All Cats Are Beautiful 🐱❤️

Couple goals

ESO’s La Silla Observatory over the night sky

Image credit: ESO

WE NEED TO ACT NOW

The role plastic products play in the daily lives of people all over the world is interminable. We could throw statistics at you all day long (e.g. Upwards of 300 MILLION tons of plastic are consumed each year), but the impact of these numbers border on inconceivable.

For those living on the coasts, a mere walk on the beach can give anyone insight into how staggering our addiction to plastic has become as bottles, cans, bags, lids and straws (just to name a few) are ever-present. In other areas that insight is more poignant as the remains of animal carcasses can frequently be observed; the plastic debris that many of them ingested or became entangled in still visible long after their death. Sadly, an overwhelming amount of plastic pollution isn’t even visible to the human eye, with much of the pollution occurring out at sea or on a microscopic level.

The short-lived use of millions of tons of plastic is, quite simply, unsustainable and dangerous. We have only begun to see the far-reaching consequences of plastic pollution and how it affects all living things. According to a study from Plymouth University, plastic pollution affects at least 700 marine species, while some estimates suggest that at least 100 million marine mammals are killed each year from plastic pollution. Here are some of the marine species most deeply impacted by plastic pollution.

Sea Turtles

Seals and Sea Lions

Seabirds

Fish

Whales and Dolphins

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More than ever, the fate of the ocean is in our hands. To be good stewards and leave a thriving ocean for future generations, we need to make changes big and small wherever we are. 

Every purchase supports Ocean Conservation. We give a portion of our profits to Organizations that bravely fight for Marine Conservation.

The Kepler space telescope has shown us our galaxy is teeming with planets — and other surprises

The Kepler space telescope has taught us there are so many planets out there, they outnumber even the stars. Here is a sample of these wondrous, weird and unexpected worlds (and other spectacular objects in space) that Kepler has spotted with its “eye” opened to the heavens.

Kepler has found that double sunsets really do exist.

Yes, Star Wars fans, the double sunset on Tatooine could really exist. Kepler discovered the first known planet around a double-star system, though Kepler-16b is probably a gas giant without a solid surface.

Kepler has gotten us closer to finding planets like Earth.

Nope. Kepler hasn’t found Earth 2.0, and that wasn’t the job it set out to do. But in its survey of hundreds of thousands of stars, Kepler found planets near in size to Earth orbiting at a distance where liquid water could pool on the surface. One of them, Kepler-62f, is about 40 percent bigger than Earth and is likely rocky. Is there life on any of them? We still have a lot more to learn.

This sizzling world is so hot iron would melt!

One of Kepler’s early discoveries was the small, scorched world of Kepler-10b. With a year that lasts less than an Earth day and density high enough to imply it’s probably made of iron and rock, this “lava world” gave us the first solid evidence of a rocky planet outside our solar system. 

If it’s not an alien megastructure, what is this oddly fluctuating star?

When Kepler detected the oddly fluctuating light from “Tabby’s Star,” the internet lit up with speculation of an alien megastructure. Astronomers have concluded it’s probably an orbiting dust cloud.  

Kepler caught this dead star cannibalizing its planet.

What happens when a solar system dies? Kepler discovered a white dwarf, the compact corpse of a star in the process of vaporizing a planet.

These Kepler planets are more than twice the age of our Sun!

The five small planets in Kepler-444 were born 11 billion years ago when our galaxy was in its youth. Imagine what these ancient planets look like after all that time?

Kepler found a supernova exploding at breakneck speed.

This premier planet hunter has also been watching stars explode. Kepler recorded a sped-up version of a supernova called a “fast-evolving luminescent transit” that reached its peak brightness at breakneck speed. It was caused by a star spewing out a dense shell of gas that lit up when hit with the shockwave from the blast. 

* All images are artist illustrations.

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Hurricanes Have No Place to Hide, Thanks to Better Satellite Forecasts

If you’ve ever looked at a hurricane forecast, you’re probably familiar with “cones of uncertainty,” the funnel-shaped maps showing a hurricane’s predicted path. Thirty years ago, a hurricane forecast five days before it made landfall might have a cone of uncertainty covering most of the East Coast. The result? A great deal of uncertainty about who should evacuate, where it was safe to go, and where to station emergency responders and their equipment.

Over the years, hurricane forecasters have succeeded in shrinking the cone of uncertainty for hurricane tracks, with the help of data from satellites. Polar-orbiting satellites, which fly nearly directly above the North and South Poles, are especially important in helping cut down on forecast error.

The orbiting electronic eyeballs key to these improvements: the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) fleet. A collaborative effort between NOAA and NASA, the satellites circle Earth, taking crucial measurements that inform the global, regional and specialized forecast models that have been so critical to hurricane track forecasts.

The forecast successes keep rolling in. From Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017 through Hurricanes Florence and Michael in 2018, improved forecasts helped manage coastlines, which translated into countless lives and property saved. In September 2018, with the help of this data, forecasters knew a week ahead of time where and when Hurricane Florence would hit. Early warnings were precise enough that emergency planners could order evacuations in time — with minimal road clogging.  The evacuations that did not have to take place, where residents remained safe from the hurricane’s fury, were equally valuable.

The satellite benefits come even after the storms make landfall. Using satellite data, scientists and forecasters monitor flooding and even power outages. Satellite imagery helped track power outages in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and in the Key West area after Hurricane Irma, which gave relief workers information about where the power grid was restored – and which regions still lacked electricity. 

Flood maps showed the huge extent of flooding from Hurricane Harvey and were used for weeks after the storm to monitor changes and speed up recovery decisions and the deployment of aid and relief teams.

As the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season kicks off, the JPSS satellites, NOAA-20 and Suomi-NPP, are ready to track hurricanes and tropical cyclones as they form, intensify and travel across the ocean – our eyes in the sky for severe storms. 

For more about JPSS, follow @JPSSProgram on Twitter and facebook.com/JPSS.Program, or @NOAASatellites on Twitter and facebook.com/NOAASatellites.

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Happy 230th Birthday, Enceladus, Our Solar System’s Greatest Hope For Life Beyond Earth

“It is still a complete unknown whether Earth is the only world in the Solar System to house any form of life: past or present. Venus and Mars may have been Earth-like for a billion years or more, and life could have arisen there early on. Frozen worlds with subsurface oceans, like Enceladus, Europa, Triton or Pluto, are completely different from Earth’s present environment, but have the same raw ingredients that could potentially lead to life as well.

Are water, energy, and the right molecules all we need for life to arise? Finding even the most basic organisms (or even the precursor components of organisms) anyplace else in the Universe would lead to a scientific revolution. A single discovered cell in the geysers of Enceladus would be the most momentous discovery of the 21st century. With the recent demise of Cassini, on the 230th anniversary of Enceladus’ discovery, the possibility of finding the incredible compels us to go back. May we be bold enough to make it so.”

On this date in 1789, William Herschel, armed with the most powerful telescope known to humanity at the time (you can get a lot of grant money when you discover the planet Uranus and name it after the King), discovered a relatively small moon of Saturn just 500 kilometers across: Enceladus. For some 200 years, Enceladus was never seen as more than a single pixel across, until the Voyager probes flew by it. What they revealed was a remarkable, unique world in all the Solar System. Now that the Cassini mission is complete, we can look back at all we know about this world, and all the signs point to a remarkable story: there’s a subsurface ocean, possibly suitable as a home for undersea life.

Is Enceladus truly our Solar System’s best hope for life beyond Earth? That’s debatable, but there’s every reason to be hopeful. Come get the story here.

(Source)

The Shrinking Aral Sea

The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest lake in the world. Fed primarily by snowmelt and precipitation flowing down from faraway mountains, it was a temperate oasis in an arid region. But in the 1960s, the Soviet Union diverted two major rivers to irrigate farmland, cutting off the inland sea from its source. As the Aral Sea dried up, fisheries collapsed, as did the communities that depended on them. The remaining water supply became increasingly salty and polluted with runoff from agricultural plots. Loss of the Aral Sea’s water influenced regional climate, making the winters even colder and the summers much hotter.

While seasonal rains still bring water to the Aral Sea, the lake is roughly one-tenth of its original size. These satellite images show how the Aral Sea and its surrounding landscape has changed over the past few decades.

For more details about these images, read the full stories here: https://go.nasa.gov/2PqJ1ot

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