Burn baby, burn

I'm Parthil and ermmmm I like potatoes, ducks, cheese, pancakes, cakes, and panties and ermmmm OOOHHHH I ALSO WUVV ermm crap I forgot o.o
OOOO YE I REMEMBERED I WUV MANGA, ANIME, PHYSICS AND ERMMM ERMMM fudge -.-"
O I ALSO LOVE TETRIS AND BTW CRAPP I FORGOT IT AGAIN D:

Permalink ikenbot: Supermassive Black Hole at Work Image Credit: NASA, S. Gezari (The Johns Hopkins University), and J. Guillochon (University of California, Santa Cruz) Back in 2010, astronomers witnessed an explosion of light from a star that was obliterated by a supermassive black hole. This is an accurate computer simulation of the event that took place.
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Permalink thenewenlightenmentage: Stellar Archeology Traces Milky Way’s History ScienceDaily (May 30, 2012) — Unfortunately, stars don’t have birth certificates. So, astronomers have a tough time figuring out their ages. Knowing a star’s age is critical for understanding how our Milky Way galaxy built itself up over billions of years from smaller galaxies. Continue Reading
Permalink thenewenlightenmentage: The Veil Nebula More than 15,000 years ago, the gaseous filaments in the Veil Nebula (NGC 6960/92-95) belonged to a massive star on the brink of blowing itself to bits. When it exploded as a supernova, the star would have shone brighter than the crescent Moon. Unfortunately, no record of this event exists. The Veil Nebula contains two main segments. NGC 6960 (right side of this image) wends its way past the star 52 Cygni, which shines at magnitude 4.2. The star is a foreground object unconnected to the supernova remnant. NGC 6960 tapers to a sharp point at the north end of a degree-long glowing strip. As it broadens to the south and passes 52 Cyg, a dark lane splits the nebulosity. The Veil Nebula’s brighter segment, NGC 6992/5 (left side of this image), lies 2.7° northeast of 52 Cyg. At medium magnification (around 100x), the nebula breaks into numerous strands. (4-inch Takahashi FSQ-106 apochromatic refractor, Canon T2i DSLR, ISO 1600, three 5-minute images, stacked) Contributed by Philippe Moussette from Québec, Canada
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Permalink thenewenlightenmentage: ALMA turns its eyes to Centaurus A (Phys.org) — A new image of the galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the observatory allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes that obscure the galaxy’s center, with unprecedented quality. ALMA is currently in its Early Science phase of observations and still under construction, but is already the most powerful of its kind. The observatory has just issued the call for proposals for its next cycle of observations. Continue Reading
Permalink the-star-stuff: The Greatest Mysteries of the Planets Mercury Mercury is notoriously difficult to study, thanks to its proximity to the scorching hot and blindingly bright sun. Thus, mysteries abound. For example, Mercury has a giant core — perhaps because its outer, lighter layers got brushed off by planetary collisions long ago, but scientists aren’t sure. It also has a magnetic field and an atmosphere, both of unknown origin. In fact, the little planet leaks a steady stream of atmospheric particles, suggesting its atmosphere is somehow constantly regenerated.  Venus Planetary scientists are still working out the details of how a once-earthlike Venus gradually morphed into the hellishly hot planet shrouded in a thick blanket of toxic gases we see today. But a bigger mystery regarding Earth’s “evil twin” is why the planet’s atmosphere swirls around it 60 times faster than the sphere spins itself; and speaking of Venus’ spin, no one knows why it goes counter-clockwise unlike all the other inner planets, such that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.  Earth You might think we’d have nailed down the major bullet points about our home planet’s structure and formation, but in fact, big zingers remain. We don’t know, for example, how all this water got here, and we’re uncertain about the nature of Earth’s core, which, strangely, transmits seismic waves faster in one direction than the other. Our beloved satellite has big bogglers, too. While most scientists think the moon formed from a chunk of Earth that got knocked off during an ancient impact, the theory has a hole: the theoretical impactor, dubbed Theia, should have left a residue with distinctive characteristics, but it has not been detected.  Mars The Red Planet, now frigid, barren and seemingly deserted, spent its first 500 million or billion years as warm, wet and geologically dynamic. Scientists don’t know why it changed so drastically for the worse. They also wonder whether a more vibrant Mars once harbored life, and if it did, whether any bacteria-like Martian organisms managed to adapt to the harsher environs that took over, and are still eking out an existence there.  Jupiter Like a carefully dyed Easter egg, Jupiter is girded by lighter-hued bands called zones and darker bands called belts. But are these stripes merely surface features overlaying a uniform inner ball of gas, or are the zones and belts actually the tops of concentric cylinders that make up the planet? Whole stripes have been known to disappear without a trace; one vanished in May 2010 that was twice as wide as Earth; why? Other surface decors, such as the swirling vortex known as the Great Red Spot, are equally as mysterious: What power source drives their turbulent motion? Saturn For four centuries, astronomers have contemplated Saturn’s eye-popping rings, but none of their attempts to explain the beautiful features have ever seemed quite right. The rings could have formed from the icy remnants of a bygone moon, or from a passing comet torn to shreds by the planet’s gravity; they could be relatively young at just a few hundred million years old, or they might date back to the birth of Saturn more than four billion years ago. We just don’t know. We’re also yet to nail down the dynamics of giant storms and jet streams on the ringed planet’s surface, as well as the dynamics of its rotation. Uranus Planets are expected to radiate heat leftover inside them from their fiery formation process, but puzzlingly, Uranus radiates little or no heat into space. Perhaps the seventh planet’s heat got unleashed during some cosmic smash-up in the distant past. (That collision could also have caused the planet’s strange sideways spin.) Or, maybe Uranus somehow self-insulates, keeping all its heat trapped inside. Neptune Astronomers had expected Neptune to be a weatherless, featureless world in deep freeze. Instead, Voyager 2’s flyby in 1989 — the only close look we’ve ever gotten of this 3-billion-mile-away planet — revealed a turbulent atmosphere with lighter cloud ripples and raging storms. Surprisingly, the fastest winds ever recorded in the solar system whirl on Neptune, up around 1,300 miles (about 2,100 kilometers) per hour. Driving this activity appears to be Neptune’s internal heat, but as the farthest planet from the sun (farthest, that is, ever since the more-distant Pluto was kicked off the planet list in 2006), why does it hold so much heat?
Permalink the-star-stuff: Hold on tight: in 4 billion years, we’re due for a galactic collision! The galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, is a large spiral galaxy that lives in a small cluster of other galaxies called the Local Group. The other big member is the Andromeda galaxy, located about 2.5 million light years away. That’s a long way off, but we’ve known for a long time that Andromeda is heading more or less toward us at a speed of roughly 100 km/sec (60 miles/second). The question is, is it headed directly at us, or does it have some “sideways” motion and will miss us?New results announced today by astronomers using Hubble show that — gulp! — Andromeda is headed right down our throats! But don’t panic. It won’t happen for nearly 4 billion years. Watch the video here.
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