Okay I Love The Big Bang Theory (as In The Actual Scientific Theory About The Start Of Our Universe)

That’s a great explanation of particle physics xD

But really, this stuff is so interesting! I love reading about stuff like this - so good work NASA!

If you liked the four forces governing the universe, you might like this book I just finished reading for the seventh time (Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry”). It talks about these forces and a lot of other really cool concepts, like dark energy and chemistry-related-to-space.

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May the Four Forces Be With You!

May the force be with you? Much to learn you still have, padawan. In our universe it would be more appropriate to say, “May the four forces be with you.”

There are four fundamental forces that bind our universe and its building blocks together. Two of them are easy to spot — gravity keeps your feet on the ground while electromagnetism keeps your devices running. The other two are a little harder to see directly in everyday life, but without them, our universe would look a lot different!

Let’s explore these forces in a little more detail.

Gravity: Bringing the universe together

If you jump up, gravity brings you back down to Earth. It also keeps the solar system together … and our galaxy, and our local group of galaxies and our supercluster of galaxies.

Gravity pulls everything together. Everything, from the bright centers of the universe to the planets farthest from them. In fact, you (yes, you!) even exert a gravitational force on a galaxy far, far away. A tiny gravitational force, but a force nonetheless.

Credit: NASA and the Advanced Visualization Laboratory at the National Center for Supercomputing and B. O'Shea, M. Norman

Despite its well-known reputation, gravity is actually the weakest of the four forces. Its strength increases with the mass of the two objects involved. And its range is infinite, but the strength drops off as the square of the distance. If you and a friend measured your gravitational tug on each other and then doubled the distance between you, your new gravitational attraction would just be a quarter of what it was. So, you have to be really close together, or really big, or both, to exert a lot of gravity.

Even so, because its range is infinite, gravity is responsible for the formation of the largest structures in our universe! Planetary systems, galaxies and clusters of galaxies all formed because gravity brought them together.

Gravity truly surrounds us and binds us together.

Electromagnetism: Lighting the way

You know that shock you get on a dry day after shuffling across the carpet? The electricity that powers your television? The light that illuminates your room on a dark night? Those are all the work of electromagnetism. As the name implies, electromagnetism is the force that includes both electricity and magnetism.

Electromagnetism keeps electrons orbiting the nucleus at the center of atoms and allows chemical compounds to form (you know, the stuff that makes up us and everything around us). Electromagnetic waves are also known as light. Once started, an electromagnetic wave will travel at the speed of light until it interacts with something (like your eye) — so it will be there to light up the dark places.

Like gravity, electromagnetism works at infinite distances. And, also like gravity, the electromagnetic force between two objects falls as the square of their distance. However, unlike gravity, electromagnetism doesn’t just attract. Whether it attracts or repels depends on the electric charge of the objects involved. Two negative charges or two positive charges repel each other; one of each, and they attract each other. Plus. Minus. A balance.

This is what happens with common household magnets. If you hold them with the same “poles” together, they resist each other. On the other hand, if you hold a magnet with opposite poles together — snap! — they’ll attract each other.

Electromagnetism might just explain the relationship between a certain scruffy-looking nerf-herder and a princess.

Strong Force: Building the building blocks

Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The strong force is where things get really small. So small, that you can’t see it at work directly. But don’t let your eyes deceive you. Despite acting only on short distances, the strong force holds together the building blocks of the atoms, which are, in turn, the building blocks of everything we see around us.

Like gravity, the strong force always attracts, but that’s really where their similarities end. As the name implies, the force is strong with the strong force. It is the strongest of the four forces. It brings together protons and neutrons to form the nucleus of atoms — it has to be stronger than electromagnetism to do it, since all those protons are positively charged. But not only that, the strong force holds together the quarks — even tinier particles — to form those very protons and neutrons.

However, the strong force only works on very, very, very small distances. How small? About the scale of a medium-sized atom’s nucleus. For those of you who like the numbers, that’s about 10-15 meters, or 0.000000000000001 meters. That’s about a hundred billion times smaller than the width of a human hair! Whew.

Its tiny scale is why you don’t directly see the strong force in your day-to-day life. Judge a force by its physical size, do you? 

Weak Force: Keeping us in sunshine

If you thought it was hard to see the strong force, the weak force works on even smaller scales — 1,000 times smaller. But it, too, is extremely important for life as we know it. In fact, the weak force plays a key role in keeping our Sun shining.

But what does the weak force do? Well … that requires getting a little into the weeds of particle physics. Here goes nothing! We mentioned quarks earlier — these are tiny particles that, among other things, make up protons and neutrons. There are six types of quarks, but the two that make up protons and neutrons are called up and down quarks. The weak force changes one quark type into another. This causes neutrons to decay into protons (or the other way around) while releasing electrons and ghostly particles called neutrinos.

So for example, the weak force can turn a down quark in a neutron into an up quark, which will turn that neutron into a proton. If that neutron is in an atom’s nucleus, the electric charge of the nucleus changes. That tiny change turns the atom into a different element! Such reactions are happening all the time in our Sun, giving it the energy to shine.

The weak force might just help to keep you in the (sun)light.

All four of these forces run strong in the universe. They flow between all things and keep our universe in balance. Without them, we’d be doomed. But these forces will be with you. Always.

You can learn more about gravity from NASA’s Space Place and follow NASAUniverse on Twitter or Facebook to learn about some of the cool cosmic objects we study with light.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Aw heck yeah let’s go

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List of extrasolar candidates for liquid water

The following list contains candidates from the list of confirmed objects that meet the following criteria:

Confirmed object orbiting within a circumstellar habitable zone of Earth mass or greater (because smaller objects may not have the gravitational means to retain water) but not a star

Has been studied for more than a year

Confirmed surface with strong evidence for it being either solid or liquid

Water vapour detected in its atmosphere

Gravitational, radio or differentation models that predict a wet stratum

55 Cancri f

With a mass half that of Saturn, 55 Cancri f is likely to be a gas giant with no solid surface. It orbits in the so-called “habitable zone,” which means that liquid water could exist on the surface of a possible moon. ]

Proxima Centauri b

Proxima Centauri b is an exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarfstar Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star to the Sun and part of a triple star system. It is located about 4.2 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus, making it the closest known exoplanet to the Solar System.

Gliese 581c

Gliese 581c gained interest from astronomers because it was reported to be the first potentially Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of its star, with a temperature right for liquid water on its surface, and by extension, potentially capable of supporting extremophile forms of Earth-like life.

Gliese 667 Cc

Gliese 667 Cc is an exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Gliese 667 C, which is a member of the Gliese 667 triple star system, approximately 23.62 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius.

Gliese 1214 b

Gliese 1214 b is an exoplanet that orbits the star Gliese 1214, and was discovered in December 2009. Its parent star is 48 light-years from the Sun, in the constellation Ophiuchus. As of 2017, GJ 1214 b is the most likely known candidate for being an ocean planet. For that reason, scientists have nicknamed the planet “the waterworld”.

HD 85512 b

HD 85512 b is an exoplanet orbiting HD 85512, a K-type main-sequence star approximately 36 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Vela.

Due to its mass of at least 3.6 times the mass of Earth, HD 85512 b is classified as a rocky Earth-size exoplanet (<5M⊕) and is one of the smallest exoplanets discovered to be just outside the inner edge of the habitable zone.

MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb

MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, occasionally shortened to MOA-192 b, is an extrasolar planet approximately 3,000 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius. The planet was discovered orbiting the brown dwarf or low-mass star MOA-2007-BLG-192L. At a mass of approximately 3.3 times Earth, it is one of the lowest-mass extrasolar planets at the time of discovery. It was found when it caused a gravitational microlensing event on May 24, 2007, which was detected as part of the MOA-II microlensing survey at the Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand.

Kepler-22b

Kepler-22b, also known by its Kepler object of interest designation KOI-087.01, is an extrasolar planet orbiting within the habitable zone of the Sun-like star Kepler-22. It is located about 587 light-years (180 pc) from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus. source

Woah :o

So, basically, like the Mission Space ride at Epcot (that one is my favoriteeeee)?

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Testing and Training on the Boeing Starliner : NASA astronaut Mike Fincke works through a check list inside a mockup of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner during a simulation at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Aug. 21, 2019. (via NASA)

CMB!!!

Aka the cosmic microwave background, which is a huge piece of evidence for the Big Bang Theory of cosmology, a remnant from the early universe.

Also my favorite superhero is Spiderman.

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I am omnipresent

Looks like I’m getting a new wallpaper

It’s so beautiful ;(

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Sunset in the Kananaskis Valley, Alberta. [2853 x 3566] [oc] - Author: ProjectOxide on reddit

Goddamn

We learned about the Uyuni Salt Flat in Marine Bio this year but the teacher never showed ANYTHING like this!!! I already thought that the band was beautiful, this just makes it 10 times more so. Welp, I know what to put next on my dream vacay list.

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Night Sky Reflections from the Worlds Largest Mirror : What’s being reflected in the world’s largest mirror? Stars, galaxies, and a planet. Many of these stars are confined to the grand arch that runs across the image, an arch that is the central plane of our home Milky Way Galaxy. Inside the arch is another galaxy – the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Stars that are individually visible include Antares on the far left and Sirius on the far right. The planet Jupiter shines brightly just below Antares. The featured picture is composed of 15 vertical frames taken consecutively over ten minutes from the Uyuni Salt Flat in Bolivia. Uyuni Salt Flat (Salar de Uyuni) is the largest salt flat on Earth and is so large and so extraordinarily flat that, after a rain, it can become the world’s largest mirror – spanning 130 kilometers. This expansive mirror was captured in early April reflecting each of the galaxies, stars, and planet mentioned above. via NASA

Okay I know that I love black holes but buddy why don’t you not come here?

I wonder if falling into a black hole would hurt? If I could choose any way to go out, it’d probably be by black holes. Might as well be killed by the love of my life.

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OJ287 is one of the largest black holes in the known universe. If it were placed at the center of our solar system, its event horizon would swallow nearly everything is our Sun’s sphere of influence. All the planets, the asteroid belt, and (obviously) us. This beast is an estimated 18 billion solar masses and drifts through the cosmos some.

Image credit: Jaime Trosper/FQTQ

Bad Astronomy

The Bad Astronomy blog is all about real-world science — it covers the entire Universe, from subatomic particles to the Big Bang itself. Astronomy, space exploration, the effect of politics on science... you'll find it all here, as well as anything else that pops into the science-drenched brain of Phil Plait - astronomer, author and communicator. And you'll find it described with obvious joy and love for all things cosmic.

So I just finished re-watching Crash Course Astronomy - and I didn’t know that Phil had a blog :OOOOOOOO

Welp I know what my next read is gonna be

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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein

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It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.

Stephen Hawking

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