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Alegram

Os dias ensolarados

Iluminam os meus olhos

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Antares M4 & Mars [1435x2156] : vinoba || ourspaceisbeautiful.tumblr.com

Pervasive Pollution: Nurdles (Part 1)

Meet the Nurdles. They may be tiny, cute, and look like a bunch of cartoon characters, but don’t be fooled: these little guys are plotting ocean domination.

Nurdles are some of the planet’s most pervasive pollutants, found in lakes, rivers, and oceans across the globe. The tiny factory-made pellets form the raw material for every plastic product we use, and each year, billions of pounds of nurdles are produced, melted, and molded into toys, bottles, buttons, bags, pens, shoes, toothbrushes, and beads. They. Are. Everywhere. 

But their real advantage in the quest for ocean domination is their incredible endurance—which allows them to persist in an environment for generations, because their artificial makeup makes them unable to biodegrade.

So, just as long as they don’t get into the environment, we have nothing to worry about, right?

The problem is, nurdles have a crafty way of doing exactly this. Produced in several countries, and shipped to plastics manufacturing plants the world over, nurdles often escape during the production process, carried by run-off to the coast, or during shipping when they’re mistakenly tipped into the waves.

And that’s just the beginning. Look out for more on these pervasive pollutants later this week, or check out the TED-Ed Lesson The nurdles’ quest for ocean domination - Kim Preshoff

Animation by Reflective Films

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葛飾 北斎  Katsushika Hokusai (1760 - 1849) Fuji at Aoyama (Aoyama no Fuji): Detatched page from One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku hyakkei) Vol. 3, circa 1835-1847

This image was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and shows a starburst galaxy named MCG+07-33-027. This galaxy lies some 300 million light-years away from us, and is currently experiencing an extraordinarily high rate of star formation — a starburst. 

Normal galaxies produce only a couple of new stars per year, but starburst galaxies can produce a hundred times more than that. As MCG+07-33-027 is seen face-on, the galaxy’s spiral arms and the bright star-forming regions within them are clearly visible and easy for astronomers to study.

In order to form newborn stars, the parent galaxy has to hold a large reservoir of gas, which is slowly depleted to spawn stars over time. For galaxies in a state of starburst, this intense period of star formation has to be triggered somehow — often this happens due to a collision with another galaxy. MCG+07-33-027, however, is special; while many galaxies are located within a large cluster of galaxies, MCG+07-33-027 is a field galaxy, which means it is rather isolated. Thus, the triggering of the starburst was most likely not due to a collision with a neighboring or passing galaxy and astronomers are still speculating about the cause. The bright object to the right of the galaxy is a foreground star in our own galaxy.

Object Names: MCG+07-33-027

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA and N. Grogin (STScI)

Text credit: European Space Agency

Time And Space

Re-Discovering Meiji Japan

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