💙 Colours Over The Bridge On 500px By Gary Alway, Melbourne, Australia ☀  Canon EOS 70D-f/4-1/125s-35mm-iso400,

The Special Ingredients…of Earth!

With its blue skies, puffy white clouds, warm beaches and abundant life, planet Earth is a pretty special place. A quick survey of the solar system reveals nothing else like it. But how special is Earth, really?

One way to find out is to look for other worlds like ours elsewhere in the galaxy. Astronomers using our Kepler Space Telescope and other observatories have been doing just that! 

In recent years they’ve been finding other planets increasingly similar to Earth, but still none that appear as hospitable as our home world. For those researchers, the search goes on.

Another group of researchers have taken on an entirely different approach. Instead of looking for Earth-like planets, they’ve been looking for Earth-like ingredients. Consider the following:

Our planet is rich in elements such as carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur…the stuff of rocks, air, oceans and life. Are these elements widespread elsewhere in the universe? 

To find out, a team of astronomers led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with our participation, used Suzaku. This Japanese X-ray satellite was used to survey a cluster of galaxies located in the direction of the constellation Virgo.

The Virgo cluster is a massive swarm of more than 2,000 galaxies, many similar in appearance to our own Milky Way, located about 54 million light years away. The space between the member galaxies is filled with a diffuse gas, so hot that it glows in X-rays. Instruments onboard Suzaku were able to look at that gas and determine which elements it’s made of.

Reporting their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, they reported findings of iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur throughout the Virgo galaxy cluster. The elemental ratios are constant throughout the entire volume of the cluster, and roughly consistent with the composition of the sun and most of the stars in our own galaxy.

When the Universe was born in the Big Bang 13.8 billon years ago, elements heavier than carbon were rare. These elements are present today, mainly because of supernova explosions. 

Massive stars cook elements such as, carbon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, silicon and sulfur in their hot cores and then spew them far and wide when the stars explode.

According to the observations of Suzaku, the ingredients for making sun-like stars and Earth-like planets have been scattered far and wide by these explosions. Indeed, they appear to be widespread in the cosmos. The elements so important to life on Earth are available on average and in similar relative proportions throughout the bulk of the universe. In other words, the chemical requirements for life are common.

Earth is still special, but according to Suzaku, there might be other special places too. Suzaku recently completed its highly successful mission.

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

Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744

The Ringed Planet

Itty bitty Mercury transits the Sun. It was a terribly cloudy morning with really poor seeing, but managed to snap this. 

Amethyst Geode

Locality:  Idar-Oberstein, Hunsrück, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.

I <3 William Shatner on Twitter

“To make this journey, we’ll need imagination, but imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.”

These are just a few of the beautiful visual effects from Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Pipe Nebula

Messier 1 - The Crab Nebula

Potentially Humanity’s First Historically Observed Supernova

The Crab Nebula is the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion. Around in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers identified a large bright object that suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. The explosion was so bright that it was even visible during the day time.

700 years later the super nova remnant faded in brightness as it expanded and was nearly forgotten. The Super Nova Remnant was rediscovered in 1758 ( officially re-recorded) by Charles Messier while he was creating a catalog of mysterious objects that looked like comets but were not.

We now know that the beautiful Crab Nebula is the magnificent result of the death of a star, which was unknown to Charles Messier and the Chinese Astronomers that discovered the Object. Now, thanks to space telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, we can image the Nebula in great detail. The bottom left image is of a small region of the Crab Nebula. It shows “Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in its intricate filamentary structure” and gives scientists a better understanding of the death of stars. The image to the bottom left shows combined visible light data from Hubble and x-ray data from Chandra.

Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra

Anyone in Orlando or has followers from the area please!

AB, O+ and O- blood donors needed ASAP!!! Due to the shooting overnight, the hospital and blood bank is critically low right now for donated blood. If you are able, please go this morning to donate at one of the locations below. This valuable gift you can give is a direct way to help those injured from this tragic incident. The Orange, Osceola, and Seminole locations open today are:

Orlando - West Michigan Donor Center 345 West Michigan St #106 Orlando, FL 32806 Phone: 407-835-5500 Fax: (407) 835-5505 Sun: 7:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Orlando - Main Donor Center 8669 Commodity Circle Orlando, FL 32819 Phone: (407) 248-5009 Fax: (407) 455-7570 Sun: 7:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Apopka Donor Center 131 North Park Ave Apopka, FL 32703 Phone: (407) 884-7471 Fax: (407) 884-7475 Sun: 9:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Kissimmee Donor Center 1029 North John Young Pkwy Kissimmee, FL 34741 Phone: (407) 847-5747 Fax: (407) 847-9605 Sun: 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Oviedo Donor Center 1954 West 426 #1100 Oviedo, FL 32765 Phone: (407) 588-1291 Fax: (407) 365-9982 Sun: 7:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Lake Mary Donor Center 105 Waymont Ct #101 Lake Mary , FL 32746 Phone: (407) 322-0822 Fax: (407) 328- 1119 Sun: 8:00 AM - 2:00 PM