aspaceinthecosmos

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no one saw me reblog that to the wrong blog

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Happy 35th anniversary to the Hubble Space Telescope! 🥳 Celebrate with an array of compelling images recently taken by the esteemed observatory: Mars, dramatic views of stellar birth and death, and a magnificent galaxy. After more than three decades of investigating the restless universe, Hubble remains a household name as the most well-recognized telescope in scientific history. The mission is a glowing success story of humanity’s technological prowess and unyielding scientific curiosity: https://bit.ly/4jjsAs7

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Total Lunar Eclipse, Blood Worm Moon © astronycc

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Happy International Women's Day!

Women are underrepresented in the fields of astronomy and physics. According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU), between 20-30% of astronomers are women. While many well-known astronomers are men, there have been numerous female astronomers in history who have made incredible discoveries, but who history has forgotten. Today we'll go over some of those women and their accomplishments.

Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941)

Annie Jump Cannon is the woman responsible for our current stellar classification system, which organizes stars based on spectral types and temperature.

She worked at Harvard Observatory as a computer, working on the Henry Draper Catalogue, which attempted to map and classify all the stars in the sky. She was regarded as the best out of the computers, being able to accurately classify the stars incredibly quickly, up to three stars per minute.

Cannon's classification system (O, B, A, F, G, K, M) is still in use today, and separates stars into one of these spectral groups based on different characteristics of their absorption lines.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921)

Henrietta Leavitt is most well known for her discovery of the period-luminosity relationship of Cepheid variable stars.

Henrietta Leavitt was also a computer at Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s and early 1900s, working on cataloguing positions and luminosities of stars. In 1912, Edward Pickering published a paper with Leavitt's observations, which contained a relationship between the brightness of the Cepheid and the logarithm of the period of it.

This discovery, and the ensuing P-L relationship (sometimes known as Leavitt's Law), allowed astronomers to determine the distance to further objects. Because Cepheids are visible in nearby galaxies, astronomers were able to determine that these galaxies (or nebulae, as they were called then), were actually much further away than previously thought, leading to our current understanding of the universe and galaxies outside our own.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979)

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the first astronomer to conclude that stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium.

At the time her thesis was proposed in 1925, it was thought that the sun had a similar elemental composition as the Earth. Payne-Gaposchkin, however, had studied quantum physics, and recognized that the differences in absorption lines between different stars was due to ionization and temperature differences, not elemental differences, and that stars were primarily made of hydrogen and helium, with heavier elements making up less than two percent of stars' masses.

Her theory was met with resistance, and she even put a disclaimer in her thesis, saying the results were "almost certainly not real" in order to protect her career. She was, however, proven right within a few years, and her discovery shaped our knowledge of the composition of the universe.

Vera C. Rubin (1928-2016)

Vera Rubin is most well known for studying the rotation curves of galaxies, and finding a discrepancy that didn't align with the current understanding of physics. This discovery was used as evidence of dark matter, as proposed by Zwicky in the 1930s.

Rubin discovered that spiral galaxies didn't rotate as expected. When looking at our solar system, the outer planets orbit slower due to the inverse square nature of gravity. However, this decaying rotation curve wasn't what was found in spiral galaxies - rather, the outer edges of the galaxies were rotating at about the same speed as the inner areas.

According to Rubin's calculations, galaxies contained 5-10 times more mass than what was accounted for with visible matter. This supported the dark matter theory, and resulted in the current "anatomy" of galaxies, with the visible matter surrounded by a dark matter halo.

Jocelyn Bell (1943-present)

Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars among a sea of data as a graduate student at Cambridge.

Pulsars (shortened from pulsating radio stars) are rapidly rotating neutron stars, which emit bursts of radiation at extremely short and consistent time intervals.

Bell discovered these, and published the findings in a paper with her thesis supervisor, Antony Hewish. in 1974, Hewish received the Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery, while Bell was omitted, due to her status as both a woman and a graduate student. In 2018, she was awarded the Breakthrough prize in Fundamental Physics for her discovery, and used the three million dollar reward to help minorities in physics.

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Analemma. The sun’s position in the sky, photographed from the same location at the same time of day throughout a year, forms an analemma. This shows the sun’s apparent swinging from its northernmost position, at the analemma’s uppermost point, at summer solstice, to its southernmost position/lowest point, at winter solstice.

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A portion of Leo P dwarf galaxy l Webb

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this is so funny to me i’ve had like five posts blow up w over 30k reblogs each and NOW you give me an achievement for FIVE single reblogs akdbksjd

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Over the last several months, engineers have been at work in the clean room at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, putting together the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The Coronagraph Instrument—a technology demonstration designed to image exoplanets—and Optical Telescope Assembly—which includes the primary mirror and nine additional mirrors—are now attached to the Instrument Carrier.

With those components in place, the team then added Roman’s primary instrument, the Wide Field Instrument. This 300-megapixel infrared camera will give Roman a deep, panoramic view of the universe.

The observatory is on track for completion by fall 2026 and launch no later than May 2027.

Credit: NASA, Chris Gunn, and Sydney Rohde.

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trick or treat !!!!

you get an infrared image of the pleiades!

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I know I'm late, but trick or treat please!

hello hello! you get the orion nebula :)

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TRICK OR TREAT!! 👻 🎃

ahhh i can’t believe i missed this one!

you get the hubble deep field image!

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TRICK OR TREAT !!!

happy halloween! you get the orion molecular cloud complex!

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Trick orrr treaaaattttt🌛🌜🌛🌜🌛🌜

omg my beloved mutual! you get this cool nebula that i don’t remember the name of i just found it saved in my photos <3

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　　　　　○＿＿＿＿＿

∥ trick or |

∥ treat!! |

∥￣￣￣￣￣￣

∧_∧ ∥

(`･ω･ ) ∥

ヽ つ０

し―Ｊ

a cat! you get the cats eye nebula!

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Trick or treat!! >w<

you get the hubble pillars of creation my beloved <3

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trick or treat ?👻

happy halloween!

you get the crab nebula! (my favorite!)

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please keep sending me trick or treat asks i need to procrastinate studying for my midterms and instead just look at pretty space pictures