Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
The Violent Lives of Galaxies: Caught in the Cosmic Dark Matter Web
-
Similar Topics
-
By USH
A security camera recently captured an eerie scene that has left people intrigued and spooked. In the footage, recorded at dawn, a mysterious figure dressed in white appears near a large vehicle. What makes the video even stranger is the reaction of two nearby dogs, who seem unusually distressed and unsettled by the presence.
While the exact location in Mexico where this happened hasn’t been confirmed, many are already speculating about the figure’s identity. Some believe it could be La Llorona, the legendary weeping woman from Mexican folklore. La Llorona is said to wander in sorrow, mourning her lost children, and has been the focus of countless ghost stories over the years.
Others have suggested a different explanation, claiming the figure resembles a "nightcrawler," a strange cryptid reportedly known for its bizarre appearance.
Skeptics, however, argue that it might just be a person caught in an unusual moment, and the dogs’ reactions could be explained by their heightened senses picking up on something out of the ordinary. Still, the dogs' unsettling behavior has sparked debate about whether the encounter might have been something paranormal.
For now, the true nature of the figure remains a mystery. View the full article
-
By NASA
The Texas Art Education Association hosted its annual conference from Nov. 14–16 at Moody Gardens Hotel & Convention Center in Galveston, Texas, drawing nearly 3,000 educators, administrators, and artists.
This year’s theme, “Cosmic Connections: SPACE, the Last Frontier and the Element of Art,” celebrated the fusion of creativity and space exploration, with NASA’s Johnson Space Center participating for the first time to inspire the Artemis Generation art educators.
Johnson Space Center volunteers Raul Tijerina (left), building graphics lead for the International Space Station Program; Gary Johnson (middle), technical manager in NASA’s International Space Station Mission Integration and Operations Office; and Christian Getteau, Imagery Integration and Multimedia producer with the Human Space Flight Technical Integration Contract, participate in the NASA booth at the Texas Art Education Association annual conference held Nov. 14–16 at Moody Gardens Hotel & Convention Center in Galveston, Texas.NASA From astronauts crafting in orbit to collaborative art projects on Earth, NASA continues to showcase how creativity can capture the wonder of the cosmos. This event allowed educators to connect with NASA, explore teaching resources, and discover innovative ways to merge the arts with science and space exploration in their classrooms.
Johnson volunteers pose with an astronaut spacesuit at the Texas Art Education Association conference.NASA/Sumer Loggins “We have seen our astronauts bring the art of painting, music, photography, and more to orbit aboard the space shuttle and the International Space Station,” said Gary Johnson, NASA’s International Space Station Mission Integration and Operations Office technical manager. “Our mission is to inspire the next generation of artists and explorers to capture the beauty of space through any medium they choose.”
“Everyone has a place at NASA,” added Raul Tijerina, International Space Station Program building graphics lead. “This collaboration celebrates the diversity of talents needed to explore the universe, including those who bring ideas to life through art.”
NASA’s inflatable mascot, Cosmo, greets attendees and poses for photos during the art car show at the conference. NASA Guests immersed themselves in a variety of stellar experiences, including interacting with NASA’s inflatable mascot, Cosmo, taking selfies at the NASA booth, and viewing artwork that shares the past and celebrates the future of space exploration.
The nonprofit SciArt Exchange provided teachers with details about its space art competitions, aimed at sparking curiosity across all ages. These competitions include the Project Mars Competition, where adults compete to have their artwork featured at Johnson, and the Moon Youth Art Competition, which highlights lunar-themed creations from students around the world.
Attendees also explored infographics and had the chance to download NASA’s Spot the Station app to track the orbiting laboratory in real-time.
NASA astronaut Michael Foreman (middle left) and Gordon Andrews, a strategic communications specialist for the International Space Station Program, pose with attendees following a space-themed presentation.NASA Gordon Andrews, a strategic communications specialist for the International Space Station Program, and NASA astronaut Michael Foreman introduced the Spacesuit Art Project to conference attendees. They shared the documentary “Space for Art,” which chronicles the project’s mission to inspire hope, courage, and healing through art.
Andrews and Foreman discussed their experiences working on the project with retired NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, the first person to watercolor in space, and the Space for Art Foundation. Foreman shared stories from his time in space and posed for photos with guests. Andrews also presented to the Visual Art Administrators of Texas, a group of over 200 Texas education leaders.
The film played at NASA’s booth, showcasing how the initiative brings hope to children undergoing pediatric cancer treatment by inviting them to create colorful spacesuit artwork. Each suit—Hope, Courage, Unity, Victory, Dreamer, Exploration, Beyond, and Infinity—embodies the resilience and imagination of its creators. Four of these spacesuits have journeyed to and from the microgravity laboratory, inspiring children to dream big as they view their artwork in orbit.
By raising awareness about pediatric cancer and promoting art therapy worldwide, the project demonstrates the powerful connection between space exploration and the human spirit.
The NASA booth featured the Spacesuit Art Project, showcasing a Flat Stanley of NASA astronaut Nicole Stott, the first person to watercolor in space, alongside spacesuits painted by pediatric patients.NASA Texas’ first Space Force Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets—the only program of its kind in Texas and one of just 10 in the nation—participated in the event, as well. As a NASA rendition of the National Anthem played in the background, the cadets from Klein High School inspired the next generation of dreamers and doers to reach for the stars.
Texas’ first Space Force Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets from Klein High School participate in the ceremony as a NASA rendition of the National Anthem plays in the background. NASA The conference also featured three murals that will be added to the art collection in Johnson’s building 4 south.
The art installation project began in 2022 when Johnson and Tijerina collaborated with Texas high school art programs to create space-themed murals for display at the center. With the help of their teachers, students brainstormed ideas and painted the murals together before visiting Johnson to install them and experience a guided walk-through of NASA’s facilities.
Led by their shared passion for artistic expression and space exploration, the students bring color, wonder, and creativity to the walls at Johnson. The initiative is part of a long-term effort to engage with students locally and globally to ignite the imagination of all and enhance the visual work environment for Johnson employees.
“Absolute Equality: Breaking Boundaries” by Reginald C. Adams, symbolizes unity and humanity’s collective future in space exploration. The artwork titled “Absolute Equality: Breaking Boundaries,” by artist Reginald C. Adams, will be one of the latest installations in building 4 south. The piece envisions humanity’s shared future, symbolizing unity and the possibilities of interplanetary exploration.
Adams was a keynote speaker for the conference, and when he learned about the mural project, he wanted to contribute to the initiative.
The two figures are enclosed within a shared helmet, representing a collective vision for the future of space exploration. The patterns surrounding them signify technology’s role in connecting humanity across cultural and societal divides.
La Marque High School students, art teacher Joan Finn, and artist Cheryl Evans painted a mural highlighting the interconnected roles in space exploration. A collaborative piece by La Marque High School art students, art teacher Joan Finn, and artist Cheryl Evans depicted the interconnected roles of visionaries, engineers, artists, and astronauts in space exploration.
Just as the space station was assembled piece by piece over more than 40 missions, the mural was created using 10 separate stretched canvases bolted together. The International Space Station patch at the bottom highlights the collaboration of the 17 countries involved.
“The Moon Now,” created by La Marque High School students, depicts two astronauts on the lunar surface in Axiom spacesuits with mirrored visors. A student-created vision titled “The Moon Now” showcased two astronauts on the lunar surface wearing Axiom spacesuits, with helmet visors designed as mirrors, signifying the next generation to envision themselves contributing to the next giant leap in space exploration.
The students created individual pieces depicting the Milky Way and other astronomical objects, which were collaged onto the surface of the artwork.
Through partnerships like this, NASA continues to embrace STEAM—science, technology, engineering, art, and math—to empower the Artemis Generation to dare, unite, and explore.
View the full article
-
By Space Force
Astronauts aboard the ISS conducted an educational downlink, a communication signal from the spacecraft back to Earth, for Denver School of Science and Technology students.
View the full article
-
By NASA
Hubble Space Telescope Home Hubble Takes a Look at Tangled… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 2 min read
Hubble Takes a Look at Tangled Galaxies
This Hubble image features a pair of interacting spiral galaxies called MCG+05-31-045. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz)
Download this image
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image depicts the cosmic tangle that is MCG+05-31-045, a pair of interacting galaxies located 390 million light-years away and a part of the Coma galaxy cluster.
The Coma Cluster is a particularly rich cluster that contains over a thousand known galaxies. Amateur astronomers can easily spot several of these in a backyard telescope (See Caldwell 35). Most of them are elliptical galaxies, and that’s typical of a dense galaxy cluster like the Coma Cluster: many elliptical galaxies form through close encounters between galaxies that stir them up, or even collisions that rip them apart. While the stars in interacting galaxies can stay together, their gas is twisted and compressed by gravitational forces and rapidly used up to form new stars. When the hot, massive, blue stars die, there is little gas left to form new generations of young stars to replace them. As spiral galaxies interact, gravity disrupts the regular orbits that produce their striking spiral arms. Whether through mergers or simple near misses, the result is a galaxy almost devoid of gas, with aging stars orbiting in uncoordinated circles: an elliptical galaxy.
It’s very likely that a similar fate will befall MCG+05-31-045. As the smaller spiral galaxy is torn up and integrated into the larger galaxy, many new stars will form, and the hot, blue ones will quickly burn out, leaving cooler, redder stars behind in an elliptical galaxy, much like others in the Coma Cluster. But this process won’t be complete for many millions of years.
Explore more Coma Cluster images from Hubble.
Hubble Uncovers Thousands of Globular Star Clusters Scattered Among Galaxies Hubble’s Galaxies With Knots, Bursts Hubble Sees Near and Far Hubble Sees Plunging Galaxy Losing Its Gas Hubble Catches Galaxies Swarmed by Star Clusters Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated Nov 14, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Hubble Space Telescope Spiral Galaxies Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From Hubble
Hubble Space Telescope
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
Galaxy Details and Mergers
Hubble’s Galaxies
Explore the Night Sky
View the full article
-
By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024. The space telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy across the entire sky, capturing the universe in more than 100 colors. BAE Systems The space telescope will detect over 100 colors from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Here’s what astronomers will do with all that color.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission won’t be the first space telescope to observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies when it launches no later than April 2025, but it will be the first to observe them in 102 colors. Although these colors aren’t visible to the human eye because they’re in the infrared range, scientists will use them to learn about topics that range from the physics that governed the universe less than a second after its birth to the origins of water on planets like Earth.
“We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colors,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based jointly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, both in Southern California. “Whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries.”
Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx will collect infrared light, which has wavelengths slightly longer than what the human eye can detect. The telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy to take the light from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies and separate it into individual colors, the way a prism transforms sunlight into a rainbow. This color breakdown can reveal various properties of an object, including its composition and its distance from Earth.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission will use spectroscopy — the splitting of light into its component wavelengths — to study the universe. Watch this video to learn more about spectroscopy. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Here are the three key science investigations SPHEREx will conduct with its colorful all-sky map.
Cosmic Origins
What human eyes perceive as colors are distinct wavelengths of light. The only difference between colors is the distance between the crests of the light wave. If a star or galaxy is moving, its light waves get stretched or compressed, changing the colors they appear to emit. (It’s the same with sound waves, which is why the pitch of an ambulance siren seems to go up as its approaches and lowers after it passes.) Astronomers can measure the degree to which light is stretched or compressed and use that to infer the distance to the object.
SPHEREx will apply this principle to map the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D. By doing so, scientists can study the physics of inflation, the event that caused the universe to expand by a trillion-trillion fold in less than a second after the big bang. This rapid expansion amplified small differences in the distribution of matter. Because these differences remain imprinted on the distribution of galaxies today, measuring how galaxies are distributed can tell scientists more about how inflation worked.
Galactic Origins
SPHEREx will also measure the collective glow created by all galaxies near and far — in other words, the total amount of light emitted by galaxies over cosmic history. Scientists have tried to estimate this total light output by observing individual galaxies and extrapolating to the trillions of galaxies in the universe. But these counts may leave out some faint or hidden light sources, such as galaxies too small or too distant for telescopes to easily detect.
With spectroscopy, SPHEREx can also show astronomers how the total light output has changed over time. For example, it may reveal that the universe’s earliest generations of galaxies produced more light than previously thought, either because they were more plentiful or bigger and brighter than current estimates suggest. Because light takes time to travel through space, we see distant objects as they were in the past. And, as light travels, the universe’s expansion stretches it, changing its wavelength and its color. Scientists can therefore use SPHEREx data to determine how far light has traveled and where in the universe’s history it was released.
Water’s Origins
SPHEREx will measure the abundance of frozen water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients for life as we know it along more than 9 million unique directions across the Milky Way galaxy. This information will help scientists better understand how available these key molecules are to forming planets. Research indicates that most of the water in our galaxy is in the form of ice rather than gas, frozen to the surface of small dust grains. In dense clouds where stars form, these icy dust grains can become part of newly forming planets, with the potential to create oceans like the ones on Earth.
The mission’s colorful view will enable scientists to identify these materials, because chemical elements and molecules leave a unique signature in the colors they absorb and emit.
Big Picture
Many space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and James Webb, can provide high-resolution, in-depth spectroscopy of individual objects or small sections of space. Other space telescopes, like NASA’s retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), were designed to take images of the whole sky. SPHEREx combines these abilities to apply spectroscopy to the entire sky.
By combining observations from telescopes that target specific parts of the sky with SPHEREx’s big-picture view, scientists will get a more complete — and more colorful — perspective of the universe.
More About SPHEREx
SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available.
For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/spherex/
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
2024-152
Share
Details
Last Updated Oct 31, 2024 Related Terms
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Galaxies Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Search for Life The Universe Explore More
5 min read ‘Blood-Soaked’ Eyes: NASA’s Webb, Hubble Examine Galaxy Pair
Stare deeply at these galaxies. They appear as if blood is pumping through the top…
Article 1 hour ago 3 min read Buckle Up: NASA-Funded Study Explores Turbulence in Molecular Clouds
On an airplane, motions of the air on both small and large scales contribute to…
Article 21 hours ago 4 min read NASA’s Perseverance Captures ‘Googly Eye’ During Solar Eclipse
Article 22 hours ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.