Twitter’s move comes a day before Meta launches its own text-based app called Threads.
Is this the cage match I was promised? Boo
Lol you’re fine. Solar flares won’t hurt us, thanks to the atmosphere. They may hurt communication systems though. If your GPS goes crazy, you know who to blame.
NASA’s short blog on it -> blogs.nasa.gov/solarcycle25/2023/07/03/sun-releases-strong-solar-flare-6/
Copying the contents here to save you a click
The Sun emitted a strong solar flare, peaking at 7:14 p.m. ET on July 2, 2023. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event.
Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy. Flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals, and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts.
This flare is classified as an X1.0 flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength.
To see how such space weather may affect Earth, please visit NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center https://spaceweather.gov/, the U.S. government’s official source for space weather forecasts, watches, warnings, and alerts. NASA works as a research arm of the nation’s space weather effort. NASA observes the Sun and our space environment constantly with a fleet of spacecraft that study everything from the Sun’s activity to the solar atmosphere, and to the particles and magnetic fields in the space surrounding Earth.
I see, I just finished reading an article myself and you are absolutely correct. Thanks for sharing. I’ll delete this thread.
Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up most of the universe, but we can’t see these phenomena in wavelengths of light. Rather, we can track the dark universe through its effects on other objects. (Gravitational lensing is one example, when a massive object bends the light of a distant object behind through the force of gravity, bringing otherwise faraway stars or galaxies into sharp focus.)
Cosmologists — scientists studying the history of space — seek to understand how the dark universe behaves to chart the effects of time on our cosmos. The mergers of galaxies, the expansion of the universe and the movements of individual stars are all subject to the forces of dark energy and dark matter.
The Euclid space observatory, which is designed to seek out invisible dark matter and dark energy, is expected to separate from its rocket 40 minutes after liftoff and will then make a distant journey to the sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, which is roughly 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away from our planet on the opposite side of the sun. Lagrange points are relatively stable orbits where satellites use a minimum of fuel, and Euclid’s destination is a popular location: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope also orbits at L2, for example.
See the image feature from NASA here -> nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-checks-in-on-a-galactic-neighbor
The highly irregular galaxy ESO 174-1, which resembles a lonely, hazy cloud against a backdrop of bright stars, dominates this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. ESO 174-1 lies around 11 million light-years from Earth and consists of a bright cloud of stars and a faint, meandering tendril of dark gas and dust.
This image is part of a collection of Hubble observations designed to better understand our nearby galactic neighbors. The observations aim to resolve the brightest stars and basic properties of every known galaxy within 10 megaparsecs. A parsec is a unit used by astronomers to measure the vast distances to other galaxies – 10 megaparsecs translates to 32 million light-years – and makes astronomical distances easier to handle. For example, the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is about 1.3 parsecs away. In everyday units this is a staggering 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km)!
The program to capture all of our neighboring galaxies was designed to use the 2-3% of Hubble time available between observations. It’s inefficient for Hubble to make back-to-back observations of objects that are in opposite parts of the sky. Observing programs like the one that captured ESO 174-1 fill the gaps between other observations. This way the telescope can move gradually from one observation to another, while still collecting data. These fill-in observing programs make the most out of every last minute of Hubble’s observing time.
Monochrome infrared imaging, wavelength of 3.23 microns color mapped to orange hue. Source (pg. 2)
An excerpt:
Methane gas absorbs almost all the sunlight falling on the atmosphere at this picture’s specific infrared wavelength (3.23 microns). As a result, Saturn’s familiar striped patterns aren’t visible because the methane-rich upper atmosphere blocks our view of the primary clouds. Instead, Saturn’s disk appears dark, and we see features associated with high-altitude stratospheric aerosols, including large, dark, and diffuse structures in Saturn’s northern hemisphere that don’t align with the planet’s lines of latitude. Unlike Saturn’s atmosphere, its rings lack methane, so at this infrared wavelength, they are no darker than usual and thus easily outshine the darkened planet.
See the official press release by SETI institute here -> seti.org/press-release/new-image-james-webb-space-telescope-reveals-astonishing-saturn-and-its-rings
Neutrinos can interact with matter via the weak force, which is so weak and short ranged that most neutrinos incident on matter just pass through it. However, you can imagine if a HUGE chunk of neutrinos falls on matter, at least a few are bound to interact, statistically speaking. These interactions are like collisions, and the collision may result in generation of new particles. If these new particles are energetic enough, they emit a special type of radiation, which can be detected through sensors. So, you’re not directly capturing neutrinos, but are making the inference that they are there, because you know a weak force interaction has taken place if your sensor goes off. And to make sure something like cosmic radiation doesn’t affect detection, this particular detector is isolated under a huge sheet of ice in Antarctica.
Read more here -> interactions.org/press-release/our-galaxy-seen-through-new-lens-neutrinos-detected-icecube
See also comparison picture of the Milky Way as depicted with visible light and with neutrinos
The posted image is a composite of both; the neutrino depiction of the galaxy is in blue
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