Science and the Like

The minimoon is about 2 meters in diameter. It’s like the size of your couch.

If it were headed towards us it would burn up in the atmosphere. It is not headed towards us.

The short name is CD3.

They had to do extensive test to make sure that this was actually a mini Moon and not a man-made object being mistaken for a minimoon, Again. This has happened before. They are sure this time.

It’s already leaving. We captured it for about 2.9 years in orbit and it is on its way out.

Generally a minimoon is captured for only nine months so this is astonishing.

It spins a hell of a lot slower than what minimoons usually do.

Is this the whole thing??? It’s the first time I’ve seen this version.

Ye

We still don’t know exactly what a black hole IS though. They’re bizarre. They’re a reality distortion. Not even a physical object, they’re a super dense point in space time that sucks in everything around it, even light. They can merge with each other. They’re the reasons galaxies spin and are shaped like they are. And we have absolutely no idea why they form or what’s going on inside them.

And lastly… this thing is 6.5 billion times bigger than our sun!? I know that’s hard to conceive but here’s a visual of how much bigger our sun is than the Earth:

And one of the largest stars in the galaxy, UY Scuti, is about 1,700 times larger than our sun. 

Trying to extrapolate something 6.2 billion times larger from that is still difficult but…. you get the idea. 

It’s actually about 6.5 billion times the mass (amount of material in it, can be thought of as its ‘weight’) of our sun, not size. As auntiewanda (above) said, black holes are actually unimaginably small. That’s why we generally measure them by their accretion disk, or the material being pulled in by gravity. In the picture, the orange glow, which is the accretion disk, is actually gases that have been superheated and ionized by the gravity of the black hole. Size-wise, this accretion disk is ‘only’ about 10 times the size of our solar system, or 700 AU (Astronomical Unit = the distance from the Sun to the Earth, about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers). 

(source: xkcd)

Scientists have given it the nickname Pōwehi, meaning “embellished dark source of unending creation” in Hawaiian. This supermassive black hole is at the center of the M87 (Messier 87) galaxy and is so massive and bright that it’s just as visible as the black hole at the center of our own galaxy even though it’s about 55 million light-years away, and our own galactic center is a mere 100,000 light-years away. M87 is one of the largest galaxies in our local universe, and ended up being the best candidate for study.

Some implications for science:

Observing a black hole like this would have required a radio telescope approximately the size of the Earth. Scientists figured out a way to create a global network of radio telescopes to get around this and it worked. Now they get to set their sights on other astronomical mysteries.

This discovery confirms predictions in Einstein’s general theory of relativity in more extreme conditions than have ever been observed. Scientists had previously observed the behavior of stars and gas clouds near black holes, but never gotten an image so close to the event horizon (the point where you cannot escape from the black hole’s gravitational pull, the dark center). 

How did the gulper eel get its name? It’s easy to see here! The crew of the E/V Nautilus spotted this gulper eel (Eurypharynx pelecanoides) while exploring the deep waters of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Marine Sanctuary. Gulper eels’ mouths work similarly to pelicans’, growing bigger rapidly so they can scoop up prey.

Need to see it again, more slowly? We’ve got you covered.

(Video: OET/NOAA)

“Is it engorged or is it…like that?”  

“Is it mad?”  

“TOUCH IT”  

David Vaughan at the Mote Laboratory is growing coral 40 times faster than in the wild.

It typically takes coral 25 to 75 years to reach sexual maturity. With a new coral fragmentation method, it takes just 3.

Scientists and conservationists plan to plant 100,000 pieces of coral around the Florida Reef Tract by 2019 and millions more around the world in the years to come.

The news has not been encouraging as of late if you are one to pay attention to either climate change or The Great Barrier Reef: coral reefs are an incubator of the ocean’s ecosystem. They account for less than 1% of the ocean and yet manage to provide food and shelter to over one quarter of all marine species in the ocean, as well as  support fish that ultimately feed over one billion people.

This is why it was distressing to note — in addition to the world losing Ruth Gates, a scientist renowned for her advocacy for saving coral reefs — that two thirds of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia — the largest living structure in the world — had in effect been killed off as of last year (a process called ‘bleaching’) by the rise in temperature brought about by global warming and climate change.

This is why it’s worth noting and celebrating that Dr. David Vaughan of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida has found a way to make coral grow 40 times faster than coral currently does in the wild…

cosmic microwave background

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is electromagnetic radiation as a remnant from an early stage of the universe in Big Bang cosmology. In older literature, the CMB is also variously known as cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) or “relic radiation”. The CMB is a faint cosmic background radiation filling all space that is an important source of data on the early universe because it is the oldest electromagnetic radiation in the universe, dating to the epoch of recombination.

With a traditional optical telescope, the space between stars and galaxies (the background) is completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope shows a faint background noise, or glow, almost isotropic, that is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the radio spectrum. The accidental discovery of the CMB in 1964 by American radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson was the culmination of work initiated in the 1940s, and earned the discoverers the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The discovery of CMB is landmark evidence of the Big Bang origin of the universe. When the universe was young, before the formation of stars and planets, it was denser, much hotter, and filled with a uniform glow from a white-hot fog of hydrogen plasma. As the universe expanded, both the plasma and the radiation filling it grew cooler. When the universe cooled enough, protons and electrons combined to form neutral hydrogen atoms. Unlike the uncombined protons and electrons, these newly conceived atoms could not absorb the thermal radiation, and so the universe became transparent instead of being an opaque fog. Cosmologists refer to the time period when neutral atoms first formed as the recombination epoch, and the event shortly afterwards when photons started to travel freely through space rather than constantly being scattered by electrons and protons in plasma is referred to as photon decoupling.

Basically, cosmic microwave background radiation is the fossil of light, resulting from a time when the Universe was hot and dense, only 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

Cosmic microwave background radiation is an electromagnetic radiation that fills the entire universe, whose spectrum is that of a blackbody at a temperature of 2.725 kelvin.

Cosmic microwave background radiation, along with the spacing from galaxies and the abundance of light elements, is one of the strongest observational evidences of the Big Bang model, which describes the evolution of the universe. Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for this discovery

source, source in portuguese

a gifset of planet facts because i rlly love space!!

Stygiomedusa Gigantea

However, some cases of intersex and even some trans individuals may be chimeras that result from the fusion of two embryos that have different genetic sex. This may also explain why some female athletes fail a sex test. (Other possibilities include genetic transcription that resulted in the loss of the SRY gene from the Y chromosome. The SRY gene is the actual switch that results in the development of a male phenotype).

Chimerism is also seen in animals.

This is Dunbar’s Gold. As you can see he looks like a brindle dog.

At one point he was bred to a mare called Sharp One, who also had the same brindle pattern, in the hope that they could breed more brindle horses - which are vanishingly rare.

Both horses are Quarter Horses, and the breeder sent in a gene sample from the foal for typing to allow him to be registered.

The test showed that the foal was related to neither his sire nor his dam.

They even did the test twice. Most cases of failed genetic testing are a sample mixup (either the hair or the semen used to produce the foal).

It turned out Dunbar’s Gold had had to be tested three times to get a good sample - and the third time was a blood test not the hair follicle test normally done. On top of that, when they looked at his gene type again they realized something rather important to a stallion was missing - he had no Y chromosome.

It was eventually established that both horses were chimeras and that in Dunbars Gold two different gene types existed in his skin and coat (one male, one female, just to prove that happens). Each gene line had a different set of color genes, but both matched properly to his parents. His foals, of course, all matched to the male gene line.

When they tested Sharp One’s other foal they discovered she was producing eggs from both of her gene lines. (Something which could also happen with a human chimera).