itsfullofstars:

Earth Oceans Were Homegrown

Where did Earth’s oceans come from? Astronomers have long contended that icy comets and asteroids delivered the water for them during an epoch of heavy bombardment that ended about 3.9 billion years ago. But a new study suggests that Earth supplied its own water, leaching it from the rocks that formed the planet. The finding may help explain why life on Earth appeared so early, and it may indicate that other rocky worlds are also awash in vast seas.

Read more.

800-588-2300:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

- Carl Sagan

(Source: narcotic)

unknownskywalker:

The Two-faced Whirlpool Galaxy

These images by the Hubble Space Telescope show off two dramatically different face-on views of the spiral galaxy M51, dubbed the Whirlpool Galaxy.

The image at left, taken in visible light, highlights the attributes of a typical spiral galaxy, including graceful, curving arms, pink star-forming regions, and brilliant blue strands of star clusters.

In the image at right, most of the starlight has been removed, revealing the Whirlpool’s skeletal dust structure, as seen in near-infrared light. This new image is the sharpest view of the dense dust in M51. The narrow lanes of dust reflect the galaxy’s moniker as if they were swirling toward the galaxy’s core.

The red color in the near-infrared image traces the dust, which is punctuated by hundreds of tiny clumps of stars, each about 65 light-years wide. These stars have never been seen before. The star clusters cannot be seen in visible light because dense dust enshrouds them. The image reveals details as small as 35 light-years across.

• Source: HubbleSite.org

inothernews:

The world has a new longest over-water bridge, and it’s in China.  Via Dvice:

China, which already boasts the three longest bridges over land, just toppled the 24-mile-long Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana to take the belt for the longest bridge over water, too. The country is now home to an impressive 26.4 miles of bridge over the Jiaozhou Bay, but that’s not even the craziest part.

Possibly more astounding than the fact that the Qingdao Haiwan Bridge is so long, is that it only took China four years to build it, with 10,000 workers and $8.5 billion backing the effort. The bridge will knock about 20 to 30 minutes off of the commute for workers commuting between the port city of Qingdao and the Huangdao suburbs, and is expected to see 30,000 cars rolling over it a day. That’s a pretty poor minutes-to-dollars ratio, but from the sounds of it Qingdao is on the up-and-up and the addition of the bridge could boost the region’s economy.

Of course, part of the problem with something this massive is making sure it stays up. The Qingdao Haiwan Bridge sits atop 5,200 columns and is designed to withstand anything from a 8.0 earthquake to a fierce typhoon.

(found via BoingBoing)

120mm:

Aerogel

“Also known as frozen smoke, Aerogel is the world’s lowest density solid, clocking in at 96% air. It’s basically just a gel made from silicon, except all the liquid has been taken out and replaced with gas instead. If you hold a small piece in your hand, it’s practically impossible to either see or feel, but if you poke it, it’s like styrofoam.

Aerogel isn’t just neat, it’s useful. It supports up to 4,000 times its own weight and can apparently withstand a direct blast from two pounds of dynamite. It’s also the best insulator in existence, which is why we don’t have Aerogel jackets: it works so well that people were complaining about overheating on Mt. Everest.”

dorka:

cavesingers:

Why Old Books Smell Good

“Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.” 

do-nothing:

“100 Million Collisions per Second” —CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Smashes Closer to Unlocking Secrets of the Universe

queerrilla:

ruineshumaines:

Best-Ever Snapshot of a Black Hole’s Jets (by NASA Goddard Photo and Video)

NASA image release May 20, 2011

To see a really cool video related to this image go here: www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5740451675/in/photostream

This composite of visible, microwave (orange) and X-ray (blue) data reveals the jets and radio-emitting lobes emanating from Centaurus A’s central black hole. Credit: ESO/WFI (visible); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (microwave); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)

To read more go to: www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/radio-particle-jets…

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

WHOA…

sunfoundation:

A Map of the Universe, 10 Years In the Making

“Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have created a map of the universe called the 2MASS Redshift Survey. The astronomers put in 10 laborious years in creating the map and it is what they call the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created.

starryuniverse:

Haunting patterns within planetary nebula NGC 6543 readily suggest its popular moniker — the Cat’s Eye nebula.  The swirls of this glowing nebula are known to be the gaseous shroud expelled from a dying sun-like star about 3,000 light-years from Earth. Gazing into the Cat’s Eye, astronomers see the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution … in about 5 billion years.

(Source: thestarrymessengerr)

lucysdiamond:

“The Crab Nebula is the remains of star that went supernova, which was seen from Earth in the year 1054. At the center, is a pulsar, which is only about the size of Washington DC and spins 30 times a second. The energy emitted from it is 100 times more powerful than the strongest particle accelerators on Earth.”