Tribe of Galaxies

This is a place for sharing wonderment and awe. A place to evolve, and a place of excitement. Join the tribe.

[brandistrickland]

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[70sscifiart]

Michael Whelan

[mothernaturenetwork]

Do robots have souls? Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s androids blur the line between humanity and technology, and he believes his headline-grabbing Geminoids even have souls.

[sci-universe]

This colorized image is my tribute to astrophysicist Cecilia Payne (1900–1979), a woman who fought her way into science which was then strictly a world only for men. Cecilia discovered the chemical composition of stars and, in particular, that hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements in stars and, therefore, in the universe. However, she is basically not credited at all with the discovery because of her male superiors. Cecilia completed her studies at Cambridge in 1923, earning a B.A. degree in 1923. Since at that time a woman could only earn “the Title of a Degree,” she travelled to the US in 1923 to seek greater opportunities. By the time she was awarded her PhD she had also already published six papers on stellar atmospheres, all by age 25. “Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”

— Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery.

[huffpost]

"I love the fact that the GIF has unlocked the middle ground between photo and video," Huffington Post Photographer Damon Dahlen said. “It’s no longer a medium that is just used for quick hits of funny parts of videos. With the powerhouse that photoshop has become and the realization that this new ability can allow artists to play in spaces that were not possible before makes the possibilities seem endless.”

See more of these mind-bending gifs here.

(By Damon Dahlen)

[ohstarstuff]

IO: ONE OF THE STRANGEST PLACES IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Io’s colors derive from sulfur and molten silicate rock 

A bit larger than Earth’s Moon, Io is the third largest of Jupiter’s moons, and the fifth one in distance from the planet. 

Io’s mountains are much taller than those on Earth, reaching heights of 16 kilometers (52,000 feet). 

The unusual surface of Io is kept very young by its system of active volcanoes. In fact, it’s the most volcanically active body in the solar system 

The intense tidal gravity of Jupiter stretches Io and the resulting friction greatly heats Io’s interior, causing molten rock to explode through the surface. 

Io’s volcanoes are so active that they are effectively turning the whole moon inside out. Some of Io’s volcanic lava is so hot it glows in the dark. 

Volcanic plumes rise 300 km (190 miles) above the surface, with material spewing out at nearly half the required escape velocity. 

Io can develop 400,000 volts across itself and create an electric current of 3 million amperes. This current takes the path of least resistance along Jupiter’s magnetic field lines to the planet’s surface, creating lightning in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. 

As Jupiter rotates, it takes its magnetic field around with it, sweeping past Io and stripping off about 1,000 kg (1 ton) of Io’s material every second! This material becomes ionized in the magnetic field and forms a doughnut-shaped cloud of intense radiation referred to as a plasma torus. Some of the ions are pulled into Jupiter’s atmosphere along the magnetic lines of force and create auroras in the planet’s upper atmosphere. It is the ions escaping from this torus that inflate Jupiter’s magnetosphere to over twice as big as expected. Source: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/

[thenewenlightenmentage]

Future Fate of Our Galaxy?

What will happen when we, in our Milky Way Galaxy, make a first pass with our ever-closing neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy? Arp 293 might very well be the result. The Schulman Telescope reveals, perhaps for the first time as a full color image, the intimate details of this interaction. These two spiral galaxies are becoming extremely distorted with the upper member’s central disk being warped dramatically. Don’t miss the very strange elliptical-shell galaxy (PGC 59348) near the bottom right of the field (probably also captured for the first time).

Image Credit: ADAM BLOCK/MOUNT LEMMON SKYCENTER/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

[thescienceofreality]

An Introduction to Black Holes.

Defined as “A dense, compact object whose gravitational pull is so strong that - within a certain distance of it - nothing can escape, not even light. Black holes are thought to result from the collapse of certain very massive stars at the ends of their evolution.”

Learn more about black holes here, and here. View images of black holes here.

[scienceyoucanlove-deactivated20]

Possibly the youngest galaxy ever seen, an irregular dwarf galaxy about 45 million light-years away is seen in this image from NASA.  Credits: NASA/ESA/A

text from Neurons Want food

[dimensao7]

[space-pics]

Thought I’d make a wallpaper with a truly inspirational quote…

[themedicalstate]

The Science of Happiness: What data & biology reveal about our mood

While true happiness may have a different definition to each of us, science can give us a glimpse at the underlying biological factors behind happiness. From the food we eat to room temperature, there are thousands of factors that play a role in how our brains work and the moods that we are in. Understanding these factors can be helpful in achieving lasting happiness.

Infographic by Webpage FX

[robscharf-deactivated20141113]

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (via ulfilarune)

[kny111]

Hidden Ocean Locked Up Deep in Earth’s Mantle

Deep within the Earth’s rocky mantle lies oceans’ worth of water locked up in a type of mineral called ringwoodite, new research shows.

Image: Earth’s surface oceans are quite apparent, even from satellite images of our blue marble, but now scientists have found oceans’ worth of water are hidden deep in Earth’s mantle, locked up in a mineral called ringwoodite. Credit: NASA/NOAA

The results of the study will help scientists understand Earth’s water cycle, and how plate tectonics moves water between the surface of the planet and interior reservoirs, researchers say.

The Earth’s mantle is the hot, rocky layer between the planet’s core and crust. Scientists have long suspected that the mantle’s so-called transition zone, which sits between the upper and lower mantle layers 255 to 410 miles (410 to 660 kilometers) below Earth’s surface, could contain water trapped in rare minerals. However, direct evidence for this water has been lacking, until now.

To see if the transition zone really is a deep reservoir for water, researchers conducted experiments on water-rich ringwoodite, analyzed seismic waves travelling through the mantle beneath the United States, and studied numerical models. They discovered that downward-flowing mantle material is melting as it crosses the boundary between the transition zone and the lower mantle layer.

"If we are seeing this melting, then there has to be this water in the transition zone," said Brandon Schmandt, a seismologist at the University of New Mexico and co-author of the new study published today (June 12) in the journal Science. “The transition zone can hold a lot of water, and could potentially have the same amount of H2O [water] as all the world’s oceans.” (Melting is a way of getting rid of water, which is unstable under conditions in Earth’s lower mantle, the researchers said.)

Full article

[thenewenlightenmentage]

'Godzilla of Earths': Alien Planet 17 Times Heavier Than Our World Discovered

Scientists have just discovered the “Godzilla of Earths” — a new type of huge and rocky alien world about 560 light-years from Earth.

Dubbed a “mega-Earth,” the exoplanet Kepler-10c weighs 17 times as much as Earth and it circles a sunlike star in the constellation Draco. The mega-Earth is rocky and also bigger than “super-Earths,” which are a class of planets that are slightly bigger than Earth.

Continue Reading

[thedemon-hauntedworld]

IC 418: The Spirograph Nebula Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool, planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns that are not well understood. Perhaps they are related to chaotic winds from the variable central star, which changes brightness unpredictably in just a few hours. By contrast, evidence indicates that only a few million years ago, IC 418 was probably a well-understood star similar to our Sun. Only a few thousand years ago, IC 418 was probably a common red giant star. Since running out of nuclear fuel, though, the outer envelope has begun expanding outward leaving a hot remnant core destined to become a white-dwarf star, visible in the image center. The light from the central core excites surrounding atoms in the nebula causing them to glow. IC 418 lies about 2000 light-years away and spans 0.3 light-years across. This false-color image taken from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the unusual details.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgement: R. Sahai (JPL) et al.

[ohstarstuff]

"WE ARE DEAD STARS…looking back up at the sky. Everything you are, literally the iron in your blood, comes from the instant before a star dies. In the case of the most massive stars, the core of the star collapses and sets off the most violent, brilliant reaction we know of called a supernova reaction. Everything outside the element iron, everything heavier, all the gold, all the silver, all the lead, all the uranium - that’s formed in that supernova explosion. A single star will glow as brightly as an entire galaxy, as hundreds of billions of stars, in that moment of death and and that’s what you are. That is literally what your body is, that instant of death.”

 -  Dr. Michelle Thaller, NASA astronomer Full video interview with The Atlantic