Astrosciencechick

Thought For The Day

Comet Lovejoy and The Pleiades

why is mercury shrinking?

Unlike the Earth, Mercury’s surface is made up of just one continental plate covering the entire planet, as Mercury’s interior is slowly cooling it also shrinks and the total volume of mercury shrinks.

Celestial Buddy Earth peers out at Mother Earth from the ISS after hitching a ride on this weeks SpaceX Dragon test flight

Comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2) streaming through the pale neon sky over Paranal on 20 January 2015. The Pleiades, a tight bundle of electric blue, also appear in the direction of Lovejoy’s tail.

Credit: ESO/G. Hüdepohl (atacamaphoto.com)

some memes I made to express my current frustrations with academia feel free to add your own

It’s only two things.

Imagine where you could be by this time next year. Now do the work

Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula : Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring telescopic image. Centered in the scene it’s anchored right and left by two bright stars, Mu and Eta Geminorum, at the foot of the celestial twin. The Jellyfish Nebula is the brighter arcing ridge of emission with dangling tentacles. In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, the Jellyfish Nebula is known to harbor a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. An emission nebula cataloged as Sharpless 249 fills the field at the upper left. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this image would be about 300 light-years across. via NASA

The Crab Pulsar (PSR B0531+21) is a relatively young neutron star. The star is the central star in the Crab Nebula, a remnant of the supernova SN 1054, which was widely observed on Earth in the year 1054. Discovered in 1968, the pulsar was the first to be connected with a supernova remnant.

The Crab Pulsar is one of very few pulsars to be identified optically. The optical pulsar is roughly 20 kilometres (12 mi) in diameter and the pulsar “beams” rotate once every 33 milliseconds, or 30 times each second.

The outflowing relativistic wind from the neutron star generates synchrotron emission, which produces the bulk of the emission from the nebula, seen from radio wavesthrough to gamma rays. The most dynamic feature in the inner part of the nebula is the point where the pulsar’s equatorial wind slams into the surrounding nebula, forming a termination shock.

The shape and position of this feature shifts rapidly, with the equatorial wind appearing as a series of wisp-like features that steepen, brighten, then fade as they move away from the pulsar into the main body of the nebula. The period of the pulsar’s rotation is slowing by 38 nanoseconds per day due to the large amounts of energy carried away in the pulsar wind.

The Crab Nebula is often used as a calibration source in X-ray astronomy. It is very bright in X-rays and the flux density and spectrum are known to be constant, with the exception of the pulsar itself.

source | A History of the Crab Nebula

images: NASA/ESA, Hubble, Cambridge University Lucky Imaging Group,  NASA/CXC/ASU/J.Hester et al.

55 Nights with Saturn