Physics

The moon passed between Nasa's Deep Space Climate Observatory and the Earth, allowing the satellite to capture this rare image of the moon's far side in full sunlight. We normally don't see this side of the moon. As the moon is tidally locked to the earth and doesn't rotate, we only ever see the one face from the earth. Photo: NASA (2015)

Big hole in the Universe
How big is it ?👇👇👇
Barnard 68: Dark Molecular Cloud
Image Credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT Antu, ESO

Explanation: Where did all the stars go? What used to be considered a hole in the sky is now known to astronomers as a dark molecular cloud. Here, a high concentration of dust and molecular gas absorb practically all the visible light emitted from background stars. The eerily dark surroundings help make the interiors of molecular clouds some of the coldest and most isolated places in the universe. One of the most notable of these dark absorption nebulae is a cloud toward the constellation Ophiuchus known as Barnard 68, pictured here. That no stars are visible in the center indicates that Barnard 68 is relatively nearby, with measurements placing it about 500 light-years away and half a light-year across. It is not known exactly how molecular clouds like Barnard 68 form, but it is known that these clouds are themselves likely places for new stars to form. In fact, Barnard 68 itself has been found likely to collapse and form a new star system. It is possible to look right through the cloud in infrared light.

In the kick off to the reusability roadmap for the United Launch Alliance , the flight of an inflatable heat shield at a relevant scale will be demonstrated as a secondary payload on the next launch Nov. 1.

This photo is from the James Webb space telescope, Processed out the stars. I think it looks astronomically beautiful.

Achievement of JWST

Hey . Did you ring? 👋
Webb's New picture of Neptune..

Webb’s latest image is the clearest look at Neptune's rings in 30+ years, and our first time seeing them in infrared light. Take in Webb's ghostly, ethereal views of the planet and its dust bands, rings and moons. (Some of these rings have not been detected since Voyager 2 flew by in 1989!)

What’s that in the upper left? That’s no star. It’s Neptune’s large, unusual moon, Triton! Because Triton is covered in frozen, condensed nitrogen, it reflects 70% of the sunlight that hits it — making it appear very bright to Webb. 6 of Neptune’s other moons can also be seen as tiny dots surrounding Neptune and its rings.

In visible light, Neptune appears blue due to small amounts of methane gas in its atmosphere. Here, Webb’s NIRCam instrument observed Neptune at near-infrared wavelengths, so Neptune doesn’t look so blue!

Mars.🫣🫣

Jupiter from the Webb Space Telescope
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; Processing: Ricardo Hueso (UPV/EHU) & Judy Schmidt

Interstellar Voyager
Poster Illustration Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Voyager
Explanation: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 on a grand tour of the outer planets of the Solar System. They have become the longest operating and most distant spacecraft from Earth. Both have traveled beyond the heliosphere, the realm defined by the influence of the solar wind and the Sun's magnetic field. On the 45th year of their journey toward the stars Voyager 1 and 2 reached nearly 22 light-hours and 18 light-hours from the Sun respectively and remain the only spacecraft currently exploring interstellar space. Each spacecraft carries a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk with recordings of sounds, pictures and messages. The Golden Records are intended to communicate a story of life and culture on planet Earth, preserved in a medium that can survive an interstellar journey for a billion years.

This is the first flower to grow entirely in space. ✨🌌

A thunderstorm unleashes a microburst over Phoenix, Arizona on July 18, 2016. Taken from a news helicopter.

Credit: Bruce Haffner/Andrew Park/Jerry Ferguson

Nature likes spirals—from hurricanes to pinwheel-shaped protoplanetary disks around newborn stars, to the majestic spiral galaxies across our universe.

Now astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope have found young stars and gas spiraling into the center of a massive cluster of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This motion is an efficient way to fuel star birth.

Sunset on Earth and Sunset on Mars

"The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home."

- Carl Sagan

A gentle reminder 🙌🏽

An Iridescent Pileus Cloud over China Yes, but how many dark clouds have a multicolored lining? Pictured, behind this darker cloud, is a pileus iridescent cloud, a group of water droplets that have a uniformly similar size and so together diffract different colors of sunlight by different amounts. The featured image was taken last month in Pu'er, Yunnan Province, China. Also captured were unusual cloud ripples above the pileus cloud. The formation of a rare pileus cloud capping a common cumulus cloud is an indication that the lower cloud is expanding upward and might well develop into a storm.

An incredible capture of a bright green meteor over Mettupalayam, a small town in the mountainous Western Ghats region of southern India.

When a 14g piece of plastic hits it aluminium at 15,000 mph in space.

Two phenomena, one frame

For the first time in human history we have a picture off ...
James Webb telescope image of a planet .... you might say its fuzzy I can't see anything put in mind this planet is 385 light-years away from Earth Which means if you have a space ship that travels with the speed of light that is 300,000 kilometer a second 186,000 miles a second it will take you 385 years to arrive at this planet , So for even a telescope to take a picture of this planet that far in it self is incredible amazing and impressive ...

Monster Black Holes Are About to Collide 🕳 🌌

A rare trio of supermassive black holes has been caught in the act of coming together. 🔭

Three of the light-gobbling monsters nuzzle shoulder to shoulder in SDSS J084905.51+111447.2, a system of three merging galaxies about 1 billion light-years from Earth, a new study reports.

"We were only looking for pairs of black holes at the time, and yet, through our selection technique, we stumbled upon this amazing system," lead author Ryan Pfeifle, of George Mason University in Virginia, said in a statement.

"This is the strongest evidence yet found for such a triple system of actively feeding supermassive black holes."

Making the epic find wasn't easy; it took observations by multiple instruments and help from lots of citizen scientists. 🔭

Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke left this family photo behind on the moon in 1972.

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Artist impression of WASP-39 b and its star.

This is an artist’s impression showing what the exoplanet WASP-39 b could look like, based on current understanding of the planet.
WASP-39 b is a hot, puffy gas giant planet with a mass 0.28 times that of Jupiter (0.94 times that of Saturn) and a diameter 1.3 times that of Jupiter, orbiting just 0.0486 astronomical units (7 274 285 km) from its host star. The star, WASP-39, is fractionally smaller and less massive than the Sun. Because it is so close to its star, WASP-39 b is very hot and is likely to be tidally locked, meaning that one side faces the star at all times.
Data collected by Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) show unambiguous evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, while previous observations from Hubble, Spitzer, and other telescopes indicate the presence of water vapour, sodium, and potassium, as well. The planet probably has clouds and some form of weather, but may not have atmospheric bands like those of Jupiter and Saturn.

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Multi-observatory views of

New images of the Phantom Galaxy, M74, showcase the power of space observatories working together in multiple wavelengths.

On the left, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s view of the galaxy ranges from the older, redder stars towards the centre, to younger and bluer stars in its spiral arms, to the most active stellar formation in the red bubbles of H II regions. On the right, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope’s image is strikingly different, instead highlighting the masses of gas and dust within the galaxy’s arms, and the dense cluster of stars at its core. The combined image in the centre merges these two for a truly unique look at this “grand design” spiral galaxy.

Scientists combine data from telescopes operating across the electromagnetic spectrum to truly understand astronomical objects. In this way, data from Hubble and Webb compliment each other to provide a comprehensive view of the spectacular M74 galaxy.
Congratulations JWST - James Webb Space Telescope

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Webb takes its first exoplanet image

For the first time, astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of an exoplanet. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable. The image, as seen through four different light filters, shows how Webb’s powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our Solar System, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets.

The exoplanet in Webb’s image, called HIP 65426 b, is about six to eight times the mass of Jupiter. It is young as planets go – about 15 to 20 million years old, compared to our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.

Close view of Sun 🤩

Rocket launch viewed from edge of Space..! 🚀
Credit: International Space Station (ISS)

Pluto doesn't care what some carbon-based life forms that appeared a few million years ago think about it. It will continue to do what it has been doing for the past 4.5 billion years. :) Be like Pluto.

Meet the BOSS, the Largest Structure in the Universe (So Far)

Astronomers recently discovered a wall of galaxies 1 billion light years across, larger than anything else yet identified in the cosmosThe English language has a few limitations. One such problem is describing size—words like big, humongous and immense don’t come close to describing the objects astronomers are discovering in deep space. There are definitely no words to describe their latest find, dubbed the BOSS Great Wall, which is a supercluster of galaxies over 1 billion light years across, making it the largest structure observed in the universe so far.
The BOSS is named after the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey—an international effort to map galaxies and quasars in the early universe—and is like cosmic webbing. This wall is made up of 830 separate galaxies that gravity has corralled into four superclusters, connected by massive filaments of hot gas, Joshua Sokol reports for New Scientist. This creates a twisting structure that resembles a cosmic honeycomb.
"On the grandest scales, the universe resembles a cosmic web of matter surrounding empty voids – and these walls are the thickest threads," he writes.
Lurking 4.5 to 6.5 billion lightyears away, the BOSS has an estimated mass 10,000 times greater than our own Milky Way and recently described the find in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Sky News explains that the BOSS is two thirds bigger than the previous record holder, the Sloan Great Wall, which was discovered in 2003. It also dwarfs both the CfA2 Wall discovered in 1989 and the Laniakea supercluster—the neighborhood where our own Milky Way resides.
Not everyone is convinced that the BOSS is truly the biggest, though. “I don’t entirely understand why they are connecting all of these features together to call them a single structure,” Allison Coil of the University of California in San Diego tells New Scientist. “There are clearly kinks and bends in this structure that don’t exist, for example, in the Sloan Great Wall.”
But it’s not really the size of the wall that counts. Superclusters and cosmic walls like the BOSS and Sloan are helping researchers model the physics of the big bang and map the shape of the universe. And, if the pace of research keeps up, it’s unlikely the BOSS will keep the corner office for very long.

While -I will not fly humans to the Moon, future Artemis missions will! Many NASA Astronauts and astronaut candidates flew to NASA's Kennedy Space Center ahead of launch to check out Orion and the rocket.

The launch window opens at 8:33 a.m. on Aug. #29 and lasts for two hours.

One in a million moment as lightning strikes a tree captured in unprecedented details.

Credit: Debbie Parker