This Scene, Captured With A 35mm Camera From Inside The Space Shuttle Endeavour, Shows Jupiter Rising

Aurora Over Alaska (by HB Mertz)

Sunflower Galaxy

This image shows something spectacular: a massive galaxy cluster that it is warping the space around it! The cluster, whose heart is at the centre of the frame, is named RCS2 J2327, and is one of the most massive clusters known at its distance or beyond.

Massive objects such as RCS2 J2327 have such a strong influence on their surroundings that they visibly warp the space around them. This effect is known as gravitational lensing. In this way, they cause the light from more distant objects to be bent, distorted, and magnified, allowing us to see galaxies that would otherwise be far too distant to detect.

Credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble & NASA

Venus, Jupiter and Mars at Dawn - Oct 22, 2015

Image credit: Joseph Brimacombe

Night sky

Lieksa, Finland

October 2018

this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby

Declining Arctic sea ice: The 2018 Arctic Report Card found the Arctic region had the second-lowest overall sea-ice coverage on record. The map shows the age of sea ice in the Arctic ice pack in March 1985 (left) and March 2018 (right). Ice that is less than a year old is darkest blue. Ice that has survived at least 4 full years is white. Maps were provided by NOAA Climate.gov and based on data provided by Mark Tschudi./University of Colorado/CCAR. (NOAA Climate.gov)

Excerpt from this Washington Post story:

Over the past three decades of global warming, the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic has declined by a stunning 95 percent, according the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual Arctic Report Card.

The finding suggests that the sea at the top of the world has already morphed into a new and very different state, with major implications not only for creatures such as walruses and polar bears but, in the long term, perhaps for the pace of global warming itself.

The oldest ice can be thought of as a kind of glue that holds the Arctic together and, through its relative permanence, helps keep the Arctic cold even in long summers.

“The younger the ice, the thinner the ice, the easier it is to go away,” said Don Perovich, a scientist at Dartmouth who coordinated the sea ice section of the yearly report.

If the Arctic begins to experience entirely ice-free summers, scientists say, the planet will warm even more, as the dark ocean water absorbs large amounts of solar heating that used to be deflected by the cover of ice. The new findings were published as climate negotiators in Poland are trying to reach a global consensus on how to address climate change.

In March, NASA scientists with the Operation IceBridge mission, which surveys the polar regions using research aircraft, witnessed a dramatic instance of the ongoing changes. Flying over the seas north of Greenland, in a region that usually features some of the oldest, thickest ice in the Arctic, they instead saw smooth, thin strips binding together the thicker, ridged pieces.

Thoughts and explanation about time travelling through a black hole?

A black hole curves the space-time fabric to an extreme point called singularity. And since space and time are working together, according to the theory of relativity, curvature and gravity also affect time.

This is best illustrated by one person (call them Unlucky) falling into a black hole while another person (call them Lucky) watches. From Lucky’s perspective, Unlucky’s time clock appears to be ticking slower and slower. This is in accordance with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which (simply put) says that time is affected by how fast you go, when you’re at extreme speeds close to light. The black hole warps time and space so much that Unlucky’s time appears to be running slower. From Unlucky’s perspective, however, their clock is running normally and Lucky’s is running fast.

Stellar Winds

Stellar winds are fast moving flows of material (protons, electrons and atoms of heavier metals) that are ejected from stars. These winds are characterised by a continuous outflow of material moving at speeds anywhere between 20 and 2,000 km/s.

In the case of the Sun, the wind ‘blows’ at a speed of 200 to 300 km/s from quiet regions, and 700 km/s from coronal holes and active regions.

The causes, ejection rates and speeds of stellar winds vary with the mass of the star. In relatively cool, low-mass stars such as the Sun, the wind is caused by the extremely high temperature (millions of degrees Kelvin) of the corona.

his high temperature is thought to be the result of interactions between magnetic fields at the star’s surface, and gives the coronal gas sufficient energy to escape the gravitational attraction of the star as a wind. Stars of this type eject only a tiny fraction of their mass per year as a stellar wind (for example, only 1 part in 1014 of the Sun’s mass is ejected in this way each year), but this still represents losses of millions of tonnes of material each second. Even over their entire lifetime, stars like our Sun lose only a tiny fraction of 1% of their mass through stellar winds.

In contrast, hot, massive stars can produce stellar winds a billion times stronger than those of low-mass stars. Over their short lifetimes, they can eject many solar masses (perhaps up to 50% of their initial mass) of material in the form of 2,000 km/sec winds.

These stellar winds are driven directly by the radiation pressure from photons escaping the star. In some cases, high-mass stars can eject virtually all of their outer envelopes in winds. The result is a Wolf-Rayet star.

Stellar winds play an important part in the chemical evolution of the Universe, as they carry dust and metals back into the interstellar medium where they will be incorporated into the next generation of stars. 

source (read more) + Wolf–Rayet star

the fact that stars even exist and we can look at them every night for free just makes me go !!!!!!!!!!!!!!