I found a really cool Youtube channel called History of the Earth that covers topics in the incredibly distant past. I'm talking billions of years ago. And learning how the Earth itself formed and where water came from and about the very first single-celled organisms is just like... woah. WOAH.
It's wild that billions of years ago there were just some bacteria hanging out in the ocean and now we have all this. It's really humbling and puts into perspective how precious our planet is. How precious life is.
Can you tell us something about j1407b?
J1407b is an exoplanet (but it can also be a brown dwarf) very interesting, orbiting its star J1407. It is larger than Saturn or Jupiter, and is surrounded by a ring system that is about 200 times larger than the rings of Saturn, very different from what we are accustomed to see.
Thirty-seven rings extending 90 million kilometers from the planet — over half the distance from the Earth to the sun — encircle the world. These planetary rings are the first found outside the solar system.
This exoplanet is 434 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus.
J1407b could house moons that could be formed by the material of the rings. One of their moons could be as large as Mars or Earth, and could orbit between the gaps of the rings, shaping them.
Astronomers expect the rings to become thinner in the next million years and eventually disappear as they form satellites from the material of the rings.
The discovery of the J1407 system and its unusual eclipses were reported by the team led by astronomer Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester in 2012. The orbital period of J1407b is estimated at about a decade.
Simulation of the eclipse of the star J1407 by the ring system around its putative exoplanet J1407b. Each time a ring passed in front of the star, it dimmed. When entering a gap, the star brightened up again. Graphing the highs and lows, scientists created a profile of the ring system.
What the rings of J1407b would look like in our sky (above the Old Observatory in Leiden, Netherlands) if it was located where Saturn is now.
image 1°, image 2°, image 3°, image 4, image 5° & image 7°
Here are some links if you want to read more about it: here, here and here.
Sh2-101, Cygnus
Savage 10 metre fish of the Silurian and Devonian Heavily armoured piscine torpedoes with fierce teeth roamed the oceans in the early days of fishes, in fact the Devonian era is called the age of fishes by palaeontologists as they had a huge burst of speciation and diversified to fill most marine ecological niches during this time. The now extinct (fortunately) class known as placodermi (plate skin in Greek) was the apex predator of these long gone waters, and thrived from 438 to 358 million years ago, dying out at the end Devonian mass extinction (one of the lesser ones).
Keep reading
This glittery spray of ancient stars is about 16,700 light-years away from Earth toward the constellation Tucana. Globular clusters like this one are isolated star cities, home to hundreds of thousands of stars that are held together by their mutual gravity. And like the fast pace of cities, there’s plenty of action in these stellar metropolises. The stars are in constant motion, orbiting around the cluster’s center.
Past observations have shown that the heavyweight stars tend to crowd into the “downtown” core area, while lightweight stars reside in the less populated suburbs. But as heavyweight stars age, they rapidly lose mass, cool down and shut off their nuclear furnaces. After the purge, only the stars’ bright, superhot cores – called white dwarfs – remain. This weight loss program causes the now lighter-weight white dwarfs to be nudged out of the downtown area through gravitational interactions with heftier stars.
Until these Hubble observations, astronomers had never seen the dynamic conveyor belt in action. The Hubble results reveal young white dwarfs amid their leisurely 40-million-year exodus from the bustling center of the cluster.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Walking dinosaur, Columbus Interactive Science Museum
I love the fact that a group of crows is called a "Murder" and a group of ravens is a "Conspiracy"
Petroglyphs in Maharashtra, India, date back to 10,000 B.C....
Amateur astronomer, owns a telescope. This is a side blog to satiate my science-y cravings! I haven't yet mustered the courage to put up my personal astro-stuff here. Main blog : @an-abyss-called-life
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