Fifty people in a room dedicated to creating a space mission for the prevention of a future problem and (as a bonus) the creation of a whole lot of science across all kinds of astronomy. Gosh it's a beautiful vibe 😍 #astrodon
Enjoying the 3d printed spacecraft model being waved around the podium. This mission is all Carmen Sandiego: big sun hat, proper thermal trench coat, gaze out in a stylish way from the shadows #astrodon
This Orrery (by Zoheyr Doctor) illustrates the diverse black hole binaries and neutron star black–hole binaries from our O3b run. More massive binaries are shown as orbiting more slowly
How do we learn about black holes from gravitational waves? Key properties leave fingerprints in the gravitational-wave signal. This infographic from the LIGO Magazine explains more
#SimulatedUniverses
simulated simultaneous evolution of magnetic fields and cosmic rays injected by the same growing galaxies in a small cosmic volume, with a recently developed version of the ENZO code, running on Leonardo @Cineca
We are launching the #ESA Science Newsletter! It serves the scientific community and welcomes everyone interested in more programmatic and technical news from the Directorate of Science: calls for proposals, announcements of opportunity, research fellowship announcements, calls for memberships, job announcements, major mission updates, conference announcements, etc. for all our missions!
To celebrate #BlackHoleWeek here is a collection of images, videos, interactives, activities, and background resources about black holes from NASA's Universe of Learning.
Student paper day! Kleisioti+ on “Direct detectability of tidally heated exomoons by photometric orbital modulation” where she shows that a tidally locked #exomoon with a volcano can be detected with #JWST and two IR bands, even if it’s NOT transiting its parent exoplanet 🔭🪐 #astrodonhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01970
Happy #BlackHoleWeek to those who celebrate! Here's a pic I took a few years ago back when I worked at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile. One of our 8.2 m telescopes was pointing at the centre of the #MilkyWay, home to Sagittarius A*, a #BlackHole 4 million times more massive than the #Sun.
Astronomers devoted almost a century to unmask this beast:
Tschudi+ on SPHERE RefPlanets: Search for epsilon Eridani b and warm dust with an absolutely heroic 38.5 hour cumulative integration looking for reflected light from the RV detected planet 🔭🪐 around this nearby star, but no joy, even with nearly eight decades of sensitivity at 1 arcsec! #astrodonhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19504
Check out this Martian panorama, captured by Curiosity two days ago, on Sol 4174. It is made of 50 adjacent images, each 1328x1184 pixels. Let's go for some zooms👇
the first official opening to the public of the ancient villa on the hills of Florence where Galileo Galilei spent his latest years while being home imprisoned by damm Santo Uffizio, and where he wrote his latest works.
Some walls and bricks and trees might stille be the same that were around while he was 🥺
If you have ever used a star map or application, you would have seen many many objects listed as "NGC(some number)" . But what does that mean?
NGC is short for New General Catalogue - or, more properly, "The New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars". It is a catalogue compiled by John Dreyer in 1888 (yes, "new" is relative), and contains about 7800 objects.
You may have also encountered objects listed with an "IC" prefix. These are also part of the New General Catalogue - or more precisely the follow-up supplements called "Index Catalogues" - adding another 5400 objects.
The NGC (and ICs) are sufficienty important that they have been updated, most recently in 2019, and it now contains nearly 14000 objects.
Last night, I imaged one of the IC objects - the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, centering on IC4604.
This is an amazing and beautiful nebula complex, but it took some post processing to really bring it to life.
Well, in this case it is. Back in 2003, #Saturn's moon Titan passed in front of the #CrabNebula. Chandra was on the spot, catching the transit as it happened. Astronomers were able to see the shadow cast by Titan, and used the size of that shadow to measure the extent of Titan's atmosphere.
A great result, demonstrating the power of the Dark Side!
Wie viel Wissenschaft steckt in der Netflix-SciFi-Serie "3 Body Problem"? Darüber habe ich gestern Abend drei Stunden lange mit Dr. Lisa Ringena von IsoQuant Heidelberg & @nawik und Cedric Engels aka Doktor Whatson bei ARTE #Couchwissen gesprochen.
Had the chance to capture this galaxy, M51, from my obsevatory in Mexico City this very week! Zoomed in beforehand to show you the details of this magnificent pair of interacting galaxies.