When Dead Stars Collide!

Ten interesting facts about Uranus

Like the classical planets, Uranus is visible to the naked eye, but it was never recognised as a planet by ancient observers because of its dimness and slow orbit. Sir William Herschel announced its discovery on 13 March 1781, expanding the known boundaries of the Solar System for the first time in history and making Uranus the first planet discovered with a telescope.

1° Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It has the third-largest planetary radius and fourth-largest planetary mass in the Solar System. Uranus is similar in composition to Neptune, and both have different bulk chemical composition from that of the larger gas giants Jupiter and Saturn.

2° Like all of the giant planets, Uranus has its share of moons. At present, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 27 natural satellites. But for the most part, these moons are small and irregular.

3° Uranus’ moons are named after characters created by William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. These include Oberon, Titania and Miranda.  All are frozen worlds with dark surfaces. Some are ice and rock mixtures.  The most interesting Uranian moon is Miranda; it has ice canyons, terraces, and other strange-looking surface areas.

4° Only one spacecraft in the history of spaceflight has ever made a close approach to Uranus. NASA’s Voyager 2 conducted its closest approach to  Uranus on January 24th, 1986, passing within 81,000 km of the cloud tops of Uranus. It took thousands of photographs of the gas/ice giant and its moons before speeding off towards its next target: Neptune.

5° Uranus has rings: All the gas and ice giants have their own ring systems, and Uranus’ is the second most dramatic set of rings in the Solar System.

6° Uranus makes one trip around the Sun every 84 Earth years. During some parts of its orbit one or the other of its poles point directly at the Sun and get about 42 years of direct sunlight. The rest of the time they are in darkness.

7° All of the planets in the Solar System rotate on their axis, with a tilt that’s similar to the Sun. In many cases, planet’s have an axial tilt, where one of their poles will be inclined slightly towards the Sun. But the axial tilt of Uranus is a staggering 98 degrees! In other words, the planet is rotating on its side.

8° Uranus is approximately 4 times the sizes of Earth and 63 times its volume.

9° Uranus is blue-green in color, the result of methane in its mostly hydrogen-helium atmosphere. The planet is often dubbed an ice giant, since 80 percent or more of its mass is made up of a fluid mix of water, methane, and ammonia ices.

10° Uranus hits the coldest temperatures of any planet. With minimum atmospheric temperature of -224°C Uranus is nearly coldest planet in the solar system. While Neptune doesn’t get as cold as Uranus it is on average colder. The upper atmosphere of Uranus is covered by a methane haze which hides the storms that take place in the cloud decks.

source 1, source 2, source 2

Images credit: NASA

this is a real deleted scene from revenge of the sith

Solar System: 10 Things to Know This Week

Pioneer Days

Someone’s got to be first. In space, the first explorers beyond Mars were Pioneers 10 and 11, twin robots who charted the course to the cosmos.

1-Before Voyager

Voyager, with its outer solar system tour and interstellar observations, is often credited as the greatest robotic space mission. But today we remember the plucky Pioneers, the spacecraft that proved Voyager’s epic mission was possible.

2-Where No One Had Gone Before

Forty-five years ago this week, scientists still weren’t sure how hard it would be to navigate the main asteroid belt, a massive field of rocky debris between Mars and Jupiter. Pioneer 10 helped them work that out, emerging from first the first six-month crossing in February 1973. Pioneer 10 logged a few meteoroid hits (fewer than expected) and taught engineers new tricks for navigating farther and farther beyond Earth.

3-Trailblazer No. 2

Pioneer 11 was a backup spacecraft launched in 1973 after Pioneer 10 cleared the asteroid belt. The new mission provided a second close look at Jupiter, the first close-up views of Saturn and also gave Voyager engineers plotting an epic multi-planet tour of the outer planets a chance to practice the art of interplanetary navigation.

4-First to Jupiter

Three-hundred and sixty-three years after humankind first looked at Jupiter through a telescope, Pioneer 10 became the first human-made visitor to the Jovian system in December 1973. The spacecraft spacecraft snapped about 300 photos during a flyby that brought it within 81,000 miles (about 130,000 kilometers) of the giant planet’s cloud tops.

5-Pioneer Family

Pioneer began as a Moon program in the 1950s and evolved into increasingly more complicated spacecraft, including a Pioneer Venus mission that delivered a series of probes to explore deep into the mysterious toxic clouds of Venus. A family portrait (above) showing (from left to right) Pioneers 6-9, 10 and 11 and the Pioneer Venus Orbiter and Multiprobe series. Image date: March 11, 1982. 

6-A Pioneer and a Pioneer

Classic rock has Van Halen, we have Van Allen. With credits from Explorer 1 to Pioneer 11, James Van Allen was a rock star in the emerging world of planetary exploration. Van Allen (1914-2006) is credited with the first scientific discovery in outer space and was a fixture in the Pioneer program. Van Allen was a key part of the team from the early attempts to explore the Moon (he’s pictured here with Pioneer 4) to the more evolved science platforms aboard Pioneers 10 and 11.

7-The Farthest…For a While

For more than 25 years, Pioneer 10 was the most distant human-made object, breaking records by crossing the asteroid belt, the orbit of Jupiter and eventually even the orbit of Pluto. Voyager 1, moving even faster, claimed the most distant title in February 1998 and still holds that crown.

8-Last Contact

We last heard from Pioneer 10 on Jan. 23, 2003. Engineers felt its power source was depleted and no further contact should be expected. We tried again in 2006, but had no luck. The last transmission from Pioneer 11 was received in September 1995. Both missions were planned to last about two years.

9-Galactic Ghost Ships

Pioneers 10 and 11 are two of five spacecraft with sufficient velocity to escape our solar system and travel into interstellar space. The other three—Voyagers 1 and 2 and New Horizons—are still actively talking to Earth. The twin Pioneers are now silent. Pioneer 10 is heading generally for the red star Aldebaran, which forms the eye of Taurus (The Bull). It will take Pioneer over 2 million years to reach it. Pioneer 11 is headed toward the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle) and will pass nearby in about 4 million years.

10-The Original Message to the Cosmos

Years before Voyager’s famed Golden Record, Pioneers 10 and 11 carried the original message from Earth to the cosmos. Like Voyager’s record, the Pioneer plaque was the brainchild of Carl Sagan who wanted any alien civilization who might encounter the craft to know who made it and how to contact them. The plaques give our location in the galaxy and depicts a man and woman drawn in relation to the spacecraft.

Read the full version of this week’s 10 Things article HERE. 

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Had to post this somewhere.

I’ve been thinking about Elon Musk’s Tesla.

The guy shot a car into space. A freaking car. With a fake astronaut in the seat and the words “Don’t Panic.”

And people are seeing this as this bizarre conspicuous consumption or a weird Tesla publicity stunt. As a one percenter…

…but the more I think about it, the more I realize something quite simple.

This guy had to launch a test load. He had to put something on that rocket. Given the power of the rocket, whatever they launched as a test load had to be heavy enough to properly test the biggest rocket we’ve launched since the Apollo program.

It had to be well built and solid enough to survive the launch. Now, because of the size of the load, it had to be put into a stable orbit not, as happens with smaller test loads, set to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

So, assuming everything went well, whatever they put on that rocket? It’s going to be in space for a long time. Assuming it’s not hit by a bit of debris, or an asteroid, or whatever, it could be up there for millions of years. It’s in space, so it’s not going to rust or corrode. It will eventually develop pitting from micro meteor strikes, it’s not going to last forever.

So, what does the guy send up.

A freaking car with an astronaut in the seat and the words “Don’t Panic” printed on it.

It’s corny. It’s tacky. But what else is it?

It’s art.

It’s something that’s going to still be recognizable as art in a few thousand years. After we’re all dead. Heck, it may still be recognizable as art after our species is dead - extinct or evolved into something else.

Given the fact that he had to put some kind of object into a stable orbit in the solar system, Musk picked not just art, but ridiculous art. The kind of thing that hangs from diner ceilings, the kind of thing a kid would put together.

He put something out there that screams to the void “This is us. This is humanity. This is how utterly silly we are, how completely frivolous.”

And you know what, if the first..or the only…thing an alien civilization sees of us is Elon Musk’s stupid car, I’m quite happy with that.

They might not be able to decipher the message, but they’ll know somebody was here who, given the power to fly into space used it to play.

I’m quite happy with that.

Don't kill yourself, please.

If you’re suffering from depression and are looking for a sign to not go through with ending your life, this is it. This is the sign. We care.

If you see this on your dash, reblog it. You could save a life.

Empire Strikes Back (1980).

The Solar System

Any advice for future astrophysicists? What’s it like at NASA?

First car in space!

Last night, Tesla Roadster went into orbit and became the fastest car in the universe:

If it was pulled over by space-police, they would have charged Elon a speeding ticket of exceeding 40'555 km per hour!

The surrealism of the situation is truly mind-blowing:

Highly amusing is the phrase “DO NOT PANIC” on the car’s dashboard, taken from the excellent book series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”:

Elon even shoved a copy of the book and a towel into the glove box so that the space-suited manequin would have something fun to read on his infinite journeys!

Inside the car, there’s a sign “made on earth by humans”, in case aliens ever catch it adrift in space and take it apart for clues:

The car was supposed to fly towards Mars orbit, but they’ve overshot it so now it’s heading into the Asteroid Belt orbit:

Especially interesting is the fact that we’re witnessing sci-fi of 1979 come to Life. In the Heavy Metal movie, Soft Landing segment, which Elon must have seen when he was 11 years old there’s this scene:

Same scene, but in the Heavy metal magazine:

What a magical time to be alive!