“for whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.”
― E.E. Cummings
(Source: wild-lion)
- Camera: Fujifilm FinePix F80EXR
- Aperture: f/5.6
- Exposure: 1/750th
- Focal Length: 50mm
6th February 2012
Reblogged From cor-vitae
Notes: 6251
Submitted by iaydl
(Source: rainbowparoxysm)
Neutron Star Merge
Binary systems containing neutron stars are born when the cores of two orbiting stars collapse in supernova explosions. Neutron stars pack the mass of our sun into the size of a city. They are so dense and packed so tightly that the boundaries atoms nuclei disappear.
In such systems, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that neutron stars emit gravitational radiation, ripples of space-time. This causes the orbits to shrink and gradually brings the neutron stars closer together.
Shown here is such a system after about 1 billion years, when two equal-mass neutron whirl around each other at 60,000 times a minute. The stars merge in a few milliseconds, sending out a burst of gravitational waves and a brief, intense gamma-ray burst.
This animation shows the merger of two neutron stars from a horizontal perspective. Theory predicts that these kinds of collisions would not produce a long afterglow because there isn’t much “fuel” — dust and gas — from the objects and in the region to sustain an afterglow.
(Source: nasa.gov)
Naked-Eye Gamma-ray Burst Model for GRB 080319B
Gamma-ray bursts that are longer than two seconds are caused by the detonation of a rapidly rotating massive star at the end of its life on the main sequence. Jets of particles and gamma radiation are emitted in opposite directions from the stellar core as the star collapses.
In this model, a narrow beam of gamma rays is emitted, followed by a wider beam of gamma rays. The narrow beam for GRB 080319B was aimed almost precisely at the Earth, which made it the brightest gamma-ray burst observed to date by NASA’s Swift satellite. As the star explodes, the narrow beam (white) of gamma rays is emitted first, followed by the wider beam (purple).
(Source: nasa.gov)
Enigmatic Titan
Titan’s golden, smog-like atmosphere and complex layered hazes appear to Cassini as a luminous ring around the planet-sized moon. The world beneath that haze has become slightly less mysterious under the gaze of Cassini and its Huygens probe, but many new discoveries await.
Images taken using red, blue and green spectral filters were combined to create this color view. Six images – two sets of three colors – were combined to create the mosaic. The images were acquired with the Cassini wide-angle camera on Oct. 12, 2009 at a distance of 145,000 kilometers from Titan.
Candle in the Dark
Saturn’s rings cut across an eerie scene that is ruled by Titan’s luminous crescent and globe-encircling haze, broken by the small moon Enceladus, whose icy jets are dimly visible at its south pole. The scattered light around planet-sized Titan makes the moon’s solid surface visible in silhouette. Enceladus enjoys far clearer skies than its giant sibling moon.
The image was taken in visible red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 10, 2006 at a distance of approximately 3.9 million kilometers from Enceladus and 5.3 million kilometers from Titan.
Fire in the Sky by Chris Kotsiopoulos
“This is an image sequence containing 70 lightning shots, taken at Ikaria island during a severe thunderstorm.”
Ikaria Island, Greece
AMAZING.
Soccer players from Haiti’s Zaryen team (in blue) and the national amputee team fight for the ball during a friendly match at the national stadium in Port-au-Prince January 10, 2011. Sprinting on their crutches at breakneck speed, the young soccer players who lost legs in Haiti’s earthquake last year project a symbol of hope and resilience in a land where so much is broken.
Cristiano Ronaldo has 31 goals in all competitions this season…and it’s only January.
damnnnnnn
I know Messi scored like 60 or something in total last season, but who knows, maybe Ronaldo could be on route to beating that tally
Kawah Ijen by night
Molten sulfur burns atop a solid sulfur deposit. Miners will extinguish the flames before they leave to prevent any loss of sulfur. (© Olivier Grunewald)
FOREVER REBLOG.
Every Rose Has a Thorn
This infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Rosette nebula, a star-forming region more than 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. In optical light, the nebula looks like a rosebud, or the “rosette” adornments that date back to antiquity.
But lurking inside this delicate cosmic rosebud are so-called planetary “danger zones”. These zones surround super hot stars, called O-stars (blue stars inside spheres), which give off intense winds and radiation. Young, cooler stars that just happen to reside within one of these zones are in danger of having their dusty planet-forming materials stripped away.
While O-star danger zones were known about before, their parameters were not. Astronomers used Spitzer’s infrared vision to survey the extent of the five danger zones shown here. The results showed that young stars lying beyond 1.6 light-years, or 10 trillion miles, of any O-stars are safe, while young stars within this zone are likely to have their potential planets blasted into space.
Radiation and winds from the super hot stars have collectively blown layers of dust (green) and gas away, revealing the cavity of cooler dust (red). The largest two blue stars in this picture are in the foreground, and not in the nebula itself.
• Source: NASA/Spitzer
