I Love Schrodinger’s Cat Memes

Well TECHNICALLY it’s a helium-4 nucleus

I guess I can see where the confusion comes from

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first post on Reddit lets go

This was such a pretty poem that I had to reblog :)

But really, it’s 100% accurate. We are star-stuff.

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THE LIFE OF A STAR: STAR NURSERIES

How did this "star stuff" come to exist? The life of stars is a cycle: a star's birth came from a star's death. When it comes to star birth, the star nebulae reigns supreme.

        A Nebula (take a look at pictures, they're some of the most beautiful things in the universe) is a giant cloud of dust and gas. This is the region where new stars are formed. Nebulae live in the space in between stars and between galaxies - called interstellar space (or the interstellar medium) - and are often formed by dying stars and supernovas (NASA). 

        This cloud of particles and gases is mostly made of hydrogen (remember - stars mostly fuse hydrogen!). These appear as patches of light (emission, reflection, or planetary-types) or a dark region against a brighter background (dark-type). This depends on whether "... it reflects light from nearby stars, emits its own light, or re-emits ultraviolet radiation from nearby stars as visible light. If it absorbs light, the nebula appears as a dark patch ..." (The Free Dictionary). 

        There are four main types of nebulae: emission, reflection, dark, and planetary nebulae.

        Emission nebulae are a high-temperature gathering of particles, of which are energized by a nearby ultra-violent-light-emitting star. These particles release radiation as they fall to lower energy states (for more information on electrons moving to energized states and falling back to lower states, read this). This radiation is red because the spectra/wavelength of photons emitted by hydrogen happens to be shifted to the red-end of the visible light spectrum. There are more particles than hydrogen in the nebulae, but hydrogen is the most abundant.

        Next up is the reflection nebulae - which reflect the light of nearby stars. As opposed to emission nebulae, reflection are blue, because "the size of the dust grains causes blue light to be reflected more efficiently than red light, so these reflection nebulae frequently appear blue in color ...." The Reddening Law of Nebula describes that the interstellar dust which forms nebulae affects shorter wavelength light more than longer-wavelengths (CalTech).

        Then there's the "emo" nebulae: dark nebulae. These are, very simply, nebulae which block light from any nearby sources. The lack of light can cause dark nebulae to be very cold and dark (hence their name), and the heat needed for star formation comes in the form of cosmic rays and gravitational energy as dust gathers. Many stars near dark nebulae emit high levels of infrared light (this type is much more intricate then I've explained, but that summary will do for now. If you're interested in learning more, read this).

        Finally, there are planetary nebulae. And these aren't nebulae made of planets. These nebulae are formed when stars (near the ends of their life) throw out a shell of dust. The result is a small, spherical shape, which looks like a planet (hence their name) (METU).

        Nebulae themselves are essentially formed by gas and dust particles clumping together by the attractive force of gravity. The clumps increase in density until they form areas where the density is great enough to form massive stars. These massive stars emit ultraviolet radiation, which ionizes surrounding gas and causes photon emissions, allowing us to see nebulae (like we discussed in the types of nebulae). Universe Today said, "Even though the interstellar gas is very dispersed, the amount of matter adds up over the vast distances between the stars. And eventually, and with enough gravitational attraction between clouds, this matter can coalesce and collapse to forms stars and planetary systems."

        Britannica notes the structure of nebulae in terms of density and chemical composition: "Various regions exhibit an enormous range of densities and temperatures. Within the Galaxy’s spiral arms about half the mass of the interstellar medium is concentrated in molecular clouds, in which hydrogen occurs in molecular form (H2) and temperatures are as low as 10 kelvins (K). These clouds are inconspicuous optically and are detected principally by their carbon monoxide (CO) emissions in the millimeter wavelength range. Their densities in the regions studied by CO emissions are typically 1,000 H2 molecules per cubic cm. At the other extreme is the gas between the clouds, with a temperature of 10 million K and a density of only 0.001 H+ ion per cubic cm." The composition of nebulae also aligns with what we see with the rest of the universe, mostly being made of hydrogen and the rest being other particles, particularly helium (this matches up with the composition of stars!).

        Fun-fact: supernova can create nebulae, but also destroy them. Possibly the most famous nebulae, the "Pillars of Creation," the Eagle Nebula, is hypothesized to have been destroyed by the shockwave of a supernova 6,000 years ago. Since it takes light 7,000 years to travel from that nebulae to the Earth, we won't know for another 1,000 years (Spitzer). If you're wondering how exactly we could know how far nebulae are, check out this article about a new way to measure that distance using the "surface brightness-radius relation", and other distance measurements (such as the parallax measurement).

        Now, why did I just explain the intricacies of nebulae in 900 words when this series is supposed to be about stars? Well, when we talk about the birth of a star (and the death sometimes, too), nebulae become important. Take note of what we've discussed in this article: formation, chemical composition, and density. It'll be important in our next chapter (and nuclear fusion, but when is that not important?).

First -  Chapter 1: An Introduction

Previous -  Chapter 2: Classification

Next -  Chapter 4: A Star is Born

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So I actually did the calculations and the surface area of Jupiter could probably fit around 11,474,491,000,000 football fields.

Okay so I googled it and the radius of Jupiter is 43,441 miles. However, I’m going to convert that into meters, which’ll make that radius a cool 69,911,513 m. Next up I’ll plug that into the surface area of a sphere formula (A= 4πr^2) which will get us approximately 6.14 x 10^16 m^2 (or roughly 61,400,000,000,000,000 m^2).

Next, I found the area of one football field to be around 5,351 m^2. Dividing the surface area of Jupiter by the surface area of one football field, we can find out how many football fields will fit onto the surface of Jupiter. And that is 1.1474491 x 10^13. Calculating that, that will be 11,474,491,000,000 football fields (11 trillion or so). Oh boy.

For comparison’s sake, the universe is estimated to have AT MOST 2 trillion galaxies! Which means that Jupiter likely could fit more football fields than the universe has galaxies. Another example, there are an estimated billion trillion stars in the observable universe. Jupiter’s football fields account for half of the stars in our observable universe.

I actually tried to find out how many football fields were in the U.S. for comparison but I still can’t find a statistic. 

But also that’s pretty hilarious xD

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No WaY

The search for another Earth is super cool even if it might never end lol

But like, Aliens.

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Are We Alone? How NASA Is Trying to Answer This Question.

One of the greatest mysteries that life on Earth holds is, “Are we alone?”

At NASA, we are working hard to answer this question. We’re scouring the universe, hunting down planets that could potentially support life. Thanks to ground-based and space-based telescopes, including Kepler and TESS, we’ve found more than 4,000 planets outside our solar system, which are called exoplanets. Our search for new planets is ongoing — but we’re also trying to identify which of the 4,000 already discovered could be habitable.

Unfortunately, we can’t see any of these planets up close. The closest exoplanet to our solar system orbits the closest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, which is just over 4 light years away. With today’s technology, it would take a spacecraft 75,000 years to reach this planet, known as Proxima Centauri b.

How do we investigate a planet that we can’t see in detail and can’t get to? How do we figure out if it could support life?

This is where computer models come into play. First we take the information that we DO know about a far-off planet: its size, mass and distance from its star. Scientists can infer these things by watching the light from a star dip as a planet crosses in front of it, or by measuring the gravitational tugging on a star as a planet circles it.

We put these scant physical details into equations that comprise up to a million lines of computer code. The code instructs our Discover supercomputer to use our rules of nature to simulate global climate systems. Discover is made of thousands of computers packed in racks the size of vending machines that hum in a deafening chorus of data crunching. Day and night, they spit out 7 quadrillion calculations per second — and from those calculations, we paint a picture of an alien world.

While modeling work can’t tell us if any exoplanet is habitable or not, it can tell us whether a planet is in the range of candidates to follow up with more intensive observations. 

One major goal of simulating climates is to identify the most promising planets to turn to with future technology, like the James Webb Space Telescope, so that scientists can use limited and expensive telescope time most efficiently.

Additionally, these simulations are helping scientists create a catalog of potential chemical signatures that they might detect in the atmospheres of distant worlds. Having such a database to draw from will help them quickly determine the type of planet they’re looking at and decide whether to keep observing or turn their telescopes elsewhere.

Learn more about exoplanet exploration, here. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Antimatter if you mattered then you would cancel out xD

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Anitimatter matters!

I am always surprised when a young man tells me he wants to work at cosmology. I think of cosmology as something that happens to one, not something one can choose.

Sir William McCrea

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How do I constantly forget how beautiful the universe is?

Also, this is true, Jewels DEFINITELY aren’t as bright as stars!

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A Stellar Jewel Box: Open Cluster NGC 290 : Jewels don’t shine this bright – only stars do. Like gems in a jewel box, though, the stars of open cluster NGC 290 glitter in a beautiful display of brightness and color. The photogenic cluster, pictured here, was captured in 2006 by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Open clusters of stars are younger, contain few stars, and contain a much higher fraction of blue stars than do globular clusters of stars. NGC 290 lies about 200,000 light-years distant in a neighboring galaxy called the Small Cloud of Magellan (SMC). The open cluster contains hundreds of stars and spans about 65 light years across. NGC 290 and other open clusters are good laboratories for studying how stars of different masses evolve, since all the open cluster’s stars were born at about the same time. via NASA

INTRODUCTION TO THE LIFE OF A STAR

The yellow dwarf of our Sun is around 4.5 billion years old (NASA).

   This is nothing compared to other stars, the oldest we know of was created 13.2 billion years ago (DISCOVERY OF THE 1523-0901).  Shortly before that, it is theorized the universe was a dense ball of super hot subatomic particles, until it wasn't. 

     For some reason, possibly the amounts of pressure or even the mysterious dark energy, the universe exploded into what it is today, forming crucial atoms and molecules, and continues to expand. These molecules formed clumps and clouds of gas, which eventually collapsed by gravity and created the very first stars. 

    Stars, particularly our Sun, are very important to life and affect the void of space to a great magnitude. They can tell us so much about the early universe, form elements from their deaths, and even create black holes. But how did this come to be?

     By definition, they are "huge celestial bodies made mostly of hydrogen and helium that produce light and heat from the churning nuclear forges inside their cores." (National Geographic) And there are TONS of them. There are stars everywhere we look. In fact, Astrophysicists aren't even sure how many stars there actually ARE in the universe (Space)! That's because they're not sure if the universe is infinite - in which the number of stars would also be infinite. Even so, we may not be able to detect them all, even if the number is finite.

     But they're so much more than a definition or a number. Stars aren't just objects: they're histories. Stars have a life, they are born, fuel themselves on nuclear fusion, and when they can no longer -  there are many ways their deaths can go (in brutal, yet tantalizing ways). They form solar systems, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and might just be the life-blood of the universe. Their light acts as beacons to scientists. Stars are so crucial to us, their deaths through Supernovas form most of the elements on the Periodic Table of the Elements.

    As the brilliant cosmologist, Carl Sagan, once said: "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star-stuff."

    And if we're made of this stuff, shouldn't we at least try to understand what it actually does?

Next - Chapter 2: Classification

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Galileo, what a man

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Reality is often disappointing