I Plucked The Stars For My Girlfriend Tonight

Tell this museum how you're feeling and it'll text you back a piece of art

When you text San Francisco Museum of Modern Art how you're feeling, it responds with a work of art that captures your mood.

When you text San Francisco Museum of Modern Art how you’re feeling, it responds with a work of art that captures your mood.

GUYS! We live in an amazing world! I just texted the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “send me food,” and they sent me a picture of vegetables from their collection. My boyfriend texted them the cactus emoji and they sent back a picture of a cactus. This is blowing my mind!

Matilda's got all the shades to grey to throw at you

apparently e.l. james called former child star mara wilson (matilda) a “sad fuck” for critiquing the 50shades books a while ago and now there’s a feud. i love it.

Cherry blossom and hefeweizen - Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Candle + Book Giveaway

Hey everyone! The Literary Snob is teaming up with The Happy Bard Candle Co. to do a double giveaway this September. We’re all on the same trivia team in the real world (Sean Bean Lives!) and I absolutely love Happy Bard’s literary inspired candles. They’re about to release their next line of literary candles and one of the new scents will be a fan submission! So we’re holding a contest and double giveaway to find the fairest combo in the land. 

Reblog this post with your submission for a literary candle scent. You can send in as many submissions as your heart desires and tag anyone who dreams of being a candle virtuoso. The Happy Bard Candle Co. will pick their favorite submission at the end of the contest, create the candle, and send it to you! Plus I will send the winner one of the newly released Vintage Minis of your choice.

GIVEAWAY RULES

Reblog this post with a book & fragrance combo suggestion

Follow The Happy Bard Candle Co. on either Instagram or Facebook

Follow The Literary Snob on Tumblr

Have fun and be creative!

RULES

There is no limit on submissions, so reblog away! Currently, The Happy Bard Candle Co. cannot ship internationally, so anybody can participate but only those in the U.S. can win. Contest ends Saturday, Sept. 30 at midnight.

We look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with! Plus I might throw in an extra prize for whoever makes me laugh the hardest. Good luck!

Hey look, it’s these guys again. My website – My Facebook page – See me on LINE Webtoon!

Some basic science 🤓

Astronomy and Astrophysics: Facts

Here is a list of some curiosities of astronomy and astrophysics. From our solar system to interstellar space.

Mercury is shrinking: It’s small, it’s hot and it’s shrinking. A NASA-funded research suggests that Mercury is still contracting today, joining Earth as a tectonically active planet.

Stellar neighbor:  Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, a small low-mass star, about 4.25 light-years (1.30 pc) from the Sun in the constellation of Centaurus. Proxima Centauri is the nearest star of the Sun that is known and at first can only be seen from the Southern Hemisphere.

A heavy star:  5 milliliters, or one teaspoon of neutron star material, equals the weight of about 900 Great Pyramids of Giza. One sugar cube equates to 100 billion tons. A cubic meter? The entire weight of the Atlantic Ocean. With an escape velocity of 100,000 km/s (Earth’s is a puny 11.3 km/s), a fall from 1 meter above a neutron star would only take one microsecond, and you would impact at around 2000 km/s, or 7.2 million kilometers per hour. This force would destroy all your component atoms, rendering all your matter identical. Fortunately, the closest neutron star is rather far away (about 400 light-years), so I wouldn’t be too concerned about the aforementioned event.

Asteroid belt: The asteroid belt is the circumstellar disc in the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets.  About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The total mass of the asteroid belt is approximately 4% that of the Moon, or 22% that of Pluto, and roughly twice that of Pluto’s moon Charon (whose diameter is 1200 km).

Sunlight Takes Around 8 Minutes To Reach Earth: The Earth is located 93 million miles (150 million kms) away from the Sun, a distance known to astronomers as an astronomical units or AU. Traveling at the speed of light (186,282 miles per second), sunlight is able to cross this vast distance in around 8 minutes 20 seconds.

Pluto is about 2,376 km in diameter. Pluto’s small size and low mass mean that it has a density of 1.86 grams per cubic centimeter according to recent measurements by New Horizons, about 40 percent of Earth’s density.

Just like black holes; neutron stars also generate gravitational waves: This year astronomers were able to detect gravitational waves originating from neutron stars. And in addition, it was possible to observe the location of the collision thanks to the efforts of the astronomers. This is a great advance for astronomy.

Most neutron stars are very fast rotators: Since the conservation of angular momentum following a supernova explosion transfers the progenitor star’s rate of rotation to the remnant that is only about 20 km (12.5 miles) in diameter, the result is that the neutron star rotates very rapidly when it is formed. Most known neutron stars rotate several hundred times per second, but the fastest rotator yet discovered, the neutron star designated PSR J1748-2446ad, is known to rotate 716 times per second, which translates into 43,000 rotations per minute, or 24% of the speed of light at the star’s equatorial surface.

Asteroid also has satellite: This color picture is made from images taken by the imaging system on the Galileo spacecraft about 14 minutes before its closest approach to asteroid 243 Ida on August 28, 1993. Ida’s moon, Dactyl, was discovered by mission member Ann Harch in images returned from Galileo. It was named after the Dactyls, creatures which inhabited Mount Ida in Greek mythology. Ida has an average diameter of 31.4 km (19.5 mi). It is irregularly shaped and elongated, and apparently composed of two large objects connected together. Its surface is one of the most heavily cratered in the Solar System, featuring a wide variety of crater sizes and ages.

Kepler-444 system: The oldest known planetary system has five terrestrial-sized planets, all in orbital resonance. This weird group showed that solar systems have formed and lived in our galaxy for nearly its entire existence. Estimated to be 11.2 billion years old (more than 80% of the age of the universe), approximately 117 light-years (36 pc) away from Earth in the constellation Lyra. 

Sources: wikipedia, space.com, futurism.com and astronomytrek.com

Image credit: NASA/JPL, ESO/M. Kornmesser, NASA/XMM Newton, Casey Reed/Penn State University, NASA/ESA/Hubble

To learn more about the shrinkage of Mercury, click here.

To learn more about the gravitational waves generated by neutron stars click here.

A book crystallized in the ocean

Sonnet for President Trump

Shall I compare thee to a Shakespeare play? Thou art less clever and less literate, But how else should poor poets have their say? Alas, our leader lacks a donkey’s wit! Sometime too fierce the fire of ego burns, And when a man is made to look a fool, He rages ’gainst the mockery he earns, As little boys will cry when teas’d at school. But thy eternal tantrums shall not wane, Nor shalt thou e’er unclench thy tiny fists, Nor listen when the people dare to say, “’Tis you, dear sir, who made a scene of this.”         So long as men can breathe and speech is free,         The Bard shall speak and show thy shame to thee.

(4 July 2017, in honor and defense of freedom of artistic expression)

WEEKLY COMIC PICKS FOR 6.4.2014

This week we review Nailbiter #2, Rise of the Magi #1, Big Trouble In Little China #1, Black Widow #7, and Original Sin #3.

We took some advice from one of our viewers and tried to make this episode as spoiler-free as possible which also makes for shorter, more digestible episodes. Check it out below and let us know what you think.

If you like these videos, please show your support by giving them a Thumbs-Up, leaving a comment, and/or subscribing to our channel. It would really mean a lot, plus it’s nice to have some form of interaction with you guys so we know that other people besides us are into this kind of stuff.

We hope you like this episode. Until next week, let us know what you’re reading in the comments!

Always a better tomorrow

A Hitchhiker’s Ride to Space

This month, we are set to launch the latest weather satellite from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The Joint Polar Satellite System-1, or JPSS-1, satellite will provide essential data for timely and accurate weather forecasts and for tracking environmental events such as forest fires and droughts.

Image Credit: Ball Aerospace

JPSS-1 is the primary satellite launching, but four tiny satellites will also be hitchhiking a ride into Earth orbit. These shoebox-sized satellites (part of our CubeSat Launch Initiative) were developed in partnership with university students and used for education, research and development. Here are 4 reasons why MiRaTA, one of the hitchhikers, is particularly interesting…

Miniaturized Weather Satellite Technology

The Microwave Radiometer Technology Acceleration (MiRaTA) CubeSat is set to orbit the Earth to prove that a small satellite can advance the technology necessary to reduce the cost and size of future weather satellites. At less than 10 pounds, these nanosatellites are faster and more cost-effective to build and launch since they have been constructed by Principal Investigator Kerri Cahoy’s students at MIT Lincoln Laboratory (with lots of help). There’s even a chance it could be put into operation with forecasters.

The Antenna? It’s a Measuring Tape

That long skinny piece coming out of the bottom right side under MiRaTA’s solar panel? That’s a measuring tape. It’s doubling as a communications antenna. MiRaTA will measure temperature, water vapor and cloud ice in Earth’s atmosphere. These measurements are used to track major storms, including hurricanes, as well as everyday weather. If this test flight is successful, the new, smaller technology will likely be incorporated into future weather satellites – part of our national infrastructure.

Tiny Package Packing a Punch MiRaTA will also test a new technique using radio signals received from GPS satellites in a higher orbit. They will be used to measure the temperature of the same volume of atmosphere that the radiometer is viewing. The GPS satellite measurement can then be used for calibrating the radiometer. “In physics class, you learn that a pencil submerged in water looks like it’s broken in half because light bends differently in the water than in the air,” Principal Investigator Kerri Cahoy said. “Radio waves are like light in that they refract when they go through changing densities of air, and we can use the magnitude of the refraction to calculate the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere with near-perfect accuracy and use this to calibrate a radiometer.” 

What’s Next?

In the best-case scenario, three weeks after launch MiRaTA will be fully operational, and within three months the team will have obtained enough data to study if this technology concept is working. The big goal for the mission—declaring the technology demonstration a success—would be confirmed a bit farther down the road, at least half a year away, following the data analysis. If MiRaTA’s technology validation is successful, Cahoy said she envisions an eventual constellation of these CubeSats orbiting the entire Earth, taking snapshots of the atmosphere and weather every 15 minutes—frequent enough to track storms, from blizzards to hurricanes, in real time.

Learn more about MiRaTA

Watch the launch!

The mission is scheduled to launch this month (no sooner than Nov. 14), with JPSS-1 atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Delta II rocket lifting off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. You’ll be able to watch on NASA TV or at nasa.gov/live.

Watch the launch live HERE on Nov. 14, liftoff is scheduled for Tuesday, 4:47 a.m.! 

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