What If We Can Breathe In Space But The Government Just Tells Us We Cant So That We Dont Try To Escape.

Enceladus and Saturn

Image credit: Gordan Ugarkovic

What is at the center of our galaxy?

Here’s a very interesting question: What exactly is at the center of our galaxy? Is there a black hole ? How do we go about studying it?

A group of researchers from UCLA’s Galactic center group were inspired by the same question and decided to look at a region in the sky where they believed was the center of our milky way galaxy.

And this is what they found of the trajectories of stars surrounding the proposed center of the galaxy:

The star in the middle is the proposed center of our galaxy.These images were taken through the years 1996 - 2016 (see top right of gif).

The first thing that you notice about these stars is that they are orbiting a point in space. This is very similar of how planets in our solar system are orbiting the sun.

                                                 Source

One of the special stars in that animation is S0-2 which completes its elliptical orbit in only 15 years!

( it takes the sun approximately 225-250 million years to complete one journey around the galaxy’s center )

But having this knowledge of how small the orbit is, we can use Kepler’s law to find out the Mass at the center of the galaxy:

And we get the mass of the center as a staggering 4 million times the mass of the Sun.

Let’s take a look at the orbits once again:

The radius of this object at the center, in order to avoid collision with the rest of the objects has to be about the diameter of Uranus’s orbit.

So, an object that has 4 million times the mass of the Sun. and diameter of Uranus’s orbit .. Hmm.. The only astronomical object that would fit this characteristic is a Super Massive Black Hole (SMBH)

And that’s why we believe that at the center of our galaxy is a SMBH.

Hope you guys liked this post. Have a good one!

* This is how the actual data of the stars orbiting this apparent black hole looks like:

**(Lecture) Dr. Andrea M. Ghez “The Monster at the Heart of Our Galaxy”

*** (TED Talk) Andrea Ghez: The hunt for a supermassive black hole              

All images/animations featured in this post were created by Prof. Andrea Ghez and her research team at UCLA and are from data sets obtained with the W. M. Keck Telescopes

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in  the Natural Sciences

Scholars have often expressed astonishment for how well mathematics works to describe our physical world. In 1960, Eugene Wigner published an article with the title above commenting that

…the mathematical formulation of the physicist’s often crude experience leads, in an uncanny number of cases, to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena.

Here are some others’ thoughts:

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

— Albert Einstein

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

— Bertrand Russell

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

— Albert Einstein

Our physical world doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties.

— Max Tegmark

Physicists may have fallen prey to a false dichotomy between mathematics and physics. It’s common for theoretical physicists to speak of mathematics providing a quantitative language for describing physical reality… But maybe… math is more than just a description of reality. Maybe math is reality.

— Brian Greene

More info at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences

SNR 0509-67.5: a remnant from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Team/Kevin M. Gill

Paradise View

http://society6.com/jaredatkins

Halley’s Comet on 8 March 1986

Credit: NASA/W. Liller

5 Facts About Earth's Radiation Donuts 🍩

Did you know that our planet is surrounded by giant, donut-shaped clouds of radiation?

Here’s what you need to know.

1. The radiation belts are a side effect of Earth’s magnetic field

The Van Allen radiation belts exist because fast-moving charged particles get trapped inside Earth’s natural magnetic field, forming two concentric donut-shaped clouds of radiation. Other planets with global magnetic fields, like Jupiter, also have radiation belts.

2. The radiation belts were one of our first Space Age discoveries

Earth’s radiation belts were first identified in 1958 by Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite. The inner belt, composed predominantly of protons, and the outer belt, mostly electrons, would come to be named the Van Allen Belts, after James Van Allen, the scientist who led the charge designing the instruments and studying the radiation data from Explorer 1.

3. The Van Allen Probes have spent six years exploring the radiation belts

In 2012, we launched the twin Van Allen Probes to study the radiation belts. Over the past six years, these spacecraft have orbited in and out of the belts, providing brand-new data about how the radiation belts shift and change in response to solar activity and other factors.

4. Surprise! Sometimes there are three radiation belts

Shortly after launch, the Van Allen Probes detected a previously-unknown third radiation belt, created by a bout of strong solar activity. All the extra energy directed towards Earth meant that some particles trapped in our planet’s magnetic field were swept out into the usually relatively empty region between the two Van Allen Belts, creating an additional radiation belt.

5. Swan song for the Van Allen Probes

Originally designed for a two-year mission, the Van Allen Probes have spent more than six years collecting data in the harsh radiation environment of the Van Allen Belts. In spring 2019, we’re changing their orbit to bring the perigee — the part of the orbit where the spacecraft are closest to Earth — about 190 miles lower. This ensures that the spacecraft will eventually burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, instead of orbiting forever and becoming space junk.

Because the Van Allen Probes have proven to be so hardy, they’ll continue collecting data throughout the final months of the mission until they run out of fuel. As they skim through the outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, scientists and engineers will also learn more about how atmospheric oxygen can degrade satellite measurements — information that can help build better satellites in the future.

Keep up with the latest on the mission on Twitter, Facebook or nasa.gov/vanallenprobes.

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