My Grandmother Thinks There Never Had Been And Never Will Be A Women As Beautiful As Madhubala So Y'all

Art by Camille Andre

Saga

I'm tired so here's some lyrics that have been stuck in my head all day

Drip drip drop Little April shower Beating a tune As you fall all around

Drip drip drop Little April shower What can compare With your beautiful sound

Disney Movie Marathon #5 Bambi (1942)

I LOVE BAMBI!!! (I love Bambi 2 too, but this isn't about that). Out of all of Disney's Golden era films I've seen Bambi the most. I've been looking forward to this one in the movie marathon.

Story: I don't think enough people appreciate or give Bambi credit because they think it's only a movie about cute animals frolicking in a forest. Yes it has these things, but that's barely scratching the surface. This is very much a coming of age story about a young deer and how there is always change with the forest and its inhabitants. It's not a fairy tale or a straight dramatic story where good beats evil. It's the circle of life, growing up, and change of the seasons. With change comes both good and bad. And we see the range of good and bad through Bambi's point of view from his innocent early life to taking his role as protector of the forest.

Characters: I can't stress enough how good it is to have children play children in animated roles because it makes the interactions that much more believable. Bambi is the only one who really gets fleshed out as we see him literally from the day he's born until he's the "Great Prince of the Forest". There are plenty of forest animals but the most notable being Thumper, Flower and Faline. Thumper taking role of mischievous best friend, Flower as a secondary shy friend, and Faline as love interest. Honorable mention to Friend Owl because he is a mood for cranky mornings.

Animation/Art: Like Fantasia being a flex in animation in general Bambi is a flex specifically for animals. This is the movie where Disney shows how hard they studied animal forms. If you compare this to previous movies you see the animals have flesh, muscle, and bone. Bambi has one of my favorite art styles. Every shot has painterly qualities and the way colors change based on mood sometimes more graphic really enhances what you're watching. Each film has a style but this one has one of the most visually distinct in my opinion.

Songs: While not having any bangers (though Little April Shower is my personal banger) the music is constant. Again like Fantasia where the music or lack of goes hand in hand with the imagery. The little things are accentuated with the music and perfectly pair with movements

Animals on discarded furniture

Astronomy: the 28 phases of the moon in a lunar month.

Engraving (1646) by P. Miotte.

Image and text information courtesy Wellcome Collection.

Self update: naughty dog posted this on their official tumblr account and I'm happy wahooo. Posting more art here now

"When wind turned to dust" A photo realistic charcoal portrait of Joel Miller from the last of us on paper ( 28×41cm) by Tanaya

The Lives, Times, and Deaths of Stars

Who among us doesn’t covertly read tabloid headlines when we pass them by? But if you’re really looking for a dramatic story, you might want to redirect your attention from Hollywood’s stars to the real thing. From birth to death, these burning spheres of gas experience some of the most extreme conditions our cosmos has to offer.

All stars are born in clouds of dust and gas like the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula pictured below. In these stellar nurseries, clumps of gas form, pulling in more and more mass as time passes. As they grow, these clumps start to spin and heat up. Once they get heavy and hot enough (like, 27 million degrees Fahrenheit or 15 million degrees Celsius), nuclear fusion starts in their cores. This process occurs when protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, squish together to form helium nuclei. This releases a lot of energy, which heats the star and pushes against the force of its gravity. A star is born.

Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

From then on, stars’ life cycles depend on how much mass they have. Scientists typically divide them into two broad categories: low-mass and high-mass stars. (Technically, there’s an intermediate-mass category, but we’ll stick with these two to keep it straightforward!)

Low-mass stars

A low-mass star has a mass eight times the Sun’s or less and can burn steadily for billions of years. As it reaches the end of its life, its core runs out of hydrogen to convert into helium. Because the energy produced by fusion is the only force fighting gravity’s tendency to pull matter together, the core starts to collapse. But squeezing the core also increases its temperature and pressure, so much so that its helium starts to fuse into carbon, which also releases energy. The core rebounds a little, but the star’s atmosphere expands a lot, eventually turning into a red giant star and destroying any nearby planets. (Don’t worry, though, this is several billion years away for our Sun!)

Red giants become unstable and begin pulsating, periodically inflating and ejecting some of their atmospheres. Eventually, all of the star’s outer layers blow away, creating an expanding cloud of dust and gas misleadingly called a planetary nebula. (There are no planets involved.)

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

All that’s left of the star is its core, now called a white dwarf, a roughly Earth-sized stellar cinder that gradually cools over billions of years. If you could scoop up a teaspoon of its material, it would weigh more than a pickup truck. (Scientists recently found a potential planet closely orbiting a white dwarf. It somehow managed to survive the star’s chaotic, destructive history!)

High-mass stars

A high-mass star has a mass eight times the Sun’s or more and may only live for millions of years. (Rigel, a blue supergiant in the constellation Orion, pictured below, is 18 times the Sun’s mass.)

Credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo

A high-mass star starts out doing the same things as a low-mass star, but it doesn’t stop at fusing helium into carbon. When the core runs out of helium, it shrinks, heats up, and starts converting its carbon into neon, which releases energy. Later, the core fuses the neon it produced into oxygen. Then, as the neon runs out, the core converts oxygen into silicon. Finally, this silicon fuses into iron. These processes produce energy that keeps the core from collapsing, but each new fuel buys it less and less time. By the point silicon fuses into iron, the star runs out of fuel in a matter of days. The next step would be fusing iron into some heavier element, but doing requires energy instead of releasing it.  

The star’s iron core collapses until forces between the nuclei push the brakes, and then it rebounds back to its original size. This change creates a shock wave that travels through the star’s outer layers. The result is a huge explosion called a supernova.

What’s left behind depends on the star’s initial mass. Remember, a high-mass star is anything with a mass more than eight times the Sun’s — which is a huge range! A star on the lower end of this spectrum leaves behind a city-size, superdense neutron star. (Some of these weird objects can spin faster than blender blades and have powerful magnetic fields. A teaspoon of their material would weigh as much as a mountain.)

At even higher masses, the star’s core turns into a black hole, one of the most bizarre cosmic objects out there. Black holes have such strong gravity that light can’t escape them. If you tried to get a teaspoon of material to weigh, you wouldn’t get it back once it crossed the event horizon — unless it could travel faster than the speed of light, and we don’t know of anything that can! (We’re a long way from visiting a black hole, but if you ever find yourself near one, there are some important safety considerations you should keep in mind.)

The explosion also leaves behind a cloud of debris called a supernova remnant. These and planetary nebulae from low-mass stars are the sources of many of the elements we find on Earth. Their dust and gas will one day become a part of other stars, starting the whole process over again.

That’s a very brief summary of the lives, times, and deaths of stars. (Remember, there’s that whole intermediate-mass category we glossed over!) To keep up with the most recent stellar news, follow NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

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

 ― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

[text ID: In the deepening spring of May, I had no choice but to recognize the trembling of my heart.]