News from SPAAAAACE!

lithy

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There has been a few things recently happening, but I haven't been bumping this thread.

The privately funded Israeli moon lander did not succeed. Japan bombed an asteroid. The Ultima Thule flyby. Some cool stuff.

But the black hole has been pretty popular, will be very interesting to me to see if they were able to image the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. For now, we have M87.

fig1-6-702x336.jpg
 

Heinz

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What's incredible is that the supermassive black hole in M87 is some 7 billion solar masses and Sagitarius A* is 4.3 million solar masses. Insane.
 

GohanX

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That's almost as big as your mom at 7.2 billion solar masses.
 

wataru330

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M87?

This where all the redundant IREM staffers ended up?
 

fake

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There has been a few things recently happening, but I haven't been bumping this thread.

The privately funded Israeli moon lander did not succeed. Japan bombed an asteroid. The Ultima Thule flyby. Some cool stuff.

But the black hole has been pretty popular, will be very interesting to me to see if they were able to image the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. For now, we have M87.

fig1-6-702x336.jpg

Very exciting. I hope Mike Rowe eats his hat. We've seen evidence of black holes before by tracking stars' trajectories and analyzing how their courses are altered by a huge gravity well. But this is obviously on another level.

I don't think we could image our own SMB, given we're on the elliptical of the galaxy. It's kind of like trying to look directly at the top of your head. What I'd like to know is why the black hole looks like what we would've expected 10 years ago, as opposed to how we did one year ago, given Kip Throne's work. The Interstellar black hole is pretty close to what scientists' best guess was, though it was dumbed down a bit to make it less confusing to the audience. But AFAIK, they were pretty sure it would have an accretion disk on the axis and the gravity of the SMB would bend the light / radiation to give the illusion that there was another disc at a 90-degree angle from the axis.

EDIT: Correction on our own SMB - this same team actually did photograph our own SMB, Sagitarius A*. The image wasn't as cool as M87, so they published the M87 photo as the flagship image.
 
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GhostSeed

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http://hubblesite.org/image/4492/news

Hubble's Wide View of the Evolving Universe

This Hubble Space Telescope image represents the largest, most comprehensive "history book" of galaxies in the universe.

The image, a combination of nearly 7,500 separate Hubble exposures, represents 16 years' worth of observations.

The ambitious endeavor, called the Hubble Legacy Field, includes several Hubble deep-field surveys, including the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest view of the universe. The wavelength range stretches from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, capturing all the features of galaxy assembly over time.

The image mosaic presents a wide portrait of the distant universe and contains roughly 265,000 galaxies. They stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the universe's birth in the big bang. The tiny, faint, most distant galaxies in the image are similar to the seedling villages from which today's great galaxy star-cities grew. The faintest and farthest galaxies are just one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

The wider view contains about 30 times as many galaxies as in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, taken in 2004. The new portrait, a mosaic of multiple snapshots, covers almost the width of the full Moon. Lying in this region is the XDF, which penetrated deeper into space than this legacy field view. However, the XDF field covers less than one-tenth of the full Moon's diameter.

 

lithy

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The moon is bright and full. On this day of all days go and look at it you heartless bastards. Have you no sense of wonder left?

69912main_Rendezvous-fig1.jpg


Jupiter and Saturn have been easily visible for a while now too if you have a cheap telescope you can see some moons and rings.
 

lithy

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P.S. My most recent success story with my little 70mm telescope was finding M57 the Ring Nebula a couple weeks back.

Was hard as shit to find but I finally found a little blue dot with a red ring behind it.

Like this but less detail through my scope. I like to find things then look at pics from something like Hubble and imagine that that's what I saw.

M57-01z.jpg


As seen from Hubble.

ring-nebula-full_jpg.jpg
 
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Heinz

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That's fucking awesome Lithy! Makes me wanna buy a telescope, don't have to drive far here to get a milky way sky at night.
 

lithy

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30th anniversary of the Hubble launch and Karou posts some 3 year old Jewpiter meme.
 

lithy

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giphy.gif


Looking forward to the JWST

As fun as manned missions are I really think the imaging missions have had a greater effect on me for my interest in space.

The astronauts have amazing stories, the challenges faced are intriguing largely because the possibility of death if we are honest and not as much the science. Learning that Nixon had a speech planned in case Armstrong and Aldrin were marooned is quite a thought experiment (can you imagine? I'm sure at that point they would trade that outcome for five more Apollo 1 disasters.)

But I watched a program yesterday about the Voyager probes which featured some great images of each flyby. It is difficult to remember now that less than 50 years ago we only had an impression of what Jupiter and Saturn looked like. Neptune and Uranus were just points of light. The moons had been detected but each new image brought new interesting details.

Neat stuff, more on space telescopes and probes, less on boots on the ground for the Space Force to Mars.
 

Karou

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30th anniversary of the Hubble launch and Karou posts some 3 year old Jewpiter meme.

ha!! checked thread was not in. 10x older whoopdeedoo stupid site with image from my birthday didnt even work.

googled ''space crap today'' https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MgMYqxdVAlA/maxresdefault.jpg

is she going to eat out of the toilet or something seems worried.. big floppy boobs would be neat to see in zero g

also yeah neat just looked up that crap about the joy division pulsar ...neat noise
 
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Lagduf

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Congratulations NASA and Space X on the successful launch of Dragon.

Don’t want to shit up this thread but NASA is a truly a part of the Government I think we all can be proud of. They are a public good.
 
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lithy

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It's fair to say that I'm not sure the govt should be in the business of space travel, but still find rockets pretty fun, right?

Also, I still find myself surprised by how fast orbital rockets are compared to translunar rockets. Like 2 seconds after ignition and the thing is hauling ass. Meanwhile 15 seconds in and Apollo feels like it is just about to clear the tower.

Yay, space.
 

Lagduf

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The figurative or literal business of Space Travel? Both?
 

LoneSage

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It's fair to say that I'm not sure the govt should be in the business of space travel

Why? If America doesn't get to mine asteroids or settle planets first, we're boned.
 

Heinz

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Congratulations NASA and Space X on the successful launch of Dragon.

Don’t want to shit up this thread but NASA is a truly a part of the Government I think we all can be proud of. They are a public good.

Word.

Great show watching that rocket go up and yay no more Russki reliance.
 
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