Studyblr - Blog Posts

Top Study Tips from NASA

Study smarter this school year! We asked scientists, engineers, astronauts, and experts from across NASA about their favorite study tips – and they delivered. Here are a few of our favorites:

Study with friends

Find friends that are like-minded and work together to understand the material better. Trading ideas with a friend on how to tackle a problem can help you both strengthen your understanding.

Create a study environment

Find a quiet space or put on headphones so you can focus. You might not be able to get to the International Space Station yet, but a library, a study room, or a spot outside can be a good place to study. If it’s noisy around you, try using headphones to block out distractions.

Take breaks

Don’t burn yourself out! Take a break, go for a walk, get some water, and come back to it.

Looking for more study tips? Check out this video for all ten tips to start your school year off on the right foot!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Time for some Sun salutations 🧘

Flow through 133 days of the Sun's activity from Aug. 12 to Dec. 22, 2022, as captured by our Solar Dynamics Observatory. From its orbit around Earth, SDO has steadily imaged the Sun in 4K resolution for nearly 13 years.

Video description: Mellow music plays as compiled images taken every 108 seconds condenses 133 days of solar observations into an hour-long video. The video shows bright active regions passing across the face of the Sun as it rotates.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Scott Wiessinger (Lead Producer and editor), Tom Bridgman (Lead Visualizer), Lars Leonhard (music)

Travel to Exotic Destinations in our Galaxy!

The planets beyond our solar system – exoplanets – are so far away, often trillions of miles, that we don’t have the technology to truly see them. Even the best photos show the planets as little more than bright dots. We’ve confirmed more than 5,000 exoplanets, but we think there are billions. Space telescopes like Hubble aren’t able to take photos of these far-off worlds, but by studying them in different wavelengths of light (colors), we’ve learned enough about conditions on these planets that we can illustrate them.

We know, thanks to the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope, that there is a thick atmosphere on a planet called 55 Cancri e about 40 light-years away. And Hubble found silicate vapor in the atmosphere of this rocky world. We also know it’s scorching-close to its Sun-like star, so … lava. Lots and lots of lava. This planet is just one of the many that the James Webb Space Telescope will soon study, telling us even more about the lava world!

You can take a guided tour of this planet (and others) and see 360-degree simulations at our new Exoplanet Travel Bureau.

Travel to the most exotic destinations in our galaxy, including:

Kepler-16b, a planet with two suns.

Then there’s PSO J318.5-22, a world with no sun that wanders the galaxy alone. The nightlife would never end on a planet without a star.

TRAPPIST-1e, which will also be studied by the Webb Space Telescope, is one of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a star about 40 light-years from Earth. It’s close enough that, if you were standing on this exoplanet, you could see our Sun as a star in the Leo constellation! You can also see it on the poster below: look for a yellow star to the right of the top person’s eye.

We haven’t found life beyond Earth (yet) but we’re looking. Meanwhile, we can imagine the possibility of red grass and other plants on Kepler-186f, a planet orbiting a red dwarf star.

We can also imagine what it might be like to skydive on a super-Earth about seven times more massive than our home planet. You would fall about 35% faster on a super-Earth like HD 40307g, making for a thrilling ride!

Any traveler is going to want to pick up souvenirs, and we have you covered. You can find free downloads of all the posters here and others! What are you waiting for? Come explore with us!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

How will the James Webb Space Telescope change how we see the universe? Ask an expert!

The James Webb Space Telescope is launching on December 22, 2021. Webb’s revolutionary technology will explore every phase of cosmic history—from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, to everything in between. Postdoctoral Research Associate Naomi Rowe-Gurney will be taking your questions about Webb and Webb science in an Answer Time session on Tuesday, December 14 from noon to 1 p.m EST here on our Tumblr!

🚨 Ask your questions now by visiting http://nasa.tumblr.com/ask.

Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney recently completed her PhD at the University of Leicester and is now working at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a postdoc through Howard University. As a planetary scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, she’s an expert on the atmospheres of the ice giants in our solar system — Uranus and Neptune — and how the Webb telescope will be able to learn more about them.

The James Webb Space Telescope – fun facts:

Webb is so big it has to fold origami-style to fit into its rocket and will unfold like a “Transformer” in space.

Webb is about 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope and designed to see the infrared, a region Hubble can only peek at.

With unprecedented sensitivity, it will peer back in time over 13.5 billion years to see the first galaxies born after the Big Bang––a part of space we’ve never seen.

It will study galaxies near and far, young and old, to understand how they evolve.

Webb will explore distant worlds and study the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars, known as exoplanets, searching for chemical fingerprints of possible habitability.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

Black Holes Dine on Stellar Treats!

See that tiny blob of light, circled in red? Doesn’t look like much, does it? But that blob represents a feast big enough to feed a black hole around 30 million times the mass of our Sun! Scientists call these kinds of stellar meals tidal disruption events, and they’re some of the most dramatic happenings in the cosmos.

Sometimes, an unlucky star strays too close to a black hole. The black hole’s gravity pulls on the star, causing it to stretch in one direction and squeeze in another. Then the star pulls apart into a stream of gas. This is a tidal disruption event. (If you’re worried about this happening to our Sun – don’t. The nearest black hole we know about is over 1,000 light-years away. And black holes aren’t wild space vacuums. They don’t go zipping around sucking up random stars and planets. So we’re pretty safe from tidal disruption events!)

The trailing part of the stream gets flung out of the system. The rest of the gas loops back around the black hole, forming a disk. The material circling in the disk slowly drifts inward toward the black hole’s event horizon, the point at which nothing – not even light – can escape. The black hole consumes the gas and dust in its disk over many years.

Sometimes the black hole only munches on a passing star – we call this a partial tidal disruption event. The star loses some of its gas, but its own gravity pulls it back into shape before it passes the black hole again. Eventually, the black hole will have nibbled away enough material that the star can’t reform and gets destroyed.

We study tidal disruptions, both the full feasts and the partial snacks, using many kinds of telescopes. Usually, these events are spotted by ground-based telescopes like the Zwicky Transient Facility and the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae network.

They alert other ground- and space-based telescopes – like our Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory (illustrated above) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton – to follow up and collect more data using different wavelengths, from visible light to X-rays. Even our planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has observed a few of these destructive wonders!

We’re also studying disruptions using multimessenger astronomy, where scientists use the information carried by light, particles, and space-time ripples to learn more about cosmic objects and occurrences.

But tidal disruptions are super rare. They only happen once every 10,000 to 100,000 years in a galaxy the size of our own Milky Way. Astronomers have only observed a few dozen events so far. By comparison, supernovae – the explosive deaths of stars – happen every 100 years or so in a galaxy like ours.

That’s why scientists make their own tidal disruptions using supercomputers, like the ones shown in the video here. Supercomputers allow researchers to build realistic models of stars. They can also include all of the physical effects they’d experience whipping ‘round a black hole, even those from Einstein’s theory of general relativity. They can alter features like how close the stars get and how massive the black holes are to see how it affects what happens to the stars. These simulations will help astronomers build better pictures of the events they observe in the night sky.

Keep up with what’s happening in the universe and how we study it by following NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!