embrace the void

Add to your electronic bookshelf with these free e-books from NASA!

1. The Saturn System Through the Eyes of Cassini

This work features 100 images highlighting Cassini’s 13-year tour at the ringed giant.

2. Earth as Art 

Explore our beautiful home world as seen from space.

3. Meatballs and more 

Emblems of Exploration showcases the rich history of space and aeronautic logos.

4. Ready for Our Close Up

Hubble Focus: Our Amazing Solar System showcases the wonders of our galactic neighborhood.

5. NASA’s First A 

This book dives into the role aeronautics plays in our mission of engineering and exploration.

6. See More 

Making the Invisible Visible outlines the rich history of infrared astronomy.

7. Ready for a Deeper Dive? 

The NASA Systems Engineering Handbook describes how we get the job done.

8. Spoiler Alert

The space race really heats up in the third volume of famed Russian spacecraft designer Boris Chertok memoirs. Chertok, who worked under the legendary Sergey Korolev, continues his fascinating narrative on the early history of the Soviet space program, from 1961 to 1967 in Rockets and People III.

9. Take a Walk on the Wild Side

The second volume of Walking to Olympus explores the 21st century evolution of spacewalks.

10. No Library Card Needed 

Find your own great read in NASA’s free e-book library.

I’m guessing you’re referring to images like this, which show black holes to appear funnel shaped

To summarize, objects warp space and time. To make it easier to imagine, representations are taken down to two dimensions, so you can see how an object warps space and time. The more massive the object, the more it warps time. Black holes theoretically warp space and time infinitely at the singularity (where any amount of matter can be compacted, in some cases millions of suns). 

The black hole appears funnel-shaped because the curvature of space increases as you approach the black hole, and then becomes infinitely curved and infinitely steep when you reach the singularity. It’s misleading, but it does help visualize how they warp space. Black holes in reality are spherical, as they warp space in all directions (that’s why these images take it down a dimension to make visualization infinitely easier). 

Black holes do not “suck,” they pull via gravity, like the earth and the sun. They aren’t vacuum cleaners and “sucking” is the wrong word to use. They pull things in. 

also, if the sun were to suddenly collapse into a black hole, nothing would change since the sun’s mass would equal the black hole’s mass. the earth and all the other planets would continue to orbit, except they’d be orbiting a sun-mass black hole instead. 

(ESA/Hubble)  Fulldome 3D Animation of Supernova Explosion

This video show a fulldome 3D animation of a supernova explosion.

Credit: ESA/Hubble,L. Calçada,Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)

The stuff of dreams, the journey of the first human created probes to journey into the cosmos.  Without vision, determination, and the sense to discover, would we have sent these two probes on their journey?  The scientific discovery from these two probes will always be one of the groundbreaking moments in science history, forever a turning point that fueled our knowledge of the solar system.

Happy Asteroid Day, and happy Meteor Watch Day! Thousands of years ago, the world-famous Willamette meteorite, traveling some 64,000 kilometers per hour, crashed into Earth’s surface.

Billions of years before that, an early planet orbiting the Sun was shattered, perhaps in a collision with another protoplanet. While planets including Earth gradually formed and matured, the fragment orbited the Sun. Eventually, it landed in Oregon just outside of what is today the city of Portland. Over many centuries, rainwater interacting with its iron sulfide deposits produced sulfuric acid, which slowly etched and carved large cavities.

The Willamette is made of iron and weighs 15.5 tons.  It is the largest ever found in the United States and the sixth-largest in the world. Only about 600 of the 25,000 meteorites found on Earth are made of iron. The material was created deep inside stars, which produce energy by fusing lighter elements into heavier ones - for example, hydrogen into helium. The force of nuclear fusion eventually shatters stars much more massive than our Sun, casting fused elements, such as iron, into interstellar space. Over eons, these elements collect inside clouds of gas and dust. 

Top 10 Largest Moons In The Solar System: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Moon, Europa, Triton, Titania, Rhea & Oberon.

An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun. The first scientific detection of an exoplanet was in 1988. However, the first confirmed detection came in 1992; since then, and as of 1 April 2017, there have been 3,607 exoplanets discovered in 2,701 planetary systems and 610 multiple planetary systems confirmed.

1- Kepler-186f

was the first rocky planet to be found within the habitable zone – the region around the host star where the temperature is right for liquid water. This planet is also very close in size to Earth. Even though we may not find out what’s going on at the surface of this planet anytime soon, it’s a strong reminder of why new technologies are being developed that will enable scientists to get a closer look at distant worlds.

2- CoRoT 7b

The first super-Earth identified as a rocky exoplanet, this planet proved that worlds like the Earth were indeed possible and that the search for potentially habitable worlds (rocky planets in the habitable zone) might be fruitful.

3- Kepler-22b  

A planet in the habitable zone and a possible water-world planet unlike any seen in our solar system.

4- Kepler 10-b

Kepler’s first rocky planet discovery is a scorched, Earth-size world that scientists believe may have a lava ocean on its surface.

5- 55 Cancri e

55 Cancri e is a toasty world that rushes around its star every 18 hours. It orbits so closely – about 25 times closer than Mercury is to our sun – that it is tidally locked with one face forever blisters under the heat of its sun. The planet is proposed to have a rocky core surrounded by a layer of water in a “supercritical” state, where it is both liquid and gas, and then the whole planet is thought to be topped by a blanket of steam.

6- 51 Pegasi b

This giant planet, which is about half the mass of Jupiter and orbits its star every four days, was the first confirmed exoplanet around a sun-like star, a discovery that launched a whole new field of exploration.

7- Kepler-444 system

The oldest known planetary system has five terrestrial-sized planets, all in orbital resonance. This weird group showed that solar systems have formed and lived in our galaxy for nearly its entire existence.

8- PSR B1257+12 system

Discovered in 1992 and 1994, the planets that orbit pulsar PSR B1257+12 are not only the smallest planetary bodies known to exist outside our solar system, they also orbit a neutron star. These weird “pulsar planets” demonstrated that planets exist in all environments in the galaxy – even around the remnants of an exploded star.

9- HD 80606 b  

This world has the most eccentric orbit, and as one scientist put it, “wears its heart on its sleeve,” with storms, rotation, atmospheric heating, and a crazy orbit all plainly visible.

10- OGLE-2005-BLG-390

Considered to be the first cold super Earth, this exoplanet began to form a Jupiter-like core of rock and ice, but couldn’t grow fast enough in size. Its final mass is five times that of Earth. The planet’s nickname is Hoth, after a planet from Star War

It’s International Asteroid Day!

(Large Asteroid Impact Simulation)

Asteroid Day (also known as International Asteroid Day) is an annual global event that aims to raise awareness about asteroids and what can be done to protect the Earth, its families, communities, and future generations. Asteroid Day is held on the anniversary of the June 30, 1908 Siberian Tunguska event, the most harmful known asteroid-related event on Earth in recent history.

Pi in the Sky 3

NASA released this year’s pi day challenge where you can solve problems like a NASA scientist. These infographics are really nice and you could probably make some cool posters from them.

Transit of Venus in 2012