Fuck Yeah Stars & Shit

"We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

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crookedindifference:

Teleoperator Retrieval System (TRS), 1979

This TRS spacecraft is illustrated being used to re-boost the Skylab space station to a higher orbit. An early Space Shuttle flight would have boosted Skylab to a higher orbit, adding five years of operational life. The TRS (which was on contract with Martin Marietta for $26 million) contained about three tons of propellant, remote-control capabilities with TV cameras and was designed for duties such as space construction and servicing and retrieving satellites the shuttle could not reach. After rescuing Skylab, the TRS would have remained in orbit for future use. Alternatively, it could have been used to de-orbit Skylab for a safe, controlled re-entry and destruction.
However, development of the Shuttle was delayed, and Skylab reentered Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated in 1979, with debris striking portions of Western Australia.

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Teleoperator Retrieval System space

distant-traveller:

Hubble finds dead stars “polluted” with planetary debris

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has found signs of Earth-like planets in an unlikely place: the atmospheres of a pair of burnt-out stars in a nearby star cluster. The white dwarf stars are being polluted by debris from asteroid-like objects falling onto them. This discovery suggests that rocky planet assembly is common in clusters, say researchers.
The stars, known as white dwarfs — small, dim remnants of stars once like the Sun — reside 150 light-years away in the Hyades star cluster, in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). The cluster is relatively young, at only 625 million years old.
Astronomers believe that all stars formed in clusters. However, searches for planets in these clusters have not been fruitful — of the roughly 800 exoplanets known, only four are known to orbit stars in clusters. This scarcity may be due to the nature of the cluster stars, which are young and active, producing stellar flares and other outbursts that make it difficult to study them in detail.
Hubble’s spectroscopic observations identified silicon in the atmospheres of two white dwarfs, a major ingredient of the rocky material that forms Earth and other terrestrial planets in the Solar System. This silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs’ gravity when they veered too close to the stars. The rocky debris likely formed a ring around the dead stars, which then funnelled the material inwards.
The debris detected whirling around the white dwarfs suggests that terrestrial planets formed when these stars were born. After the stars collapsed to form white dwarfs, surviving gas giant planets may have gravitationally nudged members of any leftover asteroid belts into star-grazing orbits.
Besides finding silicon in the Hyades stars’ atmospheres, Hubble also detected low levels of carbon. This is another sign of the rocky nature of the debris, as astronomers know that carbon levels should be very low in rocky, Earth-like material.
This new study suggests that asteroids less than 160 kilometres across were gravitationally torn apart by the white dwarfs’ strong tidal forces, before eventually falling onto the dead stars.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, and G. Bacon (STScI)

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galaxy space

eruptedrainbow:

Jupiter’s moons, this time in orbit. Made in Celestia.

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moons Jupiter Europa Io Callisto Ganymede

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fuckyeahspaceshuttle:

(via xkcd: Girls and Boys)

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ckck:

Phobos of Mars.

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