55 Nights With Saturn

I *love* this! Recycled windows to make a glass pavilion/greenhouse. See more over here.

Float On: Hey sometimes shit happens but life goes on yaay :D

Dashboard: Things may suck right now but at least not everything sucks :D

Lampshades On Fire: We're all gonna fucking die and there's nothing the human race can do about it

❤️

Female Physicist’s moodboard <3

This image is beautiful, and closer to my heart because I have done a field study at NRAO. Such an incredible experience!

The W50 supernova remnant in radio (green) against the infrared background of stars and dust (red).

Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, K. Golap, M. Goss; NASA’s Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE).

SpaceTime 20181010 Series 21 Episode 80 is now out

SpaceTime covers the latest news in astronomy & space sciences.

The show is available as a free twice weekly podcast through Apple Podcasts (itunes), Stitcher, Google Podcast, Pocketcasts, SoundCloud, Bitez.com, YouTube, Audio Boom, your favourite podcast download provider, and from www.spacetimewithstuartgary.com

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Today’s stories…

Another lander touches down on the asteroid Ryugu Japan’s Hyabusa2 spacecraft has successfully deployed a third lander rover onto the rugged boulder strewn surface of the asteroid Ryugu – located some 300 million kilometres from Earth.

New Neutron Star discovery challenges existing theories Existing theories about Neutron stars have taken a blow with astronomers detecting radio jets emanating from a neutron star with a strong magnetic field.

New sub-atomic particles discovered at the super collider Physicists have discovered two new sub atomic particles with hints of a possible third.

Intergalactic stars flying towards the Milky Way Astronomers have discovered dozens of stars flying through intergalactic space heading towards the Milky Way Galaxy.

The Science Report Russia widely condemned over a series of cyber-security attacks. Users demanding higher purity types of ecstasy, crystal methamphetamine, and cocaine. Australia records its driest September on record. Wireless broadband connections the most popular means of accessing the Internet. Alex on tech Prince Charles gives the thumbs down to artificial intelligence.

Last Saturday’s show….

Opportunity still silent Scientists are increasing the frequency of commands being sent to the still silent Opportunity Mars rover on the surface of the red planet.

Neutrino experiment records its first tracks The world’s largest liquid-argon neutrino detector has just recorded its first particle tracks.

One hundredth Ariane 5 launch Arianespace has successfully carried out its 100th Ariane 5 launch.

October Skywatch A busy month with three meteor showers in October–the Draconids, the Taurids and the Orionids.

The Science Report A new class of antibiotics to combat the growing problem of deadly multi-drug resistant bacteria. New solar flow battery that both soaks up sunlight and store it as chemical energy for later use. How bombing air raids during World War Two affected the ionosphere. Warnings that industries dominated by the opposite sex tend to have higher rates of divorce.

SpaceTime Background SpaceTime is Australia’s most respected astronomy and space science news program. The show reports on the latest stories and discoveries making news in astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, planetary science, galactic and stellar evolution, physics, spaceflight, and general science. SpaceTime features interviews with leading Australian scientists about their latest research. The show is broadcast coast to coast across the United States by the National Science Foundation on Science360 Radio and around the world on Tune in Radio. SpaceTime is available in Australia as a twice weekly podcast which averages around three million downloads annually. It’s hosted on line through Bitez.com on all major podcast platforms. SpaceTime began life in 1995 as ‘StarStuff’ on ABC NewsRadio. Stuart Gary created the show while he was NewsRadio’s Science Editor and evening News anchor. Gary wrote, produced and hosted the program, consistently achieving 9 percent of the Australian radio audience share - according to Neilsen ratings survey figures for the five major Australian metro markets (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, & Perth). The StarStuff podcast was hosted by ABC Science on line achieving over 1.3 million downloads annually. Sadly, the popular program was axed in 2015 during ABC budget cuts. Rather than remain with the ABC, Gary resigned to continue producing the show independently and rebranding it as SpaceTime. The first episode of SpaceTime was broadcast on February 8th 2016 and the show has been in continuous production ever since. SpaceTime now reaches an audience almost three times greater that it achieved as StarStuff and continues to grow.

I love this! Our SPS club is building a memorial to Cassini, and it should be finished and installed by March!

Ultra-Close Orbits of Saturn = Ultra-Cool Science

On Sept. 15, 2017, our Cassini spacecraft ended its epic exploration of Saturn with a planned dive into the planet’s atmosphere–sending back new science to the very last second. The spacecraft is gone, but the science continues!

New research emerging from the final orbits represents a huge leap forward in our understanding of the Saturn system – especially the mysterious, never-before-explored region between the planet and its rings. Some preconceived ideas are turning out to be wrong while new questions are being raised. How did they form? What holds them in place? What are they made of?

Six teams of researchers are publishing their work Oct. 5 in the journal Science, based on findings from Cassini’s Grand Finale. That’s when, as the spacecraft was running out of fuel, the mission team steered Cassini spectacularly close to Saturn in 22 orbits before deliberately vaporizing it in a final plunge into the atmosphere in September 2017.

Knowing Cassini’s days were numbered, its mission team went for gold. The spacecraft flew where it was never designed to fly. For the first time, it probed Saturn’s magnetized environment, flew through icy, rocky ring particles and sniffed the atmosphere in the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) gap between the rings and the cloud tops. Not only did the engineering push the spacecraft to its limits, the new findings illustrate how powerful and agile the instruments were.

Many more Grand Finale science results are to come, but today’s highlights include:

Complex organic compounds embedded in water nanograins rain down from Saturn’s rings into its upper atmosphere. Scientists saw water and silicates, but they were surprised to see also methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The composition of organics is different from that found on moon Enceladus – and also different from those on moon Titan, meaning there are at least three distinct reservoirs of organic molecules in the Saturn system.

For the first time, Cassini saw up close how rings interact with the planet and observed inner-ring particles and gases falling directly into the atmosphere. Some particles take on electric charges and spiral along magnetic-field lines, falling into Saturn at higher latitudes – a phenomenon known as “ring rain.” But scientists were surprised to see that others are dragged quickly into Saturn at the equator. And it’s all falling out of the rings faster than scientists thought – as much as 10,000 kg of material per second.

Scientists were surprised to see what the material looks like in the gap between the rings and Saturn’s atmosphere. They knew that the particles throughout the rings ranged from large to small. They thought material in the gap would look the same. But the sampling showed mostly tiny, nanograin- and micron-sized particles, like smoke, telling us that some yet-unknown process is grinding up particles. What could it be? Future research into the final bits of data sent by Cassini may hold the answer.

Saturn and its rings are even more interconnected than scientists thought. Cassini revealed a previously unknown electric current system that connects the rings to the top of Saturn’s atmosphere.

Scientists discovered a new radiation belt around Saturn, close to the planet and composed of energetic particles. They found that while the belt actually intersects with the innermost ring, the ring is so tenuous that it doesn’t block the belt from forming.

Unlike every other planet with a magnetic field in our Solar System, Saturn’s magnetic field is almost completely aligned with its spin axis. Think of the planet and the magnetic field as completely separate things that are both spinning. Both have the same center point, but they each have their own axis about which they spin. But for Saturn the two axes are essentially the same – no other planet does that, and we did not think it was even possible for this to happen. This new data shows a magnetic-field tilt of less than 0.0095 degrees. (Earth’s magnetic field is tilted 11 degrees from its spin axis.) According to everything scientists know about how planetary magnetic fields are generated, Saturn should not have one. It’s a mystery physicists will be working to solve.

Cassini flew above Saturn’s magnetic poles, directly sampling regions where radio emissions are generated. The findings more than doubled the number of reported crossings of radio sources from the planet, one of the few non-terrestrial locations where scientists have been able to study a mechanism believed to operate throughout the universe. How are these signals generated? That’s still a mystery researchers are looking to uncover.

For the Cassini mission, the science rolling out from Grand Finale orbits confirms that the calculated risk of diving into the gap – skimming the upper atmosphere and skirting the edge of the inner rings – was worthwhile.

Almost everything going on in that region turned out to be a surprise, which was the importance of going there, to explore a place we’d never been before. And the expedition really paid off!

Analysis of Cassini data from the spacecraft’s instruments will be ongoing for years to come, helping to paint a clearer picture of Saturn.

To read the papers published in Science, visit: URL to papers

To learn more about the ground-breaking Cassini mission and its 13 years at Saturn, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

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

Seeing Titan : Shrouded in a thick atmosphere, Saturn’s largest moon Titan really is hard to see. Small particles suspended in the upper atmosphere cause an almost impenetrable haze, strongly scattering light at visible wavelengths and hiding Titan’s surface features from prying eyes. But Titan’s surface is better imaged at infrared wavelengths where scattering is weaker and atmospheric absorption is reduced. Arrayed around this centered visible light image of Titan are some of the clearest global infrared views of the tantalizing moon so far. In false color, the six panels present a consistent processing of 13 years of infrared image data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) on board the Cassini spacecraft. They offer a stunning comparison with Cassini’s visible light view. via NASA

These 5 Women Deserved, And Were Unjustly Denied, A Nobel Prize In Physics

“The fact of the matter is that there is no concrete evidence that women are in any way inherently inferior to men when it comes to work in any of the sciences or any of their sub-fields. But there is overwhelming evidence for misogyny, sexism, and institutional bias that hinders their careers and fails to recognize them for their outstanding achievements. When you think of the Nobel Laureates in Physics and wonder why there are so few women, make sure you remember Cecilia Payne, Chien-Shiung Wu, Vera Rubin, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, and Lise Meitner. The Nobel committee may have forgotten or overlooked their contributions until it was too late, but that doesn’t mean we have to. In all the sciences, we want the best, brightest, most capable, and hardest workers this world has to offer. Looking back on history with accurate eyes only serves to demonstrate how valuable, and yet undervalued, women in science have been.”

In most intellectual lines of work, if you claimed that a certain type of person wasn’t mentally capable of doing as good a job as another, you’d be rightfully called a bigot. Yet somehow, in a myriad of the sciences (such as physics), there are those who simultaneously claim that “women are inferior to men” alongside the claim that it isn’t sexist or bigoted to say so.

But what there is a long history of, in physics, is women being denied their due credit for discoveries and advances that they were an integral part of. Even in the aftermath of last week’s events, when physicist Donna Strickland became just the third woman ever to be awarded a Nobel Prize, many have claimed that she isn’t worthy, for reasons that have never been applied to men.

Well, meet five women you might not be aware of who certainly earned a Nobel Prize, even if they were never awarded one. We cannot rewrite history, but we can right the legacy of its wrongs in our public consciousness.

Every. Damn. Time. 🙄🤦🏻‍♀️

my gym coach: and now, plank

me: hoe don't do it

my brain: planck's constant, 6.63 x 10-34 m2kg/s

me: oh my god

NGC 6888: The Crescent Nebula