October 13, 1966 – Gemini 12 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Undergoes Zero-gravity Training Aboard An Air Force

Astronomers have found compelling signs for a supermassive black hole in the center of almost every large galaxy they have scrutinized, and the Milky Way is no exception. The core of our galaxy harbors an object called Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) — a black hole with about 4 million times the Sun’s mass. It’s the 19th confirmed black hole in the Milky Way, and it sits dead in the center.

The evidence takes several forms. First, intense radio waves and X-rays flow from an accretion disk that spans a region no bigger than our solar system. But the proof comes from careful tracking of the motions of stars as they orbit the central mass. It’s the same method astronomers use to hunt for globular cluster black holes, but the huge size of the object in the Milky Way’s heart makes these motions far easier to see. Analyzing the stellar orbits leads directly to the black hole’s mass.

The count of black holes in our galaxy likely will continue to grow in the years ahead, but it never will outpace the flood of planet discoveries. The ability to find planets has reached the stage where it’s surprising when a week goes by without a new detection. Black holes hide their identities much better, either behind the cloak of an event horizon or in isolation from other objects. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the study of our galaxy’s black holes is that we’ve already found 19.

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Check out Fingerprints of Water on the Sand via NASA http://ift.tt/1Mxtpaz

Wind farm star trails by Matt James

What’s Enceladus?

Before we tell you about Enceladus, let’s first talk about our Cassini spacecraft…

Our Cassini mission to Saturn is one of the most ambitious efforts in planetary space exploration ever mounted. Cassini is a sophisticated robotic spacecraft orbiting the ringed planet and studying the Saturnian system in detail.

Cassini completed its initial four-year mission to explore the Saturn System in June 2008. It has also completed its first mission extension in September 2010. Now, the health spacecraft is making exciting new discoveries in a second extension mission!

Enceladus

Enceladus is one of Saturn’s many moons, and is one of the brightest objects in our solar system. This moon is about as wide as Arizona, and displays at least five different types of terrain. The surface is believed to be geologically “young”, possibly less than 100 million years old.

Cassini first discovered continually-erupting fountains of icy material on Enceladus in 2005. Since then, the Saturn moon has become one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for present-day habitable environments.  

Scientists found that hydrothermal activity may be occurring on the seafloor of the moon’s underground ocean. In September, it was announced that its ocean –previously thought to only be a regional sea – was global!

Since Cassini is nearing the end of its mission, we are able to make a series of three close encounters with Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.

Close Encounters

On Oct. 14, Cassini performed a mid-range flyby of Enceladus, but the main event will take place on Oct. 28, when Cassini will come dizzyingly close to the icy moon. During this flyby, the spacecraft will pass a mere 30 miles above the moon’s south polar region!

This will be the deepest-ever dive through the moon’s plume of icy spray, where Cassini can collect images and valuable data about what’s going on beneath the frozen surface.

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

Thanks, Doc

In June 2013, a group of friends encased a GoPro in a 3D-printed body, attached it to a weather balloon, and launched it. The weather balloon burst and the camera came careening back down to Earth, just as planned – only the crew never found it. 

Two years later, a woman hiking in the desert found a camera in the rubble and brought it to the AT&T store where she worked. The owner of the SIM card was identified and the camera was returned to its original owners. Technology is pretty damn cool. 

This breathtaking shot of the Grand Canyon from the stratosphere was taken from their footage. 

Source

-RLO

The Twin Jet Nebula, or PN M2-9, is a striking example of a bipolar planetary nebula. Bipolar planetary nebulae are formed when the central object is not a single star, but a binary system, Studies have shown that the nebula’s size increases with time, and measurements of this rate of increase suggest that the stellar outburst that formed the lobes occurred just 1200 years ago. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

(via The Twin Jet Nebula | ESA/Hubble)

Tadashi was unaware of what Hiro was doing, since he had fallen back asleep in under five minutes. He couldn't feel any movement, though he would wake up to the slightest sounds. youneedsomeupgrades

hamada-tadashii

Hiro woke, rubbing his eyes and staring at the dark ceiling, slowly sitting up and dangling his feet off the bed. His eyes scanned the room searching for his sound asleep brother. As his eyes found him he tiredly stood out of bed and almost drunkly walked over to the bed, setting his hands on the bed, closing his eyes. “Dashi.. Tadashi, you awake?”

Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge

Welcome to the Pirate Bay of science.

A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.

For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.

“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,”Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”

If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that’s because it kinda is. But in this story, it’s not just the poor who don’t have access to scientific papers - journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand - with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.

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Lunar Eclipse Super Moon - 28th September 2015

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