So yesterday I posted about exactly how big a 12 billion solar mass black hole appears to be. But I didn’t get into the followup question of, “So why is this new black hole exciting?” Here’s why this is cool, and surprising.
Category: Science
Posts about science, either stuff that I’m working on or stuff that’s interesting to me.
Massive Black Holes and Size
Question from a friend: Multiple News sources (Time Magazine, Wired, now Salon) are all claiming that this new “Monster” Black Hole which is 12+ billion light years away (thank god) is 12 Billion Times the size of our sun… But, every time I read the article it says “12 billion times the MASS of our… Continue reading Massive Black Holes and Size
Rockets Galore
Here’s a really awesome poster that someone is putting together on Etsy of all modern rocketry (1958 to now). It’s pretty amazing to see where the really modern rockets end up on here. This doesn’t include some of the aircraft-based launch vehicles (like the Pegasus XL rocket that launched NuSTAR), but they’d be pretty tiny.
That’s no moon…
…it’s a space station. Well, not really. But even this thing at a measly 300(ish) meters across has enough gravity to trap a moon (and keep it bound, even when it’s doing a flyby of MUCH bigger fish, like us). Full story with an animated gif of the moon orbiting the asteroid here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4459
There’s no place like home
Let’s be honest, you needed something to splash up on that fancy external monitor. How’s about a live view fo the Earth from the ISS? Granted, half of the orbit it’s dark (because…nighttime). But every half hour or so it’s a very pretty thing to watch. Update: Here’s a link straight to the NASA… Continue reading There’s no place like home
Popularity and/or substance
From Scientific America, they’ve got a mapping strategy that identifies papers that got a big “traditional” splash (the news, research blogs, Mendeley citations, etc) vs those that make a splash on social media. The image below is the result, which is from this article.
Astro Pics of the Year
Okay, while I admit that I found this page because it had the NuSTAR observation of the Sun listed as one of the top ten pics, it also made me think that this was a GOOD year for space imagery… IFL: Top 10 Space Images of 2014
Merging Active Galaxies
Beautiful new shot of Arp299. Red/Blue are the NuSTAR false color hard X-ray images overlaid on an HST optical image. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC Associated news release here, where you can also get a link to larger versions of the image. Because you know you want this to rotate through as your desktop background.
Yep, we made it into APOD. And on the evening news. Woot. This particular link goes straight to the APOD coverage, but if you Google “NuSTAR Sun” then you can find lots of great coverage.
A giant pulse from M82
Latest NuSTAR Nature paper on the “ultra” pulsar in M82 and the press release via the NuSTAR Caltech site.