“The Most Exciting Phrase To Hear In Science, The One That Heralds New Discoveries, Is Not ‘Eureka!’

Solar System: 10 Things to Know

Movie Night

Summer break is just around the corner. Hang a sheet from the clothesline in the backyard and fire up the projector for a NASA movie night.

1. Mars in a Minute

Back in the day, movies started with a cartoon. Learn the secrets of the Red Planet in these animated 60 second chunks.

2. Crash of the Titans

Watch two galaxies collide billions of years from now in this high-definition visualization.

3. Tour the Moon in 4K

Wait for the dark of the waning Moon next weekend to take in this 4K tour of our constant celestial companion.

4. Seven Years of the Sun

Watch graceful dances in the Sun’s atmosphere in this series of videos created by our 24/7 Sun-sentinel, the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO).

5. Light ‘Em Up

Crank up the volume and learn about NASA science for this short video about some of our science missions, featuring a track by Fall Out Boy.

6. Bennu’s Journey

Follow an asteroid from its humble origins to its upcoming encounter with our spacecraft in this stunning visualization.

7. Lunar Landing Practice

Join Apollo mission pilots as they fly—and even crash—during daring practice runs for landing on the Moon.

8. Earthrise

Join the crew of Apollo 8 as they become the first human beings to see the Earth rise over the surface of the Moon.

9. Musical Descent to Titan

Watch a musical, whimsical recreation of the 2005 Huygens probe descent to Titan, Saturn’s giant moon.

10. More Movies

Our Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio provides a steady stream of fresh videos for your summer viewing pleasure. Come back often and enjoy.

Read the full version of this article on the web HERE. 

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

Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope

While we’re waiting for some hopefully good news that the amazing instrument is returning to service (down since October 5 due to a gyro dyfugalty) here are some of the Hubble Space Telescope’s top pics.

images of Neptune taken by Voyager 2 on August 24 1989.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kevin M. Gill

The Andromeda Galaxy Floats Above the Dawn Clouds - May 6, 2017

Joseph Brimacombe

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

One of the challenges in studying tornadoes is being in the right place at the right time. In that regard, storm chaser Brandon Clement hit the jackpot earlier this week when he captured this footage of a tornado near Sulphur, Oklahoma from his drone. He was able to follow the twister for several minutes until it apparently dissipated. 

Scientists are still uncertain exactly how tornadoes form, but they’ve learned to recognize the key ingredients. A strong variation of wind speed with altitude can create a horizontally-oriented vortex, which a localized updraft of warm, moist air can lift and rotate to vertical, birthing a tornado. These storms most commonly occur in the central U.S. and Canada during springtime, and researchers are actively pursing new ways to predict and track tornadoes, including microphone arrays capable of locating them before they fully form. (Image and video credit: B. Clement; via Earther)

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.

After the rain of Hurricane Florence came the rainbow, or rainbows, in this case. Photographer John Entwistle captured this image of a rainbow with several additional supernumerary bows. The inner fringes seen here form when light passes through water droplets that are all close to the same size; given the spread seen here, the droplets are likely smaller than a millimeter in diameter. Supernumerary rainbows cannot be explained with a purely geometric theory of optics; instead, they require acknowledging the wave nature of light. (Image credit: J. Entwistle; via APOD; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

This is the visible spectrum of the light from the sun. And if you have played with white light and prisms before, it might come as a huge surprise to you to know that the spectrum from the sun is actually not continuous.

Why is it not ? The dark patches in the above spectrum arise from gas at or above the Sun’s surface absorbing sunlight emitted below.

                                               Source

Since there are different types of gases that compose the sun, there are numerous wavelengths of light that get absorbed by these gases.

                                         Source: xkcd

How do we know which line corresponds to which ? Well, it’s because we have a periodic table, and we know the spectrum of all the elements in it:

                                               Source

And then it’s a matter of solving the jigsaw puzzle of fitting the spectrum with the tiles that you have. When we do so, we obtain the following composition of elements:

                                   Source: Earth Blog

We can even take it one step further by finding the composition of other neighboring stars as well.

                                  Source: Potsdam University 

All of this information about the star can be captured from a simple spectrum. And this is why one of the most important tool that an astronomer has about an object is it’s spectrum.

Have a good one!

Edit: Added all sources for the images.

Living near the Rocky Mountains, it’s not unusual to look up and find the sky striped with lines of clouds. Such wave clouds are often formed on the lee side of mountains and other topography. But even in the flattest plains, you can find clouds like these at times. That’s because the internal waves necessary to create the clouds can be generated by weather fronts, too.

Imagine a bit of atmosphere sitting between a low-pressure zone and a high-pressure zone. This will be an area of convergence, where winds flow inward and squeeze the fluid parcel in one direction before turning 90 degrees and stretching it in the perpendicular direction. The result is a sharpening of any temperature gradient along the interface. This is the weather front that moves in and causes massive and sudden shifts in temperature. 

On one side of the front, warm air rises. Then, as it loses heat and cools, it sinks down the cold side of the front. The sharper the temperature differences become, the stronger this circulation gets. If the air is vertically displaced quickly enough, it will spontaneously generate waves in the atmosphere. With the right moisture conditions, those waves create visible clouds at their crests, as seen here. For more on the process, check out this article over at Physics Today. (Image credit: W. Velasquez; via Physics Today)