Love Him To Mars And Back ❤️

This is Earth, our amazing home. The only planet in the solar system with the ability to harbor life (that we know of).

This is the distance between our awesome planet and the moon. 

Doesn’t look that far does it? How about if I told you that you could fit EVERY planet in our solar system neatly in that distance. 

Speaking of the other planets in our solar system, this is them & this is where our amazing planet resides.

The moon’s our cute little companion. This is the United States compared to it.

The planets in the solar system are so cool. This is what North America looks like in comparison to Jupiter. 

Speaking of Jupiter and the moon, this is what it would look like if Jupiter was in the place of the moon. (The white dot is our moon). 

Earth compared to Saturn (well 6 Earths…)

Ever wonder about what Earth would look like if it had rings like Saturn? Well wonder no more.. 

Amazing right? Want to see something cooler? Here is the Earth compared to our Sun. 

Here’s what we look like from the moon

And from Mars

From Saturn 

From Neptune…

Here is what the Sun looks like from Mars

Remember what Carl Sagan said? There are more stars in space than grains of sand on every beach in the Earth. 

That’s a lot right? That only means there are stars way larger than our Sun..like this one for example: 

And there are stars bigger than that….

Stars are huge, but the galaxy is even bigger. If you shrunk the Sun down to the size of a white blood cell, the Milky Way Galaxy would be the size of the United States. 

This is where the Earth is in our huge galaxy 

You know all the stars we see in the sky? These are the ones we only ever see (this isn’t our galaxy but its very similar)

The Milky Way is so big that the last time the Earth was in this exact position in the galaxy, the dinosaurs were here

Even though our galaxy is huge, there are galaxies that are even bigger…

This picture from Hubble shows thousands of thousands of thousands of galaxies that each have their own stars with their own planets…

Here is one of the galaxies in that picture. It is 10 BILLION light years away. When we look at it, we are looking 10 BILLION YEARS BACK IN TIME

And just to keep this in mind, this is a very small portion of the sky that was believed to be empty…

Everything is relative. 

Next time you’re stressed out or worried about something, stop and take a step back. Look up at the sky and think about all of the things that are out there. All the stars being born, the stars dying, galaxies colliding. 

We live in such an amazing universe, and we are only an extremely tiny part of it. 

Credit- pictures from: Buzzfeed on Facebook

A new neutron star merger is caught on X-ray camera

Two stellar remnants smashed together in a galaxy more than 6 billion light-years away, forming a single monster magnetic star.

In October 2017, astronomers announced the first detection of gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars earlier that year. The event also rung in the era of multi-messenger astronomy, as more than 70 telescopes observed the event’s afterglow in optical light, X-rays, gamma rays, and more. Now, an X-ray signal dubbed XT2 from a galaxy 6.6 billion light-years away has revealed another neutron star merger, which left behind a single, heavier neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field: a magnetar.

Read more ~ astronomy.com

Image: Chandra observations show the flare-up and subsequent dimming of XT2, which matches predictions for the signal from a pair of merging neutron stars and the birth of a magnetar. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Uni. of Science and Technology of China/Y. Xue et al; Optical: NASA/STScI

A Solar Filament Erupts : What’s happened to our Sun? Nothing very unusual – it just threw a filament. Toward the middle of 2012, a long standing solar filament suddenly erupted into space producing an energetic Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The filament had been held up for days by the Sun’s ever changing magnetic field and the timing of the eruption was unexpected. Watched closely by the Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the resulting explosion shot electrons and ions into the Solar System, some of which arrived at Earth three days later and impacted Earth’s magnetosphere, causing visible aurorae. Loops of plasma surrounding an active region can be seen above the erupting filament in the featured ultraviolet image. Although the Sun is now in a relatively inactive state of its 11-year cycle, unexpected holes have opened in the Sun’s corona allowing an excess of charged particles to stream into space. As before, these charged particles are creating auroras. via NASA

*me on ellen*

ellen: so i hear u like spyro the dragon

me: yeah i guess u could say i’m a bit of a fan

*everyone in the audience turns to crystal*

me: omg ellen u didn’t

Cover art for Programming the 8086/8088 by James Colton

We Have Now Reached The Limits Of The Hubble Space Telescope

“Finally, there are the wavelength limits as well. Stars emits a wide variety of light, from the ultraviolet through the optical and into the infrared. It’s no coincidence that this is what Hubble was designed for: to look for light that’s of the same variety and wavelengths that we know stars emit.

But this, too, is fundamentally limiting. You see, as light travels through the Universe, the fabric of space itself is expanding. This causes the light, even if it’s emitted with intrinsically short wavelengths, to have its wavelength stretched by the expansion of space. By the time it arrives at our eyes, it’s redshifted by a particular factor that’s determined by the expansion rate of the Universe and the object’s distance from us.

Hubble’s wavelength range sets a fundamental limit to how far back we can see: to when the Universe is around 400 million years old, but no earlier.”

The Hubble Space Telescope, currently entering its 30th year of service, has literally revolutionized our view of the Universe. It’s shown us our faintest and most distant stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters of all. But as far back as it’s taken us, and as spectacular as what it’s revealed, there is much, much more Universe out there, and Hubble is at its limit.

Here’s how far we’ve come, with a look to how much farther we could yet go. It’s up to us to build the tools to take us there.

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage!

A 5.5 hour time lapse I made of Mercury transiting the Sun the other week, shot from my apartment roof [OC]

The first image of a black hole, from the galaxy Messier 87

April 10, 2019