Let Us See Jupiter Through Your Eyes

Astronaut in the house!

Air Force Colonel and NASA Astronaut Nick Hague is back from his seven month stay aboard the space station and ready to answer your questions in today's Tumblr Answer Time!

Let's get started.

Blooms in the Baltic

Every summer, phytoplankton – microscopic plant-like organisms – spread across the North Atlantic, with blooms spanning hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles. Nutrient-rich, cooler waters tend to promote more growth among marine plants and phytoplankton than is found in tropical waters. Blooms this summer off Scandinavia seem to be particularly intense.

On July 18, 2018, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired a natural-color image of a swirling green phytoplankton bloom in the Gulf of Finland, a section of the Baltic Sea. Note how the phytoplankton trace the edges of a vortex; it is possible that this ocean eddy is pumping up nutrients from the depths.

Though it is impossible to know the phytoplankton type without sampling the water, three decades of satellite observations suggest that these green blooms are likely to be cyanobacteria (blue-green algae), an ancient type of marine bacteria that capture and store solar energy through photosynthesis (like plants).

In recent years, the proliferation of algae blooms in the Baltic Sea has led to the regular appearance of “dead zones” in the basin. Phytoplankton and cyanobacteria consume the abundant nutrients in the Baltic ¬and deplete the oxygen. According to researchers from Finland’s University of Turku, the dead zone this year is estimated to span about 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles).

Read more: https://go.nasa.gov/2uLK4aZ

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Say hello to the Antennae galaxies 👋

Two galaxies are locked in a deadly embrace in this Hubble Space Telescope image. Once normal, sedate spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, this galactic pair has spent the past few hundred million years sparring. The clash is so violent that stars have been ripped from their host galaxies to form a streaming arc between the two. 

The far-flung stars and streamers of gas stretch out into space, creating long tidal tails reminiscent of antennae (not visible in this close-up Hubble view). Clouds of gas blossom out in bright pink and red, surrounding the bright flashes of blue star-forming regions — some of which are partially obscured by dark patches of dust. 

Hubble’s observations have uncovered over 1,000 bright, young star clusters bursting to life as a result of the head-on wreck. The sweeping spiral-like patterns, traced by bright blue star clusters, shows the result of a firestorm of star-birth activity, which was triggered by the collision. The rate of star formation is so high that the Antennae galaxies are said to be in a state of starburst, a period in which all of the gas within the galaxies is being used to form stars. This cannot last forever, and neither can the separate galaxies; eventually the nuclei will coalesce and the galaxies will begin their retirement together as one large elliptical galaxy. 

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Game Time: Final Voting for Tournament Earth

The moment has arrived- it's time to decide the NASA Earth Observatory's all-time best image. After four grueling rounds of voting, two contenders remain: Ocean Sand, Bahamas (#5 seed) versus Raikoke Erupts (#6 seed).

The road to the finals has been full of surprises. All top seeds have been knocked out. In one semifinal, Ocean Sand garnered 50.6 percent of the votes to squeak out a win over the overall favorite, Twin Blue Marbles. In the other matchup, Raikoke Erupts trounced Where the Dunes End, 66.5 to 33.5 percent.

Now you have to pick a champion. Will it be a gorgeous, artistic image from the very early years of Earth Observatory or stunning natural-color views of an explosive event from 2019? Which image will you crown as the best in the EO archives: Ocean Sand, Bahamas or Raikoke Erupts? Voting ends on April 28 at 9 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time.

Thank you for helping us celebrate Earth Observatory’s 20th anniversary and the 50th anniversary of Earth Day!

Vote here: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/tournament-earth

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Are the rumors about the ozone layer being totally fixed true ? If yes , is it susceptible of being opened again ans if no, is it suspecte

Why Sequencing DNA in Space is a Big Deal

... And How You Can Talk to the Scientists Who Made It Happen

Less than one month ago, DNA had never been sequenced in space. As of today, more than one billion base pairs of DNA have been sequenced aboard the International Space Station, Earth’s only orbiting laboratory. The ability to sequence the DNA of living organisms in space opens a whole new world of scientific and medical possibilities. Scientists consider it a game changer. 

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, who has a background in genomics, conducted the sequencing on the space station as part of the Biomolecule Sequencer investigation. A small, commercial, off-the-shelf device called MinION (min-EYE-ON), manufactured by Oxford Nanopore Technologies in the UK, was used to sequence the DNA of bacteria, a virus and rodents. Human DNA was not sequenced, and there are no immediate plans to sequence human DNA in space. 

(Image Credit: Oxford Nanopore Technologies)

The MinION is about the size of a candy bar, and plugs into a laptop or tablet via USB connection, which also provides power to the device. The tiny, plug and play sequencer is diminutive compared to the large microwave-sized sequencers used on Earth, and uses much less power. Unlike other terrestrial instruments whose sequencing run times can take days, this device’s data is available in near real time; analysis can begin within 10-15 minutes from the application of the sample.

Having real-time analysis capabilities aboard the space station could allow crews to identify microbes, diagnose infectious disease and collect genomic and genetic data concerning crew health, without having to wait long periods of time to return samples to Earth and await ground-based analysis.

The first DNA sequencing was conducted on Aug. 26, and on Sept. 14, Rubins and the team of scientists back at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston hit the one-billionth-base-pairs-of-DNA-sequenced mark.

Have more questions about how the Biomolecule Sequencer works, or how it could benefit Earth or further space exploration? Ask the team of scientists behind the investigation, who will be  available for questions during a Reddit Ask Me Anything on /r/science on Wednesday, Sept. 28 at 2 p.m. EDT. 

The participants are:

Dr. Aaron Burton, NASA Johnson Space Center, Planetary Scientist and Principal Investigator

Dr. Sarah Castro-Wallace, NASA Johnson Space Center, Microbiologist and Project Manager

Dr. David J. Smith, NASA Ames Research Center, Microbiologist

Dr. Mark Lupisella, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Systems Engineer

Dr. Jason P. Dworkin, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Astrobiologist

Dr. Christopher E. Mason, Weill Cornell Medicine Dept. of Physiology and Biophysics, Associate Professor

Europa Clipper is a space mission crafted with one overarching goal: determine if Jupiter’s ocean moon, Europa, has conditions suitable for life. Watch launch live on Oct. 14 as the largest uncrewed spacecraft we've ever built begins its journey into the solar system.

Gobble Up These Black (Hole) Friday Deals!

Welcome to our 6th annual annual Black Hole Friday! Check out these black hole deals from the past year as you prepare to head out for a shopping spree or hunker down at home to avoid the crowds.

First things first, black holes have one basic rule: They are so incredibly dense that to escape their surface you’d have to travel faster than light. But light speed is the cosmic speed limit . . . so nothing can escape a black hole’s surface!

Black hole birth announcements

Some black holes form when a very large star dies in a supernova explosion and collapses into a superdense object. This is even more jam-packed than the crowds at your local mall — imagine an object 10 times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere with the diameter of New York City!

Some of these collapsing stars also signal their destruction with a huge burst of gamma rays. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory continuously seek out the signals of these gamma ray bursts — black hole birth announcements that come to us from across the universe.

NICER black holes

There are loads of stellar mass black holes, which are just a few 10s of times the Sun’s mass, in our home galaxy alone — maybe even hundreds of millions of them! Our Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER for short, experiment on the International Space Station has been studying some of those relatively nearby black holes.

Near one black hole called GRS 1915+105, NICER found disk winds — fast streams of gas created by heat or pressure. Scientists are still figuring out some puzzles about these types of wind. Where do they come from, for example? And do they change the way material falls into the black hole? Every new example of these disk winds helps astronomers get closer to answering those questions.

Merging monster black holes

But stellar mass black holes aren’t the only ones out there. At the center of nearly every large galaxy lies a supermassive black hole — one with the mass of millions or billions of Suns smooshed into a region no bigger than our solar system.

There’s still some debate about how these monsters form, but astronomers agree that they certainly can collide and combine when their host galaxies collide and combine. Those black holes will have a lot of gas and dust around them. As that material is pulled into the black hole it will heat up due to friction and other forces, causing it to emit light.  A group of scientists wondered what light it would produce and created this mesmerizing visualization showing that most of the light produced around these two black holes is UV or X-ray light. We can’t see those wavelengths with our own eyes, but many telescopes can. Models like this could help scientists know what to look for to spot a merger.

Black holes power bright gamma ray lights

It also turns out that these supermassive black holes are the source of some of the brightest objects in the gamma ray sky! In a type of galaxy called active galactic nuclei (also called “AGN” for short) the central black hole is surrounded by a disk of gas and dust that’s constantly falling into the black hole.

But not only that, some of those AGN have jets of energetic particles that are shooting out from near the black hole at nearly the speed of light! Scientists are studying these jets to try to understand how black holes — which pull everything in with their huge amounts of gravity — provide the energy needed to propel the particles in these jets. If that jet is pointed directly at us, it can appear super-bright in gamma rays and we call it a blazar. These blazars make up more than half of the sources our Fermi space telescope sees.

Catching particles from near a black hole

Sometimes scientists get a two-for-one kind of deal when they’re looking for black holes. Our colleagues at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory actually caught a particle from a blazar 4 billion light-years away. IceCube lies a mile under the ice in Antarctica and uses the ice itself to detect neutrinos, tiny speedy particles that weigh almost nothing and rarely interact with anything. When IceCube caught a super-high-energy neutrino and traced its origin to a specific area of the sky, they turned to the astronomical community to pinpoint the source.

Our Fermi spacecraft scans the entire sky about every three hours and for months it had observed a blazar producing more gamma rays than usual. Flaring is a common characteristic in blazars, so this didn’t attract special attention. But when the alert from IceCube came through, scientists realized the neutrino and the gamma rays came from the same patch of sky! This method of using two or more kinds of signals to learn about one event or object is called multimessenger astronomy, and it’s helping us learn a lot about the universe.

Get more fun facts and information about black holes HERE and follow us on social media today for other cool facts and findings about black holes!

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Pumpkin space latte, anyone? ☕

Hubble captured this festive array of stars, Terzan 12, found in the Milky Way about 15,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in this cluster are bound together by gravity in a sphere-like shape and are shrouded in gas and dust. As the starlight travels through that gas and dust to Earth, blue light scatters, leaving the redder wavelengths to come through.

Download the full-resolution image here.

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3 … 2 … 1… ALOHA!

Sometimes in space, you have to set your clocks to island time and gather for a good Hawaiian shirt day. In this 2001 #TBT, Expedition Two and STS-100 crew members gather for a group photo with a pre-set digital still camera.

Clockwise from the 12 o'clock point in the circle are Kent V. Rominger, Yuri V. Lonchakov, Yury V. Usachev, Umberto Guidoni, James S. Voss, Jeffrey S. Ashby, Scott E. Parazynski, John L. Phillips and Chris A. Hadfield, with Susan J. Helms at center. Usachev, Helms and Voss are members of three Expedition Two crew, with the other seven serving as the STS-100 crew on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Usachev and Lonchakov represent Rosaviakosmos; Guidoni is associated with the European Space Agency (ESA); and Hadfield is from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).

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