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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Robert H. Goddard, considered the father of modern rocketry, was born in Worcester Massachusetts in 1882. As a 16 year old, Goddard read H.G. Wells' science fiction classic "War Of The Worlds" and dreamed of space flight. By 1926 he had designed, built, and flown the world's first liquid fuel rocket. Launched 100 years ago, on March 16, 1926 from his aunt Effie's farm in Auburn Massachusetts, the rocket dubbed "Nell", rose to an altitude of 41 feet in a flight that lasted about 2 1/2 seconds. In this posed photo Goddard stands next to the 10 foot tall rocket, holding the launch stand frame. To achieve a stable flight without the need for fins, the rocket's heavy motor was located at the top, fed by lines from liquid oxygen and gasoline fuel tanks at the bottom. Widely recognized as a gifted experimenter and engineering genius, his rockets were many years ahead of their time. Goddard was awarded over 200 patents in rocket technology, most of them after his death in 1945. A liquid fuel rocket constructed on principles developed by Goddard landed humans on the Moon in 1969.

Mary Martin with children, during production of the Broadway musical The Sound of Music. Martin portrayed Maria von Trapp who died on this day in 1987.

Toni Frissell / Adam Cuerden, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Bogdan Pasca on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups. The four prominent galaxies seen in this intriguing telescopic skyscape are one such group, Hickson 44. The Hickson 44 galaxy group is about 100 million light-years distant, far beyond the foreground Milky Way stars, toward the northern springtime constellation Leo. The two spiral galaxies in the center of the image are edge-on NGC 3190 with distinctive, warped dust lanes, and S-shaped NGC 3187. Along with the bright elliptical, NGC 3193 (left) they are also known as Arp 316. The spiral toward the lower right corner is NGC 3185, the 4th member of the Hickson group. Like other galaxies in Hickson groups, these show signs of distortion and enhanced star formation, evidence of a gravitational tug of war that will eventually result in galaxy mergers on a cosmic timescale. The merger process is now understood to be a normal part of the evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. For scale, NGC 3190 is about 75,000 light-years across at the estimated distance of Hickson 44.

Photo by Peter Kennett

Northern lights in the night sky over Mývatn, Iceland.

Giles Laurent, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

Georgina Steytler on Unsplash

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What is the sound of two black holes merging in deep space? Sound waves don't propagate in vacuum, but gravitational waves do. In 2015 we were able to "hear" them for the first time and confirm one of Albert Einstein's theoretical predictions. Each square on the grid of the featured image represents one of the gravitational wave detections announced so far by the LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA Collaboration. These plots show how the binary pair accelerates in their orbit around each other towards merger: the rising frequency effect is called a "chirp". Although there are significantly more neutron stars than black holes, most of the detections are binary black hole mergers. That happens because black holes are heavier and their signals are louder and can be seen farther away, resulting in more detections. These events are rare, and we don't expect to see one close by in our Galaxy any time soon. But they are happening continuously throughout the cosmos.

Kyzylkup table mountain. Kyzylsai regional park, Mangystau District, Mangystau Region, Kazakhstan.

Максат79, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.