justinrezz
21 posts
Latest Posts by justinrezz
Spooky Sounds from Across the Solar System
Soaring to the depths of our universe, gallant spacecraft roam the cosmos, snapping images of celestial wonders. Some spacecraft have instruments capable of capturing radio emissions. When scientists convert these to sound waves, the results are eerie to hear.
In time for Halloween, we’ve put together a compilation of elusive “sounds” of howling planets and whistling helium that is sure to make your skin crawl.
Listen to a few here and visit our Soundcloud for more spooky sounds.
Cassini Ring Crossing
This eerie audio represents data collected by our Cassini spacecraft, as it crossed through the gap between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017, during the first dive of the mission’s Grand Finale. The instrument is able to record ring particles striking the spacecraft in its data. In the data from this dive, there is virtually no detectable peak in pops and cracks that represent ring particles striking the spacecraft. The lack of discernible pops and cracks indicates the region is largely free of small particles.
Voyager Tsunami Waves in Interstellar Space
Listen to this howling audio from our Voyager 1 spacecraft. Voyager 1 has experienced three “tsunami waves” in interstellar space. This kind of wave occurs as a result of a coronal mass ejection erupting from the Sun. The most recent tsunami wave that Voyager experienced began in February 2014, and may still be going. Listen to how these waves cause surrounding ionized matter to ring like a bell.
Voyager Sounds of Interstellar Space
Our Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these high-pitched, spooky sounds of interstellar space from October to November 2012 and April to May 2013.
The soundtrack reproduces the amplitude and frequency of the plasma waves as “heard” by Voyager 1. The waves detected by the instrument antennas can be simply amplified and played through a speaker. These frequencies are within the range heard by human ears.
When scientists extrapolated this line even further back in time (not shown), they deduced that Voyager 1 first encountered interstellar plasma in August 2012.
Plasma Sounds at Jupiter
Ominous sounds of plasma! Our Juno spacecraft has observed plasma wave signals from Jupiter’s ionosphere. The results in this video show an increasing plasma density as Juno descended into Jupiter’s ionosphere during its close pass by Jupiter on February 2, 2017.
Roar of Jupiter
Juno’s Waves instrument recorded this supernatural sounding encounter with the bow shock over the course of about two hours on June 24, 2016. “Bow shock” is where the supersonic solar wind is heated and slowed by Jupiter’s magnetosphere. It is analogous to a sonic boom on Earth. The next day, June 25, 2016, the Waves instrument witnessed the crossing of the magnetopause. “Trapped continuum radiation” refers to waves trapped in a low-density cavity in Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
Visit the NASA Soundcloud for more spooky space sounds: https://soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/spookyspacesounds
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Spooky Sounds from Across the Solar System
Soaring to the depths of our universe, gallant spacecraft roam the cosmos, snapping images of celestial wonders. Some spacecraft have instruments capable of capturing radio emissions. When scientists convert these to sound waves, the results are eerie to hear.
In time for Halloween, we’ve put together a compilation of elusive “sounds” of howling planets and whistling helium that is sure to make your skin crawl.
Listen to a few here and visit our Soundcloud for more spooky sounds.
Cassini Ring Crossing
This eerie audio represents data collected by our Cassini spacecraft, as it crossed through the gap between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017, during the first dive of the mission’s Grand Finale. The instrument is able to record ring particles striking the spacecraft in its data. In the data from this dive, there is virtually no detectable peak in pops and cracks that represent ring particles striking the spacecraft. The lack of discernible pops and cracks indicates the region is largely free of small particles.
Voyager Tsunami Waves in Interstellar Space
Listen to this howling audio from our Voyager 1 spacecraft. Voyager 1 has experienced three “tsunami waves” in interstellar space. This kind of wave occurs as a result of a coronal mass ejection erupting from the Sun. The most recent tsunami wave that Voyager experienced began in February 2014, and may still be going. Listen to how these waves cause surrounding ionized matter to ring like a bell.
Voyager Sounds of Interstellar Space
Our Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these high-pitched, spooky sounds of interstellar space from October to November 2012 and April to May 2013.
The soundtrack reproduces the amplitude and frequency of the plasma waves as “heard” by Voyager 1. The waves detected by the instrument antennas can be simply amplified and played through a speaker. These frequencies are within the range heard by human ears.
When scientists extrapolated this line even further back in time (not shown), they deduced that Voyager 1 first encountered interstellar plasma in August 2012.
Plasma Sounds at Jupiter
Ominous sounds of plasma! Our Juno spacecraft has observed plasma wave signals from Jupiter’s ionosphere. The results in this video show an increasing plasma density as Juno descended into Jupiter’s ionosphere during its close pass by Jupiter on February 2, 2017.
Roar of Jupiter
Juno’s Waves instrument recorded this supernatural sounding encounter with the bow shock over the course of about two hours on June 24, 2016. “Bow shock” is where the supersonic solar wind is heated and slowed by Jupiter’s magnetosphere. It is analogous to a sonic boom on Earth. The next day, June 25, 2016, the Waves instrument witnessed the crossing of the magnetopause. “Trapped continuum radiation” refers to waves trapped in a low-density cavity in Jupiter’s magnetosphere.
Visit the NASA Soundcloud for more spooky space sounds: https://soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/spookyspacesounds
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
When Dead Stars Collide!
Gravity has been making waves - literally. Earlier this month, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the first direct detection of gravitational waves two years ago. But astronomers just announced another huge advance in the field of gravitational waves - for the first time, we’ve observed light and gravitational waves from the same source.
There was a pair of orbiting neutron stars in a galaxy (called NGC 4993). Neutron stars are the crushed leftover cores of massive stars (stars more than 8 times the mass of our sun) that long ago exploded as supernovas. There are many such pairs of binaries in this galaxy, and in all the galaxies we can see, but something special was about to happen to this particular pair.
Each time these neutron stars orbited, they would lose a teeny bit of gravitational energy to gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are disturbances in space-time - the very fabric of the universe - that travel at the speed of light. The waves are emitted by any mass that is changing speed or direction, like this pair of orbiting neutron stars. However, the gravitational waves are very faint unless the neutron stars are very close and orbiting around each other very fast.
As luck would have it, the teeny energy loss caused the two neutron stars to get a teeny bit closer to each other and orbit a teeny bit faster. After hundreds of millions of years, all those teeny bits added up, and the neutron stars were *very* close. So close that … BOOM! … they collided. And we witnessed it on Earth on August 17, 2017.
Credit: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet
A couple of very cool things happened in that collision - and we expect they happen in all such neutron star collisions. Just before the neutron stars collided, the gravitational waves were strong enough and at just the right frequency that the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo could detect them. Just after the collision, those waves quickly faded out because there are no longer two things orbiting around each other!
LIGO is a ground-based detector waiting for gravitational waves to pass through its facilities on Earth. When it is active, it can detect them from almost anywhere in space.
The other thing that happened was what we call a gamma-ray burst. When they get very close, the neutron stars break apart and create a spectacular, but short, explosion. For a couple of seconds, our Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope saw gamma-rays from that explosion. Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor is one of our eyes on the sky, looking out for such bursts of gamma-rays that scientists want to catch as soon as they’re happening.
And those gamma-rays came just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal. The galaxy this occurred in is 130 million light-years away, so the light and gravitational waves were traveling for 130 million years before we detected them.
After that initial burst of gamma-rays, the debris from the explosion continued to glow, fading as it expanded outward. Our Swift, Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer telescopes, along with a number of ground-based observers, were poised to look at this afterglow from the explosion in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and infrared light. Such coordination between satellites is something that we’ve been doing with our international partners for decades, so we catch events like this one as quickly as possible and in as many wavelengths as possible.
Astronomers have thought that neutron star mergers were the cause of one type of gamma-ray burst - a short gamma-ray burst, like the one they observed on August 17. It wasn’t until we could combine the data from our satellites with the information from LIGO/Virgo that we could confirm this directly.
This event begins a new chapter in astronomy. For centuries, light was the only way we could learn about our universe. Now, we’ve opened up a whole new window into the study of neutron stars and black holes. This means we can see things we could not detect before.
The first LIGO detection was of a pair of merging black holes. Mergers like that may be happening as often as once a month across the universe, but they do not produce much light because there’s little to nothing left around the black hole to emit light. In that case, gravitational waves were the only way to detect the merger.
Image Credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)
The neutron star merger, though, has plenty of material to emit light. By combining different kinds of light with gravitational waves, we are learning how matter behaves in the most extreme environments. We are learning more about how the gravitational wave information fits with what we already know from light - and in the process we’re solving some long-standing mysteries!
Want to know more? Get more information HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
Solar System: Things to Know This Week
What’s next for NASA? A quick look at some of the big things coming up:
1. We will add to our existing robotic fleet at the Red Planet with the InSight Mars lander set to study the planet’s interior.
This terrestrial planet explorer will address one of the most fundamental issues of planetary and solar system science - understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.
2. The Mars 2020 rover will look for signs of past microbial life, gather samples for potential future return to Earth.
The Mars 2020 mission takes the next step by not only seeking signs of habitable conditions on the Red Planet in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life itself. The Mars 2020 rover introduces a drill that can collect core samples of the most promising rocks and soils and set them aside in a “cache” on the surface of Mars.
3. The James Webb Space Telescope will be the premier observatory of the next decade, studying the history of our Universe in infrared.
Webb will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own solar system.
4. The Parker Solar Probe will “touch the Sun,” traveling closer to the surface than any spacecraft before.
This spacecraft, about the size of a small car, will travel directly into the sun’s atmosphere about 4 million miles from our star’s surface. Parker Solar Probe and its four suites of instruments – studying magnetic and electric fields, energetic particles, and the solar wind – will be protected from the Sun’s enormous heat by a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite heat shield.
5. Our OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrives at the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in August 2018, and will return a sample for study in 2023.
This mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth.
6. Launching in 2018, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets around 200,000 bright, nearby stars.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system (exoplanets), including those that could support life. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits.
7. A mission to Jupiter’s ocean-bearing moon Europa is being planned for launch in the 2020s.
The mission will place a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter in order to perform a detailed investigation of Europa – a world that shows strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust and which could host conditions favorable for life.
8. We will launch our first integrated test flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, known as Exploration Mission-1.
The Space Launch System rocket will launch with Orion atop it. During Exploration Mission-1, Orion will venture thousands of miles beyond the moon during an approximately three week mission.
9. We are looking at what a flexible deep space gateway near the Moon could be.
We’ve issued a draft announcement seeking U.S. industry-led studies for an advanced solar electric propulsion (SEP) vehicle capability. The studies will help define required capabilities and reduce risk for the 50 kilowatt-class SEP needed for the agency’s near-term exploration goals.
10. Want to know more? Read the full story.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Bernie Sanders on defeating Trumpcare and moving to Medicare For All. #BernieSanders
Origin of the Names of Days of the Week
FUN FACT: The days of the week were named after deities and correspond with celestial bodies for astrology purposes. European languages including romance languages tend to derive their names from Latin and thus refer to Roman deities but also include Christian influence. The Roman names of deities are the same as the names of planets. English names of the days come from Old English, language of Anglo-Saxons, which refers to Germanic deities closely related to Scandinavian Norse deities. The Germanic peoples adopted the seven day calendar from the Romans but substituted their own deities. The seven day calendar goes back to the Babylonians and Sumerians. It is based on being approximately a quarter of a moon cycle. Days of the week in English, French and Spanish with Roman, Greek and Norse deities: Sunday: Day of the Sun (Latin- Sol) (Fr. Dimanche, Sp. Domingo) (Most European languages call it the Lord's Day) Monday: Day of the Moon (Latin- Luna) (Fr. Lundi, Sp. Lunes) Tuesday: Tiw's (from Tyr) Day (Fr. Mardi, Sp. Martes) Mars (month of March is named after) Ares Tyr (one of Thor’s brothers) (gods of war) Wednesday: Woden's (“violently insane headship”) or Odin's Day (Fr. Mercredi, Sp. Miércoles) Mercury Hermes (both are messengers and gods of commerce) Odin (Odin only loosely corresponds with Mercury and Hermes in that they all are guides of souls after death. He corresponds more to Jupiter and Zeus in being chief of the gods) Thursday: Thor’s Day (Fr. Jeudi, Sp. Jueves) Jupiter (month of June is named after Jupiter's consort Juno) Zues Thor (All three are gods of thunder. Jupiter and Zeus are chiefs of the gods. Thor is Odin's son) Friday: Freya's Day (Fr. Vendredi, Sp. Viernes) Venus Aphrodite Freya (Frigga) (goddesses of love) Saturday: Saturn's Day (Fr. Samedi, Sp. Sábado- day of the Sabbath) Saturn- similar to Cronus Cronus- god of time, father of Zeus (No Norse deity assigned to Saturday, it was known as “washing day”)
John Martinaeu - The Dance of Venus (An accurate scientific drawing of Venus stunning pattern around the Earth. Our closest planetary neighbour draws a huge pentagram pattern around Earth every 8 years or 13 Venusian years. Four of the eight-year Venus cycles are shown, with the motion of Venus around Earth over 32 years), “A Little Book of Coincidence”, 2002.
“Four Examples Of Sexism In Movies That Seem OK But Are Really Not” @justinrezz
Juno Spacecraft: What Do We Hope to Learn?
The Juno spacecraft has been traveling toward its destination since its launch in 2011, and is set to insert Jupiter’s orbit on July 4. Jupiter is by far the largest planet in the solar system. Humans have been studying it for hundreds of years, yet still many basic questions about the gas world remain.
The primary goal of the Juno spacecraft is to reveal the story of the formation and evolution of the planet Jupiter. Understanding the origin and evolution of Jupiter can provide the knowledge needed to help us understand the origin of our solar system and planetary systems around other stars.
Have We Visited Jupiter Before? Yes! In 1995, our Galileo mission (artist illustration above) made the voyage to Jupiter. One of its jobs was to drop a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The data showed us that the composition was different than scientists thought, indicating that our theories of planetary formation were wrong.
What’s Different About This Visit? The Juno spacecraft will, for the first time, see below Jupiter’s dense clover of clouds. [Bonus Fact: This is why the mission was named after the Roman goddess, who was Jupiter’s wife, and who could also see through the clouds.]
Unlocking Jupiter’s Secrets
Specifically, Juno will…
Determine how much water is in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which helps determine which planet formation theory is correct (or if new theories are needed)
Look deep into Jupiter’s atmosphere to measure composition, temperature, cloud motions and other properties
Map Jupiter’s magnetic and gravity fields, revealing the planet’s deep structure
Explore and study Jupiter’s magnetosphere near the planet’s poles, especially the auroras – Jupiter’s northern and southern lights – providing new insights about how the planet’s enormous
Juno will let us take a giant step forward in our understanding of how giant planets form and the role these titans played in putting together the rest of the solar system.
For updates on the Juno mission, follow the spacecraft on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
#BernieBae
“As anyone who has heard his 1987 folk album We Shall Overcome knows, singing ain’t exactly Sen. Bernie Sanders’ strong suit. Fortunately, he’s got some tremendously talented constituents in his hometown who can lend his message a slightly less gruff and agitated voice." http://www.sevendaysvt.com/LiveCulture/archives/2016/01/28/btv-musicians-honor-bernie-with-this-land-is-your-land
America becomes a greater nation when we stand together and say no to racism, hatred, and bigotry. #VoteTogether
Visit bernie.to/votetogether to express your voice and join together.