When STEM People Have Fun.

Jeff Williams: Record Breaker

Astronaut becomes U.S. record holder for most cumulative time in space!

The Olympics are over, but Americans are STILL breaking records. NASA astronaut Jeff Williams just broke Scott Kelly’s record of 520 cumulative days spent in space. When Williams returns to Earth on Sept. 5, he will have racked up 534 days in space. To celebrate this amazing achievement, here are some of the best images taken during his four spaceflights.

STS-101 Atlantis:

During May 2000, Williams made his first spacewalk during space shuttle Atlantis’ STS-101 mission. On this 10-day mission, Williams’ first spacewalk lasted nearly seven hours. He is pictured here outside the space station.

Expedition 13:

Williams experienced his first long-duration mission in 2006, when he served as flight engineer for Expedition 13 space station mission. During his time in orbit, he performed two spacewalks, saw the arrival of two space shuttle missions and resumed construction of the orbiting laboratory during his six-month tour. While on one of those spacewalks, Williams took this selfie.

Expedition 21/22:

Williams returned to space for another six-month mission in 2009 as a flight engineer on Expedition 21 and commander of Expedition 22. During that time, he hosted the crews of two space shuttle missions. The U.S.-built Tranquility module and cupola were installed on station. Here is an image of the then newly installed cupola.

Expedition 47/48:

This time around, Williams has been onboard the space station since March 2016, where he served as flight engineer for Expedition 47 and now commands Expedition 48. With over 7,000 retweets on Williams’ photo of an aurora from space, his Twitter followers were clearly impressed with his photography skills.

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Strong words to use on a Resume

If you have ever had to write a resume for work or for an application, then you know the hardest part is figuring out what type of words to use that sound professional and and intelligent.

Example: If an application asks you if you have any relevant experience for a job at a day care center and you have experience, like you have babysat children. You would look at the words in the columns to see what words you should use that will help your resume stand out. You might put down “Have supervised and attended to children on a regular basis.”

I hope this is helpful to you.

The reverse progression of Modern Humans to simple life forms. 

Festo’s Bionic Flying Fox, as an example of Bio-mimicry.

German automation company Festo has created a Flying Fox (Fruit Bat) made of a 580g foam body with a carbon fibre skeleton and a membrane like material for the wings.

This robot imitates the exact body and wing movements of an actual bad in order for it to fly. This idea of bio-mimicry is one that is paving the way for a host of natural moving, nature inspired machines. 

Dirty thunderstorm

A dirty thunderstorm (also volcanic lightning, thunder volcano) is a weather phenomenon that is related to the production of lightning in a volcanic plume.

A study in the journal Science indicated that electrical charges are generated when rock fragments, ash, and ice particles in a volcanic plume collide and produce static charges, just as ice particles collide in regular thunderstorms.

Volcanic eruptions are sometimes accompanied by flashes of lightning. However, this lightning doesn’t descend from storm clouds in the sky. It is generated within the ash cloud spewing from the volcano, in a process called charge separation.

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“NEW GALAXY DISCOVERED ORBITING THE MILKY WAY” You would think that scientists would have already discovered most of the galaxies around the Milky Way, but that does not seem to be the case. Astronomers have recently detected a dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way called the Crater 2 dwarf. This galaxy was discovered through measuring its ‘half-light diameter’. Since galaxies don’t have actual definitive edges, astronomers measure galaxies by looking at the brightest part of the galaxy where half of the total amount of light from the it is emitted - half-light diameter. This galaxy has a half-light diameter of 7000 light years, which would look twice as big as the full moon if we could see it with the naked eye. Gabriel Torrealba and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge, the team that discovered this galaxy, was only able to find it by using a computer that looked for over-densities of stars in data (hinting at the possibilities of galaxies or something else) from images taken by a telescope in Chile. The galaxy has eluded the detection of the scientific community for so long only because its stars are spread out so thinly, giving it a ghost-like appearance. In addition, this dwarf galaxy is near four other new-found objects: the Crater globular star cluster as well as three dwarf galaxies in Leo - a group of objects that is now falling towards the Milky Way. Interestingly, this galaxy is quite new due to it retaining a round shape suggesting that it had never encountered a giant galaxy, otherwise gravity would have bent the dwarf out of shape.

Read more about this fascinating story on: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2084438-never-before-seen-galaxy-spotted-orbiting-the-milky-way/

Bits and pieces of the Carina Nebula

A site of intense star formation, the Carina Nebula complex is home to some of the brightest and most massive stars in our Galaxy, the Milky Way.

This immense nebula contains a dozen or more brilliant stars that are estimated to be at least 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. The most rich and extensive one is the variable star Eta Carinae.

The visible-light view comes from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory and the infrared picture comes from the HAWK-I camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope.

Credit: ESO

Largest Batch of Earth-size, Habitable Zone Planets

Our Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in an area called the habitable zone, where liquid water is most likely to exist on a rocky planet.

This exoplanet system is called TRAPPIST-1, named for The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. In May 2016, researchers using TRAPPIST announced they had discovered three planets in the system.

Assisted by several ground-based telescopes, Spitzer confirmed the existence of two of these planets and discovered five additional ones, increasing the number of known planets in the system to seven.

This is the FIRST time three terrestrial planets have been found in the habitable zone of a star, and this is the FIRST time we have been able to measure both the masses and the radius for habitable zone Earth-sized planets.

All of these seven planets could have liquid water, key to life as we know it, under the right atmospheric conditions, but the chances are highest with the three in the habitable zone.

At about 40 light-years (235 trillion miles) from Earth, the system of planets is relatively close to us, in the constellation Aquarius. Because they are located outside of our solar system, these planets are scientifically known as exoplanets. To clarify, exoplanets are planets outside our solar system that orbit a sun-like star.

In this animation, you can see the planets orbiting the star, with the green area representing the famous habitable zone, defined as the range of distance to the star for which an Earth-like planet is the most likely to harbor abundant liquid water on its surface. Planets e, f and g fall in the habitable zone of the star.

Using Spitzer data, the team precisely measured the sizes of the seven planets and developed first estimates of the masses of six of them. The mass of the seventh and farthest exoplanet has not yet been estimated.

For comparison…if our sun was the size of a basketball, the TRAPPIST-1 star would be the size of a golf ball.

Based on their densities, all of the TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky. Further observations will not only help determine whether they are rich in water, but also possibly reveal whether any could have liquid water on their surfaces.

The sun at the center of this system is classified as an ultra-cool dwarf and is so cool that liquid water could survive on planets orbiting very close to it, closer than is possible on planets in our solar system. All seven of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary orbits are closer to their host star than Mercury is to our sun.

 The planets also are very close to each other. How close? Well, if a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth’s sky.

The planets may also be tidally-locked to their star, which means the same side of the planet is always facing the star, therefore each side is either perpetual day or night. This could mean they have weather patterns totally unlike those on Earth, such as strong wind blowing from the day side to the night side, and extreme temperature changes.

Because most TRAPPIST-1 planets are likely to be rocky, and they are very close to one another, scientists view the Galilean moons of Jupiter – lo, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede – as good comparisons in our solar system. All of these moons are also tidally locked to Jupiter. The TRAPPIST-1 star is only slightly wider than Jupiter, yet much warmer. 

How Did the Spitzer Space Telescope Detect this System?

Spitzer, an infrared telescope that trails Earth as it orbits the sun, was well-suited for studying TRAPPIST-1 because the star glows brightest in infrared light, whose wavelengths are longer than the eye can see. Spitzer is uniquely positioned in its orbit to observe enough crossing (aka transits) of the planets in front of the host star to reveal the complex architecture of the system. 

Every time a planet passes by, or transits, a star, it blocks out some light. Spitzer measured the dips in light and based on how big the dip, you can determine the size of the planet. The timing of the transits tells you how long it takes for the planet to orbit the star.

The TRAPPIST-1 system provides one of the best opportunities in the next decade to study the atmospheres around Earth-size planets. Spitzer, Hubble and Kepler will help astronomers plan for follow-up studies using our upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018. With much greater sensitivity, Webb will be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of water, methane, oxygen, ozone and other components of a planet’s atmosphere.

At 40 light-years away, humans won’t be visiting this system in person anytime soon…that said…this poster can help us imagine what it would be like: 

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Volcanic ash being hit by sunset. This is Volcán Puyehue, in Chile.

On October 8 a privileged few could see auroras in abnormally low latitudes, as the spectacular pictures above taken in Wales and Northern England.

Via TON: Northern Lights Put On Spectacular Show As Aurora Borealis Lit Skies Over Wales And Yorkshire.