came over three years later with the detected variation of single spot in the Andromeda Nebula, as shown on the original glass discovery plate digitally reproduced here. When Edwin Hubble compared images, he noticed that this spot varied, and on October 6, 1923 wrote "VAR!" on the plate. The best explanation, Hubble knew, was that this spot was the image of a variable star that was very far away. So M31 was really the Andromeda Galaxy -- a galaxy possibly similar to our own. Annotated 100 years ago, the featured image may not be pretty, but the variable spot on it opened a window through which humanity gazed knowingly, for the first time, into a surprisingly vast cosmos.

Photo by Carnegie Institution for Science

 "First, the shrimp disappeared. In late 1980s, the catch became so poor that Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation shrimper, had to take a job running a fish house in Seadrift in Calhoun County, Texas, where she grew up and still lives. Then beached, diseased 300-pound dolphins started appearing, and dead pelicans kept floating to the shores of Lavaca Bay"  More at Reasons to be Cheerful ➜

"A vaccine against tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease, has never been closer to reality, with the potential to save millions of lives. But its development slowed after its corporate owner focused on more profitable vaccines" More at ProPublica ➜

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Tracking along a narrow path, the shadow of a new moon will race across North, Central, and South America, on October 14. When viewed from the shadow path the apparent size of the lunar disk will not quite completely cover the Sun though. Instead, the moon in silhouette will appear during the minutes of totality surrounded by a fiery ring, an annular solar eclipse more dramatically known as a ring of fire eclipse. This striking time lapse sequence from May of 2012 illustrates the stages of a ring of fire eclipse. From before eclipse start until sunset, they are seen over the iconic buttes of planet Earth's Monument Valley. Remarkably, the October 14 ring of fire eclipse will also be visible over Monument Valley, beginning after sunrise in the eastern sky.

Photo by Tunc Tezel

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Does this nebula look like the head of a witch? The nebula is known popularly as the Witch Head Nebula because, it is said, the nebula's shape resembles a Halloween-style caricature of a witch's head. Exactly how, though, can be a topic of imaginative speculation. What is clear is that IC 2118 is about 50 light-years across and made of gas and dust that points to -- because it has been partly eroded by -- the nearby star Rigel. One of the brighter stars in the constellation Orion, Rigel lies below the bottom of the featured image. The blue color of the Witch Head Nebula and is caused not only by Rigel's intense blue starlight but because the dust grains scatter blue light more efficiently than red. The same physical process causes Earth's daytime sky to appear blue, although the scatterers in planet Earth's atmosphere are molecules of nitrogen and oxygen.

Photo by Abdullah Alharbi

The national debt is composed of distinct types of debt, similar to an individual whose debt may consist of a mortgage, car loan, and credit cards. The different types of debt include non-marketable or marketable securities and whether it is debt held by the public or debt held by the government itself (known as intragovernmental). The U.S. has carried debt since its inception. Debts incurred during the American Revolutionary War amounted to $75 million, primarily borrowed from domestic investors and the French Government for war materials. More at the US Department of the Treasury ➜ 

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Do you see the hourglass shape -- or does it see you? If you can picture it, the rings of MyCn 18 trace the outline of an hourglass -- although one with an unusual eye in its center. Either way, the sands of time are running out for the central star of this hourglass-shaped planetary nebula. With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacular, closing phase of a Sun-like star's life occurs as its outer layers are ejected - its core becoming a cooling, fading white dwarf. In 1995, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to make a series of images of planetary nebulae, including the one featured here. Pictured, delicate rings of colorful glowing gas (nitrogen-red, hydrogen-green, and oxygen-blue) outline the tenuous walls of the hourglass. The unprecedented sharpness of the Hubble images has revealed surprising details of the nebula ejection process that are helping to resolve the outstanding mysteries of the complex shapes and symmetries of planetary nebulas like MyCn 18.

Photo by NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Processing & Copyright: Harshwardhan Pathak

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sometimes lightning occurs out near space. One such lightning type is red sprite lightning, which has only been photographed and studied on Earth over the past 25 years. The origins of all types of lightning remain topics for research, and scientists are still trying to figure out why red sprite lightning occurs at all. Research has shown that following a powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning strike, red sprites may start as 100-meter balls of ionized air that shoot down from about 80-km high at 10 percent the speed of light. They are quickly followed by a group of upward streaking ionized balls. Featured here is an extraordinarily high-resolution image of a group of red sprites. This image is a single frame lasting only 1/25th of a second from a video taken above Castelnaud Castle in Dordogne, France, about three weeks ago. The sprites quickly vanished -- no sprites were visible even on the very next video frame.

Photo by Nicolas Escurat