OrbitalHub

NASA dicit:

This animation takes the viewer on a simulated journey into Jupiter’s exotic high-altitude electrical storms. Get an up-close view of Mission Juno’s newly discovered “shallow lighting” flashes and dive into the violent atmospheric jet of the Nautilus cloud. The smallest white “pop-up” clouds on top of the Nautilus are about 100 km across. The ride navigates through Jupiter’s towering thunderstorms, dodging the spray of ammonia-water rain, and shallow lighting flashes. At these altitudes — too cold for pure liquid water to exit – ammonia gas acts like an antifreeze that melts the water ice crystals flung up to these heights by Jupiter’s powerful storms – giving Jupiter an unexpected ammonia-water cloud that can electrify the sky. The animation was created by combining an image of high-altitude clouds from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft with a computer-generated animation.

Video credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gil/Animation: Koji Kuramura/Music: Vangelis

NASA dicit:

Mars’ nightside atmosphere glows and pulsates in this data animation from MAVEN spacecraft observations. Green-to-white false color shows the enhanced brightenings on Mars’ ultraviolet “nightglow” measured by MAVEN’s Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph at about 70 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) altitude. A simulated view of the Mars globe is added digitally for context, with ice caps visible at the poles. Three nightglow brightenings occur over one Mars rotation, the first much brighter than the other two. All three brightenings occur shortly after sunset, appearing on the left of this view of the night side of the planet. The pulsations are caused by downwards winds which enhance the chemical reaction creating nitric oxide which causes the glow. Months of data were averaged to identify these patterns, indicating they repeat nightly.

Video credit: NASA/MAVEN/Goddard Space Flight Center/CU/LASP

NASA dicit:

NASA’s Lucy mission is launching in 2021 and will fly by seven different Trojan asteroids that are orbiting the same distance from the Sun as Jupiter. This video highlights the four main science objectives and the instruments aboard the spacecraft that will be utilized. Lucy will be the first space mission to study the Trojan asteroids, which are remnants of our early solar system.

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Produced & Edited by: David Ladd (USRA)/Animations by: David Ladd (USRA), Walt Feimer (KBRwyle), Jacquelyn DeMink (USRA), Michael Lentz (USRA), Jonathan North (USRA)/Music: “Feels Good” – Wally Gagel & Xandy Barry [ASCAP], provided by Universal Production Music

NASA dicit:

When amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov discovered an interstellar comet zipping through our solar system on Aug. 30, 2019, scientists promptly turned their telescopes toward it hoping to catch a glimpse of this rare and ephemeral event. After all, no one had ever set eyes on a confirmed comet from a foreign star system, and it was clear from its projected trajectory that the alien visitor, named 2I/Borisov, would soon disappear from the sky forever.

Before it dimmed from view, a team of international scientists led by Martin Cordiner and Stefanie Milam at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, probed it with the world’s most powerful radio telescope: the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile. The comet was near its closest approach to Earth at about 180 million miles, or nearly 300 million kilometers, away.

When the scientists peeked inside the halo of gas that formed around the comet as it came closer to the Sun and its ices began to vaporize, they detected something peculiar: 2I/Borisov was releasing gas with a greater concentration of carbon monoxide (CO) than anyone had detected in any comet at a similar distance from the Sun (within less than 186 million miles, or 300 million kilometers). 2I/Borisov’s CO concentration was estimated to be between nine and 26 times higher than that of the average solar system comet.

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/James Tralie (ADNET): Lead Producer, Lead Editor, Narrator/Lonnie Shekhtman (ADNET): Lead Writer/Martin Cordiner (Catholic University of America): Scientist, Stefanie Milam (NASA/GSFC): Scientist/ Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET): Technical Support

Wikipedia dicit:

A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it. The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole. The boundary of the region from which no escape is possible is called the event horizon. Although the event horizon has an enormous effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, according to general relativity it has no locally detectable features. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Moreover, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is on the order of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stellar mass, making it essentially impossible to observe.

Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace. The first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black hole was found by Karl Schwarzschild in 1916, although its interpretation as a region of space from which nothing can escape was first published by David Finkelstein in 1958. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was not until the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality.

Black holes of stellar mass are expected to form when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses (M☉) may form. There is consensus that supermassive black holes exist in the centers of most galaxies.

Video credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA dicit:

Hear the rapid beat of HD 31901, a Delta Scuti star in the southern constellation Lepus. The sound is the result of 55 pulsation patterns TESS observed over 27 days sped up by 54,000 times. Delta Scuti stars have long been known for their apparently random pulsations, but TESS data show that some, like HD 31901, have more orderly patterns.

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Simon Murphy, University of Sydney