Steps into Space - Commercialisation, Occupation, Colonization: 10/31/13

Thursday, 31 October 2013

Crab Nebula Case iPad Mini Cover

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!

here's a design from one of the greats - windyone,
another talented creative from the Zazzle community!

Crab Nebula Case iPad Mini Cover

tagged with: crab, nebula, space, astronomy, crab nebula, universe, celestial

An image of the Supernova explosion of Crab Nebula by NASA’S Hubble Space Telescope on a .

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The Zazzle Promise: We promise 100% satisfaction. If you don't absolutely love it, we'll take it back!

Monogram Celestial Bauble - SXP1062 space picture Lamps

Here's a great lamp featuring a beautiful image from deep in outer space

Monogram Celestial Bauble - SXP1062 space picture Lamps

tagged with: sculptured gas clouds, star incubator, star galaxies, outer space picture, sxp1062, supernova remnant, small magellanic cloud, smc, deep space astronomy, monogram initials, star factory, hot young stars

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series In this composite image, X-rays from Chandra and XMM-Newton have been colored blue and optical data from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile are colored red and green. The flowering shape on the left is a star factory and on the right is the pulsar. Known as SXP 1062, it's the bright white source located on the right-hand side of the image in the middle of the diffuse blue emission inside a red shell. The diffuse X-rays and optical shell are both evidence for a supernova remnant surrounding the pulsar. The optical data also displays spectacular formations of gas and dust in a star-forming region on the left side of the image. A comparison of the Chandra image with optical images shows that the pulsar has a hot, massive companion.
Astronomers are interested in SXP 1062 because the Chandra and XMM-Newton data show that it is rotating unusually slowly - about once every 18 minutes. (In contrast, some pulsars are found to revolve multiple times per second, including most newly born pulsars.) This relatively leisurely pace of SXP 1062 makes it one of the slowest rotating X-ray pulsars in the SMC.
Two different teams of scientists have estimated that the supernova remnant around SXP 1062 is between 10,000 and 40,000 years old, as it appears in the image. This means that the pulsar is very young, from an astronomical perspective, since it was presumably formed in the same explosion that produced the supernova remnant.
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image code: sxp1062

Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al & ESA/XMM-Newton; Optical: AURA/NOAO/CTIO/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al

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Click to fill in your monogram initials.
via Zazzle Astronomy market place

Celebrating the legacy of ESA's Planck mission

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From the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang to the evolution of stars and galaxies over 13.8 billion years, ESA's Planck space telescope has provided new insight into the history of our Universe. Although science observations are now complete, the legacy of the Planck mission lives on.

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Astronomers see misaligned planets in distant system

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Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system featuring multiple planets orbiting at a severe tilt to their host star.

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Physicists prove Heisenberg's intuition correct

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An international team of scientists has provided proof of a key feature of quantum physics – Heisenberg's error-disturbance relation - more than 80 years after it was first suggested.

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Most distant gravitational lens helps weigh galaxies

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An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational lens yet—a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a distant galaxy. But it also poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare. Given this and other recent finds, astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky—or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially the number of small, very young galaxies in the early Universe.

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Habitable zone super Jupiter-sized exoplanet found in Milky Way bulge

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(Phys.org) —A multinational team of astronomers has discovered the existence of a large (four times the size of Jupiter) sized exoplanet lurking in the Milky Way bulge—the first discovery of its kind. The team has reported on their findings in a paper they've uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.

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Fat black holes grown up in cities: 'Observational' result using Virtual Observatory

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Massive black holes of more than one million solar masses exist at the center of most galaxies. Some of the massive black holes are observed as active galactic nuclei (AGN) which attract surrounding gas and release huge amounts of energy.

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Magnetic 'force field' shields giant gas cloud during collision with Milky Way

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Doom may be averted for the Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas that is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers have discovered a magnetic field deep in the cloud’s interior, which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk of our Galaxy.

via Science Daily

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Magnetic 'force field' shields giant gas cloud during collision with Milky Way

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(Phys.org) —Doom may be averted for the Smith Cloud, a gigantic streamer of hydrogen gas that is on a collision course with the Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a magnetic field deep in the cloud's interior, which may protect it during its meteoric plunge into the disk of our Galaxy.

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Making electrical contact along 1-D edge of 2-D materials

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Scientists have demonstrated it is possible for an atomically thin two-dimensional material to have electrical contact along its one-dimensional edge. The contact architecture offers a new assembly technique for layered materials that prevents contamination at interfaces.

via Science Daily

New techniques produce cleanest graphene yet

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Researchers demonstrate for the first time that it's possible to electrically contact an atomically thin 2D material only along its 1D edge. With this new contact architecture, they've developed a new assembly technique for layered materials that prevents contamination at the interfaces, and, using graphene as the model 2D material, show that these two methods in combination result in the cleanest graphene yet realized.

via Science Daily

Happy Halloween 2013: Rainbow Dash edition!

“I’m not ashamed to dress ‘like a woman’ because I don’t think it’s shameful to be a woman.” – Iggy Pop

Well folks, it’s that time of year once again: to share my favorite holiday with you and change my digital avatar for the next 365 days! Traditionally, I’ve dressed as superhero-figures from my childhood, but I wanted to switch it up a little bit this year. This year, my halloween costume is based on Rainbow Dash.

Image credit: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Season 1 Episode 16, via http://mlp.wikia.com/.

For those of you who’ve never encountered the new My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic television show (recommended by me), there are six main characters: all female, all ponies (two pegasi, two unicorns, and two “Earth ponies”), and all with different personalities and inner struggles. Rainbow dash is loyal, brave, and the most talented flyer in the land, but she’s also insecure, easily annoyed, proud and a bit of a braggart.

Image credit: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Season 2 Episode 7, via http://mlp.wikia.com/.

She also has a pet tortoise named Tank, and dreams of joining the Wonderbolts, which is the My Little Pony equivalent of the crew from Top Gun.

Image credit: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Season 1 Episode 3, via http://mlp.wikia.com/.

There’s no reason you shouldn’t dress up as a character of another gender (or species) for Halloween, so even though this was a bit of a unique challenge this year, it was one I was excited to take on!

Without further ado, here’s my take on a Rainbow Dash costume! (With some dog photobombs.)