Latest Posts by space-and-stuff-blog1 - Page 4

The Special Ingredients…of Earth!

With its blue skies, puffy white clouds, warm beaches and abundant life, planet Earth is a pretty special place. A quick survey of the solar system reveals nothing else like it. But how special is Earth, really?

One way to find out is to look for other worlds like ours elsewhere in the galaxy. Astronomers using our Kepler Space Telescope and other observatories have been doing just that! 

In recent years they’ve been finding other planets increasingly similar to Earth, but still none that appear as hospitable as our home world. For those researchers, the search goes on.

Another group of researchers have taken on an entirely different approach. Instead of looking for Earth-like planets, they’ve been looking for Earth-like ingredients. Consider the following:

Our planet is rich in elements such as carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur…the stuff of rocks, air, oceans and life. Are these elements widespread elsewhere in the universe? 

To find out, a team of astronomers led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with our participation, used Suzaku. This Japanese X-ray satellite was used to survey a cluster of galaxies located in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

The Virgo cluster is a massive swarm of more than 2,000 galaxies, many similar in appearance to our own Milky Way, located about 54 million light years away. The space between the member galaxies is filled with a diffuse gas, so hot that it glows in X-rays. Instruments onboard Suzaku were able to look at that gas and determine which elements it’s made of.

Reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they reported findings of iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur throughout the Virgo galaxy cluster. The elemental ratios are constant throughout the entire volume of the cluster, and roughly consistent with the composition of the sun and most of the stars in our own galaxy.

When the Universe was born in the Big Bang 13.8 billon years ago, elements heavier than carbon were rare. These elements are present today, mainly because of supernova explosions. 

Massive stars cook elements such as, carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur in their hot cores and then spew them far and wide when the stars explode.

According to the observations of Suzaku, the ingredients for making sun-like stars and Earth-like planets have been scattered far and wide by these explosions. Indeed, they appear to be widespread in the cosmos. The elements so important to life on Earth are available on average and in similar relative proportions throughout the bulk of the universe. In other words, the chemical requirements for life are common.

Earth is still special, but according to Suzaku, there might be other special places too. Suzaku recently completed its highly successful mission.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Cassini: Saturn on May 21st 2016. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

This is the fourth week of Red, White and Blue Stars Month!

This week’s entry: Types of Stars

http://typeslist.com/different-types-of-stars/

In the Center of the Lagoon Nebula processing by Judy Schmidt

Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744

IC 2944 // Running Chicken Nebula

Also visible are star clusters: Pearl Cluster (left) & Collinder 249 (inside nebula)

Photos of space are everywhere online. Their beauty is dazzling, showing a universe awash in color and light. But if you’re a skeptic, you’ve likely wondered whether it all truly looks like that in real life. Michael Benson took data from NASA and ESA missions to make 77 images of everything from Pluto to Europa. In his exhibition Otherworlds: Visions of Our Solar System, Benson tries his best to create images that represent what a moon or planet might actually look like if you could peer at it out a spaceship window. Check out more photos and read about Benson’s project.

The dagger that belonged to Pharaoh Tutankhamun has a curious extraterrestrial composition.

King Tut –who ruled over the land of the Pharaohs – continues to amaze the archeological community. Researchers concluded that the iron sheet of the dagger that once belonged to the ‘Boy’ Pharaoh was made from a material that belonged to a meteorite. The scientific study was led by Italian-Egyptian researchers who used X-ray fluorescence to analyze the dagger which dates back to the XIV century BCE.

The mystery behind one of the two daggers found beside the mummy of the Pharaoh is now solved, it originated in space, or better said, the sheet that makes up the dagger was fabricated from materials found in meteorites (source)

Dolomites - Heart Of The Alps

German photographer Kilian Schönberger takes us on a trip to the most probably most beautiful mountains of Europe’s best known mountain chain.

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Colorado Perseid Meteor Shower Spherical Panorama 360x180 degrees

js

Messier 1 - The Crab Nebula

Potentially Humanity’s First Historically Observed Supernova

The Crab Nebula is the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion. Around in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers identified a large bright object that suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. The explosion was so bright that it was even visible during the day time.

700 years later the super nova remnant faded in brightness as it expanded and was nearly forgotten. The Super Nova Remnant was rediscovered in 1758 ( officially re-recorded) by Charles Messier while he was creating a catalog of mysterious objects that looked like comets but were not.

We now know that the beautiful Crab Nebula is the magnificent result of the death of a star, which was unknown to Charles Messier and the Chinese Astronomers that discovered the Object. Now, thanks to space telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, we can image the Nebula in great detail. The bottom left image is of a small region of the Crab Nebula. It shows “Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in its intricate filamentary structure” and gives scientists a better understanding of the death of stars. The image to the bottom left shows combined visible light data from Hubble and x-ray data from Chandra.

Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra

The beautiful rings of Saturn. (NASA: 1, 2)

Itty bitty Mercury transits the Sun. It was a terribly cloudy morning with really poor seeing, but managed to snap this. 

Better late than never!

This week’s comic: Rogue Planets

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/13/a-guide-to-lonely-planets-in-the-galaxy/

http://www.space.com/11699-rogue-alien-planets-milky-common.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAsACBDi_sk

💙 Colours over the bridge on 500px by Gary Alway, Melbourne, Australia ☀  Canon EOS 70D-f/4-1/125s-35mm-iso400, 3648✱5472px-rating:91.2 ◉  Photo location: Google Maps 

Available on Mineraliety in The Earthy Goddess shop is this Pyrite crusted Smoky Quartz and Moonstone necklace /////// www.mineraliety.com/shops/earthygoddess

Way to the stars

The Carina nebula, captured from Australia’s Siding Spring observatory

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than those you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

— Mark Twain

Succulents by unrulylust4life

You just scrolled over a high-res segment of the Andromeda galaxy. How does NASA get its photos to look so spectacular? The same way as everyone else.

“To make this journey, we’ll need imagination, but imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.”

These are just a few of the beautiful visual effects from Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Flying Across The Universe Part 3 (From Top to Bottom: Fly through the Orion Nebula, Gum 29, and Sharpless 2-106)

(Part 1, Part 2)

Credit: HubbleSite.org

Obsessed with this magical wide-field view of the Eagle Nebula. At the center lies the iconic “Pillars of Creation” along with several other star forming regions. The cluster of bright stars to the upper right is NGC 6611, home to the massive and hot stars that illuminate the pillars. (Credit: ESO, La Silla Observatory)

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