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Fall colors in the White Mountains of New Hampshire [OC][1600x1067] by: bckpkrs

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🎃Cozy Autumn Blog👻

What's Up - December 2017

What’s Up For December? Geminid and Ursid meteor showers & winter constellations!

This month hosts the best meteor shower of the year and the brightest stars in familiar constellations.

The Geminds peak on the morning of the 14th, and are active from December 4th through the 17th. The peak lasts for a full 24 hours, meaning more worldwide meteor watchers will get to see this spectacle.

Expect to see  up to 120 meteors per hour between midnight and 4 a.m. but only from a dark sky. You’ll see fewer after moonrise at 3:30 a.m. local time.

In the southern hemisphere, you won’t see as many, perhaps 10-20 per hour, because the radiant never rises above the horizon.

Take a moment to enjoy the circle of constellations and their brightest stars around Gemini this month.

Find yellow Capella in the constellation Auriga. 

Next-going clockwise–at 1 o'clock find Taurus and bright reddish Aldebaran, plus the Pleiades. 

At two, familiar Orion, with red Betelguese, blue-white Rigel, and the three famous belt stars in-between the two.   

Next comes Leo, and its white lionhearted star, Regulus at 7 o'clock.

Another familiar constellation Ursa Major completes the view at 9 o'clock.

There’s a second meteor shower in December, the Ursids, radiating from Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper. If December 22nd  and the morning of December 23rd are clear where you are, have a look at the Little Dipper’s bowl, and you might see about ten meteors per hour. Watch the full What’s Up for December Video: 

There are so many sights to see in the sky. To stay informed, subscribe to our What’s Up video series on Facebook. Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.   

Back to the Autumn | Alex Kaßner

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Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars

There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Credit: NASA

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The Rift.

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By Khanh Do