Originally A Twitter Thread, With The Help Of Thread Reader

Dragons in the modern world I

5 Unpredictable Things Swift Has Studied (and 1 It’s Still Looking For)

Our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory — Swift for short — is celebrating its 20th anniversary! The satellite studies cosmic objects and events using visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray light. Swift plays a key role in our efforts to observe our ever-changing universe. Here are a few cosmic surprises Swift has caught over the years — plus one scientists hope to see.

#BOAT

Swift was designed to detect and study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe. These bursts occur all over the sky without warning, with about one a day detected on average. They also usually last less than a minute – sometimes less than a few seconds – so you need a telescope like Swift that can quickly spot and precisely locate these new events.

In the fall of 2022, for example, Swift helped study a gamma-ray burst nicknamed the BOAT, or brightest of all time. The image above depicts X-rays Swift detected for 12 days after the initial flash. Dust in our galaxy scattered the X-ray light back to us, creating an extraordinary set of expanding rings.

Star meets black hole

Tidal disruptions happen when an unlucky star strays too close to a black hole. Gravitational forces break the star apart into a stream of gas, as seen above. Some of the gas escapes, but some swings back around the black hole and creates a disk of debris that orbits around it.

These events are rare. They only occur once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of our Milky Way. Astronomers can’t predict when or where they’ll pop up, but Swift’s quick reflexes have helped it observe several tidal disruption events in other galaxies over its 20-year career.

Active galaxies

Usually, we think of galaxies – and most other things in the universe – as changing so slowly that we can’t see the changes. But about 10% of the universe’s galaxies are active, which means their black hole-powered centers are very bright and have a lot going on. They can produce high-speed particle jets or flares of light. Sometimes scientists can catch and watch these real-time changes.

For example, for several years starting in 2018, Swift and other telescopes observed changes in a galaxy’s X-ray and ultraviolet light that led them to think the galaxy’s magnetic field had flipped 180 degrees.

Magnetic star remnants

Magnetars are a type of neutron star, a very dense leftover of a massive star that exploded in a supernova. Magnetars have the strongest magnetic fields we know of — up to 10 trillion times more intense than a refrigerator magnet and a thousand times stronger than a typical neutron star’s.

Occasionally, magnetars experience outbursts related to sudden changes in their magnetic fields that can last for months or even years. Swift detected such an outburst from a magnetar in 2020. The satellite’s X-ray observations helped scientists determine that the city-sized object was rotating once every 10.4 seconds.

Comets

Swift has also studied comets in our own solar system. Comets are town-sized snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust. When one gets close to our Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing halo.

In 2019, Swift watched a comet called 2I/Borisov. Using ultraviolet light, scientists calculated that Borisov lost enough water to fill 92 Olympic-size swimming pools! (Another interesting fact about Borisov: Astronomers think it came from outside our solar system.)

What's next for Swift?

Swift has studied a lot of cool events and objects over its two decades, but there are still a few events scientists are hoping it’ll see.

Swift is an important part of a new era of astrophysics called multimessenger astronomy, which is where scientists use light, particles, and space-time ripples called gravitational waves to study different aspects of cosmic events.

In 2017, Swift and other observatories detected light and gravitational waves from the same event, a gamma-ray burst, for the first time. But what astronomers really want is to detect all three messengers from the same event.

As Swift enters its 20th year, it’ll keep watching the ever-changing sky.

Keep up with Swift through NASA Universe on X, Facebook, and Instagram. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

HiPOD: Layers in a Crater

The objective of this observation is to examine light and dark layers in an impact crater in Cydonia Mensae. Our interest is in seeing if the layer boundaries are diffuse as suggested in CTX image data. Most of the layers seem to have definite boundaries. (Black and white is less than 5 km across; enhanced color is less than 1 km.)

ID: ESP_075247_2125 date: 15 August 2022 altitude: 292 km

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

It is a field of knowledge proposed by me, defined as the study of nature in all its expressions, but from the point of view of alternative non-real possibilities. My background is in ecological economics, but I started to have broader interests that encompass other fields of knowledge. However, instead of an interest in traditional knowledge, I started to study fantastic facts and concepts (fantasy). It is not (only) a literary endeavor, but an attempt to create a new (!?) realm of knowledge aside mathematics, philosophy, and science. I will bring up some themes that can be raised as being of interest to fantastic natural history. By scope or complexity, from mathematics to politics, to aesthetics and art.

Fairy nap

Winter milky way.

Toyama, Japan.

magic is everywhere

The mythical fox // Dennis Lehtonen

In Finnish the word for northern lights is ”revontulet” and it directly translates to ”fox fires.” According to the old mythology when it runs along the tundra, the fox’s flaming tail sweeps snowflakes into the sky and the fur scratches the trees, setting the skies on fire. That is how the northern lights are created. 

Here we are now! :D

And that's how I got there~!

I'm still doodling around with acrylics and cheap cardboard canvas. :D I'm also pretty sure I'm sinking WAY too much time into details no one will notice by now. But it's a ton of fun to just paint like that~!

what really motivates people is passion

From one simple problem about coloring maps– a problem with hardly any relevance to actual cartographers– came over a century’s worth of passion from mathematicians and philosophers alike. They built on each others’ discoveries and inspired each other to keep searching. It took every single new idea and piece of technology up until the moment it was finally solved in order to conquer, all for a theorem with next to no practical application.

Mathematics is not worthwhile only insofar as its use in solving real-world problems. The story of the four-color theorem is a story not of necessity, but of desire. It is a story of the way that the fundamental human drive to understand can tie people together across time. De Morgan’s peers were not interested in the four-color theorem, but Kempe was. Heawood was. Wernicke, Birkhoff, Heesch, Haken, Appel, and dozens of other mathematicians who devoted their time to solving this puzzle, were all interested. There was no competition, nor any prize to be won, from solving the four-color problem. This century of work was motivated by people who wanted it. Mathematics is, above all else, a tapestry woven from the stories of people like them.

More large VtM doodle dumps–mixed of old and new, you can tell when I finally got a visual reference of the guy–this one specifically starring Manuel’s Ventrue employer (and slow burn love interest): Rosario de Angelis (who belongs to @bettiqua)! 

While Manuel acts as Rosario’s loyal ghoul and right hand man around New York, these two have a very messy history with each other that they’re only recently beginning to chisel away at after years of spiteful miscommunication and misunderstandings. A very simple summary of them would be that they’re two vulnerable men who have been hurt in the past and have been too prideful (and scared) to want that to happen to them again, only now discovering this about the other to the point they can begin to truly connect.

In short: they’re two idiots in love (even if one party is aware of their feelings but don’t see the other returning it, while the other refuses to believe they are). A little toxic but suited perfectly for each other.