“You Can’t Read That Book In A Day”

Moments and Memories

A home is sometimes a person,

sometimes a place.

But mostly it's million tiny feelings you can't erase.

A nostalgia,

A flutter in your heart or

An aching memory that makes you fall apart.

It's in the familiarity

Of a touch, sound, and smell.

How you can recognize footsteps so well.

It's in the fragrance of an old detergent,

The coolness of a freshly made bed or

Within the worn-out pages of a book, you once read.

The way you can recognize

The chair that wobbles and,

The coordinates of every dent from squabbles.

You'll be taken back in time

At the sound of a video game

When new high scores were the only mark of fame.

You're back at your childhood home

When you smell your favorite meal

Reminiscing how mum's food has powers to heal

Home could be right now,

Right here, but the feeling is

Forged out of moments that were once dear.

sometimes i read a book that i just saw and like the cover and then i go on pinterest and discover that i have joined an international cult and thre is no way out of it

Black Holes: Seeing the Invisible!

Black holes are some of the most bizarre and fascinating objects in the cosmos. Astronomers want to study lots of them, but there’s one big problem – black holes are invisible! Since they don’t emit any light, it’s pretty tough to find them lurking in the inky void of space. Fortunately there are a few different ways we can “see” black holes indirectly by watching how they affect their surroundings.

Speedy stars

If you’ve spent some time stargazing, you know what a calm, peaceful place our universe can be. But did you know that a monster is hiding right in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy? Astronomers noticed stars zipping superfast around something we can’t see at the center of the galaxy, about 10 million miles per hour! The stars must be circling a supermassive black hole. No other object would have strong enough gravity to keep them from flying off into space.

Two astrophysicists won half of the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for revealing this dark secret. The black hole is truly monstrous, weighing about four million times as much as our Sun! And it seems our home galaxy is no exception – our Hubble Space Telescope has revealed that the hubs of most galaxies contain supermassive black holes.

Shadowy silhouettes

Technology has advanced enough that we’ve been able to spot one of these supermassive black holes in a nearby galaxy. In 2019, astronomers took the first-ever picture of a black hole in a galaxy called M87, which is about 55 million light-years away. They used an international network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope.

In the image, we can see some light from hot gas surrounding a dark shape. While we still can’t see the black hole itself, we can see the “shadow” it casts on the bright backdrop.

Shattered stars

Black holes can come in a smaller variety, too. When a massive star runs out of the fuel it uses to shine, it collapses in on itself. These lightweight or “stellar-mass” black holes are only about 5-20 times as massive as the Sun. They’re scattered throughout the galaxy in the same places where we find stars, since that’s how they began their lives. Some of them started out with a companion star, and so far that’s been our best clue to find them.

Some black holes steal material from their companion star. As the material falls onto the black hole, it gets superhot and lights up in X-rays. The first confirmed black hole astronomers discovered, called Cygnus X-1, was found this way.

If a star comes too close to a supermassive black hole, the effect is even more dramatic! Instead of just siphoning material from the star like a smaller black hole would do, a supermassive black hole will completely tear the star apart into a stream of gas. This is called a tidal disruption event.

Making waves

But what if two companion stars both turn into black holes? They may eventually collide with each other to form a larger black hole, sending ripples through space-time – the fabric of the cosmos!

These ripples, called gravitational waves, travel across space at the speed of light. The waves that reach us are extremely weak because space-time is really stiff.

Three scientists received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for using LIGO to observe gravitational waves that were sent out from colliding stellar-mass black holes. Though gravitational waves are hard to detect, they offer a way to find black holes without having to see any light.

We’re teaming up with the European Space Agency for a mission called LISA, which stands for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. When it launches in the 2030s, it will detect gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes – a likely sign of colliding galaxies!

Rogue black holes

So we have a few ways to find black holes by seeing stuff that’s close to them. But astronomers think there could be 100 million black holes roaming the galaxy solo. Fortunately, our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide a way to “see” these isolated black holes, too.

Roman will find solitary black holes when they pass in front of more distant stars from our vantage point. The black hole’s gravity will warp the starlight in ways that reveal its presence. In some cases we can figure out a black hole’s mass and distance this way, and even estimate how fast it’s moving through the galaxy.

For more about black holes, check out these Tumblr posts!

⚫ Gobble Up These Black (Hole) Friday Deals!

⚫ Hubble’s 5 Weirdest Black Hole Discoveries

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

I used to curl up close to my bedroom wall,

hide under my blanket and hug my knees to my chest

Hoping, if there was a demon under my bed

it couldn't reach me.

Now I sleep on the other end

And when the night is darkest

I reach out under my bed

Hoping the demon under my bed

would hold me.

Tell me tales until I fall asleep, I say.

When it responds

I notice our voice sounds similar.

Hoarse and scratchy from the lack of use.

Hands cold and rough like it's filled with papercuts.

There are other demons, you know? Inside my head, I say.

They're not as kind as you.

They keep me up at night and keep me spiraling in the morning.

How do I get rid of them?

It considers, and as my consciousness starts to slip, it answers

Be kind to yourself as you're to me.

🪄 ✨

The 25 Days of Shit Slytherins Say (Season 2): #3

Jingle bells, Umbridge smells, losers go away.

Draco’s hot, Voldy’s not.

Slytherin all the way!

when stephen chbosky wrote "we accept the love we think we deserve" and hanya yanagihara wrote "x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x."

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

if there's anything tumblr has taught me it's that this guy named franz kafka was in agony 365 days a year

A weak week!

I buried my head in a pillow to bawl

Knees to my chest like a ball

I guess it was the Domino effect

Of being vulnerable, easy to affect

Sometimes my heart twists and wrings

Most often my head hurts and rings

I assure you it's not just a phase

I've tried but the feeling doesn't faze.

No one really saw the signs

Even if it's simple science

At last I cried out aloud

Louder than I was allowed.

(there's something so comforting about homophones. <3)