During A Recent Close Flyby Of The Gas Giant Jupiter, Our Juno Spacecraft Captured This Stunning Series

And that’s a wrap!! Thank you for all the wonderful questions in this Tumblr Answer Time, and we hope you learned a little something about what it takes to launch humans to space. 

You can follow all of our latest Space Station news on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. 

The Sun is not silent. The low, pulsing hum of our star's heartbeat allows scientists to peer inside, revealing huge rivers of solar material flowing around before their eyes — er, ears.

Data from ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), sonified by the Stanford Experimental Physics Lab, captures the Sun’s natural vibrations and reveals what can’t be seen with the naked eye.

In this audiogram, our heliophysicist Alex Young explains how this simple sound connects us with the Sun and all the other stars in the universe.

This piece features low frequency sounds of the Sun. For the best listening experience, listen to this story with headphones. 🎧 

Read more: https://go.nasa.gov/2LMW42o

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

What’s Up For August 2018?

The summer Perseids are here! 

The Perseid meteor shower is the best of the year! It peaks on a Moonless summer night from 4 p.m. EST on August 12 until 4 a.m. EST on August 13.

Because the new Moon falls near the peak night, the days before and after the peak will also provide nice, dark skies. Your best window of observation is from a few hours after twilight until dawn, on the days surrounding the peak.

Unlike most meteor showers, which have a short peak of high meteor rates, the Perseids have a very broad peak, as Earth takes more than three weeks to plow through the wide trail of cometary dust from comet Swift-Tuttle.

The Perseids appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus, visible in the northern sky soon after sunset this time of year. Observers in mid-northern latitudes will have the best views.

You should be able to see some meteors from July 17 to August 24, with the rates increasing during the weeks before August 12 and decreasing after August 13.

Observers should be able to see between 60 and 70 per hour at the peak. Remember, you don't have to look directly at the constellation to see them. You can look anywhere you want to-even directly overhead.

Meteor showers like the Perseids are caused by streams of meteoroids hitting Earth's atmosphere. The particles were once part of their parent comet-or, in some cases, from an asteroid.

The parade of planets Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars--and the Milky Way continue to grace the evening sky, keeping you and the mosquitoes company while you hunt for meteors.

Watch the full What’s Up for August 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

Earth’s Land Ice by the Numbers

“At a glacial pace” used to mean moving so slowly the movement is almost imperceptible. Lately though, glaciers are moving faster. Ice on land is melting and flowing, sending water to the oceans, where it raises sea levels.

In 2018, we launched the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) to continue a global record of ice elevation. Now, the results are in. Using millions of measurements from a laser in space and quite a bit of math, researchers have confirmed that Earth is rapidly losing ice.

16 Years 

ICESat-2 was a follow-up mission to the original ICESat, which launched in 2003 and took measurements until 2009. Comparing the two records tells us how much ice sheets have lost over 16 years.

½ Inch

During those 16 years, melting ice from Antarctica and Greenland was responsible for just over a half-inch of sea level rise. When ice on land melts, it eventually finds its way to the ocean. The rapid melt at the poles is no exception.

400,000 Olympic Swimming Pools

One gigaton of ice holds enough water to fill 400,000 Olympic swimming pools. It’s also enough ice to cover Central Park in New York in more than 1,000 feet of ice.

200 Gigatons

Between 2003 and 2019, Greenland lost 200 gigatons of ice per year. That’s 80 million Olympic swimming pools reaching the ocean every year, just from Greenland alone.

118 Gigatons

During the same time period, Antarctica lost 118 gigatons of ice per year. That’s another 47 million Olympic swimming pools every year. While there has been some elevation gain in the continent’s center from increased snowfall, it’s nowhere near enough to make up for how much ice is lost to the sea from coastal glaciers.

10,000 Pulses

ICESat-2 sends out 10,000 pulses of laser light a second down to Earth’s surface and times how long it takes them to return to the satellite, down to a billionth of a second. That’s how we get such precise measurements of height and changing elevation.

These numbers confirm what scientists have been finding in most previous studies and continue a long record of data showing how Earth’s polar ice is melting. ICESat-2 is a key tool in our toolbox to track how our planet is changing.

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

New results from our Juno mission suggest the planet is home to “shallow lightning.” An unexpected form of electrical discharge, shallow lightning comes from a unique ammonia-water solution. ⁣

⁣It was previously thought that lightning on Jupiter was similar to Earth, forming only in thunderstorms where water exists in all its phases – ice, liquid, and gas. But flashes observed at altitudes too cold for pure liquid water to exist told a different story. This illustration uses data obtained by the mission to show what these high-altitude electrical storms look like. ⁣

Understanding the inner workings of Jupiter allows us to develop theories about atmospheres on other planets and exoplanets! ⁣

Illustration Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Heidi N. Becker/Koji Kuramura⁣

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

Hubble Space Telescope

You’ve probably heard of our Hubble Space Telescope, but have you had the chance to actually take a look at the amazing images it has captured for us over the years? Since Hubble launched in April 1990,  it has made more than 1.2 million observations, some to locations more than 13.4 billion light years from Earth!

Hubble can see astronomical objects with an angular size of 0.05 arc seconds, which is like seeing a pair of fireflies in Tokyo from your home in Maryland…yea, that’s pretty far! This accuracy allows us to see images like this one of Little Gem Nebula, roughly 6,000 light-years away from us.

Images from Hubble are regularly released to the public, and are some of the most breathtaking views in the Universe. Images like this one of Lagoon Nebula, in the constellation of Sagittarius, not only make for amazing desktop screen-savers, but provide us with valuable scientific information about distant stars and galaxies, as well as the planets in our solar system.

We recently celebrated Hubble’s 25th Anniversary, and look forward to many more years of discovery and captivating images.

Sea Level Rise

For thousands of years, sea level has remained relatively stable. But now, Earth’s seas are rising. Since the beginning of the 20th century, they have risen about eight inches, and more than two inches in the last 20 years alone!

As water warms, it expands and takes up more space. That means that when oceans warm, the sea level rises. This summer, we’ve been researching exactly how global warming has impacted Greenland’s ice sheet. Our ICESat-2 mission will use a laser to measure the height of the planet’s surface. Over time, we will be able to provide a record of elevation change, and estimate how much water has melted into the ocean from land ice change.

So how much ice are we actually losing? Great question, but the answer might shock you. In Greenland alone, 303 gigatons of ice was lost in 2014!

Since we know that ice is melting, we’re working to gain a better understanding of how much and how fast. We’re using everything from planes, probes and boats, to satellites and lasers to determine the impact of global warming on the Earth’s ice.

Follow along for updates and information: http://climate.nasa.gov/

What's a SPOC? Isn't that a star trek character?

Rare & Record-Breaking Black Holes

While even the most “normal” black hole seems exotic compared to the tranquil objects in our solar system, there are some record-breaking oddballs. Tag along as we look at the biggest, closest, farthest, and even “spinniest” black holes discovered in the universe … that we know of right now!

Located 700 million light-years away in the galaxy Holmberg 15A, astronomers found a black hole that is a whopping 40 billion times the mass of the Sun — setting the record for the biggest black hole found so far. On the other hand, the smallest known black hole isn’t quite so easy to pinpoint. There are several black holes with masses around five times that of our Sun. There’s even one candidate with just two and a half times the Sun’s mass, but scientists aren’t sure whether it’s the smallest known black hole or actually the heaviest known neutron star!

You may need to take a seat for this one. The black hole GRS 1915+105 will make you dizzier than an afternoon at an amusement park, as it spins over 1,000 times per second! Maybe even more bizarre than how fast this black hole is spinning is what it means for a black hole to spin at all! What we're actually measuring is how strongly the black hole drags the space-time right outside its event horizon — the point where nothing can escape. Yikes!

If you’re from Earth, the closest black hole that we know of right now, Mon X-1 in the constellation Monoceros, is about 3,000 light-years away. But never fear — that’s still really far away! The farthest known black hole is J0313-1806. The light from its surroundings took a whopping 13 billion years to get to us! And with the universe constantly expanding, that distance continues to grow.

So, we know about large (supermassive, hundreds of thousands to billions of times the Sun's mass) and small (stellar-mass, five to dozens of times the Sun's mass) black holes, but what about other sizes? Though rare, astronomers have found a couple that seem to fit in between and call them intermediate-mass black holes. As for tiny ones, primordial black holes, there is a possibility that they were around when the universe got its start — but there’s not enough evidence so far to prove that they exist!

One thing that’s on astronomers’ wishlist is to see two supermassive black holes crashing into one another. Unfortunately, that event hasn’t been detected — yet! It could be only a matter of time before one reveals itself.

Though these are the records now, in early 2021 … records are meant to be broken, so who knows what we’ll find next!

Add some of these records and rare finds to your black hole-watch list, grab your handy-dandy black hole field guide to learn even more about them — and get to searching!

Keep up with NASA Universe on Facebook and Twitter where we post regularly about black holes.

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

Ever want to ask a real life astronaut a question? Here’s your chance! 

We are kicking off Hispanic Heritage Month a little early this year, and astronaut Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor will be taking your questions in an Answer Time session on Thursday, September 12 from 12pm - 1pm ET here on NASA’s Tumblr! Find out what it’s like to be a NASA astronaut and learn more about her Cuban-American heritage. Make sure to ask your question now by visiting http://nasa.tumblr.com/ask!

Dr. Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor began working with NASA as a Flight Surgeon in 2006 and was later selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. Her first flight was from Jun 6- Dec. 20, 2018 where she served as Flight Engineer on the International Space Station as a member of Expeditions 56 and 57. During these missions, the crew contributed to hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science – including investigations into a new cancer treatment!

She has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University, Washington, D.C and a Doctorate of Medicine from The University of Texas - Health Science Center at Houston. 

Dr. Auñón-Chancellor Fun Facts:

She spent 2 months in Antarctica from 2010 to 2011 searching for meteorites as part of the ANSMET expedition.

She served as an Aquanaut on the NEEMO 20 mission in the Aquarius underwater laboratory, which is used to prepare for living and working in space. 

She logged 197 days in space during Expeditions 56 and 57.

Follow Serena on Twitter at @AstroSerena and follow NASA on Tumblr for your regular dose of space.