#star hole

[nasa]

A Tour of Cosmic Temperatures

We often think of space as “cold,” but its temperature can vary enormously depending on where you visit. If the difference between summer and winter on Earth feels extreme, imagine the range of temperatures between the coldest and hottest places in the universe — it’s trillions of degrees! So let’s take a tour of cosmic temperatures … from the coldest spots to the hottest temperatures yet achieved.

First, a little vocabulary: Astronomers use the Kelvin temperature scale, which is represented by the symbol K. Going up by 1 K is the same as going up 1°C, but the scale begins at 0 K, or -273°C, which is also called absolute zero. This is the temperature where the atoms in stuff stop moving. We’ll measure our temperatures in this tour in kelvins, but also convert them to make them more familiar!

We’ll start on the chilly end of the scale with our CAL (Cold Atom Lab) on the International Space Station, which can chill atoms to within one ten billionth of a degree above 0 K, just a fraction above absolute zero.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Just slightly warmer is the Resolve sensor inside XRISM, pronounced “crism,” short for the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission. This is an international collaboration led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) with NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). Resolve operates at one twentieth of a degree above 0 K. Why? To measure the heat from individual X-rays striking its 36 pixels!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Resolve and CAL are both colder than the Boomerang Nebula, the coldest known region in the cosmos at just 1 K! This cloud of dust and gas left over from a Sun-like star is about 5,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists are studying why it’s colder than the natural background temperature of deep space.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Let’s talk about some temperatures closer to home. Icy gas giant Neptune is the coldest major planet. It has an average temperature of 72 K at the height in its atmosphere where the pressure is equivalent to sea level on Earth. Explore how that compares to other objects in our solar system!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

How about Earth? According to NOAA, Death Valley set the world’s surface air temperature record on July 10, 1913. This record of 330 K has yet to be broken — but recent heat waves have come close. (If you’re curious about the coldest temperature measured on Earth, that’d be 183.95 K (-128.6°F or -89.2°C) at Vostok Station, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.)

We monitor Earth's global average temperature to understand how our planet is changing due to human activities. Last year, 2023, was the warmest year on our record, which stretches back to 1880.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

The inside of our planet is even hotter. Earth’s inner core is a solid sphere made of iron and nickel that’s about 759 miles (1,221 kilometers) in radius. It reaches temperatures up to 5,600 K.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We might assume stars would be much hotter than our planet, but the surface of Rigel is only about twice the temperature of Earth’s core at 11,000 K. Rigel is a young, blue star in the constellation Orion, and one of the brightest stars in our night sky.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger 

We study temperatures on large and small scales. The electrons in hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, can be stripped away from their atoms in a process called ionization at a temperature around 158,000 K. When these electrons join back up with ionized atoms, light is produced. Ionization is what makes some clouds of gas and dust, like the Orion Nebula, glow.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We already talked about the temperature on a star’s surface, but the material surrounding a star gets much, much hotter! Our Sun’s surface is about 5,800 K (10,000°F or 5,500°C), but the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, called the corona, can reach millions of kelvins.

Our Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona in 2021, helping us answer questions like why it is so much hotter than the Sun's surface. This is one of the mysteries of the Sun that solar scientists have been trying to figure out for years.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Looking for a hotter spot? Located about 240 million light-years away, the Perseus galaxy cluster contains thousands of galaxies. It’s surrounded by a vast cloud of gas heated up to tens of millions of kelvins that glows in X-ray light. Our telescopes found a giant wave rolling through this cluster’s hot gas, likely due to a smaller cluster grazing it billions of years ago.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Now things are really starting to heat up! When massive stars — ones with eight times the mass of our Sun or more — run out of fuel, they put on a show. On their way to becoming black holes or neutron stars, these stars will shed their outer layers in a supernova explosion. These layers can reach temperatures of 300 million K!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman

We couldn’t explore cosmic temperatures without talking about black holes. When stuff gets too close to a black hole, it can become part of a hot, orbiting debris disk with a conical corona swirling above it. As the material churns, it heats up and emits light, making it glow. This hot environment, which can reach temperatures of a billion kelvins, helps us find and study black holes even though they don’t emit light themselves.

JAXA’s XRISM telescope, which we mentioned at the start of our tour, uses its supercool Resolve detector to explore the scorching conditions around these intriguing, extreme objects.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Our universe’s origins are even hotter. Just one second after the big bang, our tiny, baby universe consisted of an extremely hot — around 10 billion K — “soup” of light and particles. It had to cool for a few minutes before the first elements could form. The oldest light we can see, the cosmic microwave background, is from about 380,000 years after the big bang, and shows us the heat left over from these earlier moments.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We’ve ventured far in distance and time … but the final spot on our temperature adventure is back on Earth! Scientists use the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to smash teensy particles together at superspeeds to simulate the conditions of the early universe. In 2012, they generated a plasma that was over 5 trillion K, setting a world record for the highest human-made temperature.

Want this tour as a poster? You can download it here in a vertical or horizontal version!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Explore the wonderful and weird cosmos with NASA Universe on X, Facebook, and Instagram. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[inky-axolotl]

Decided to redraw that one Obi Wan drawing I did- *checks time* 4 years ago! Happy to say I’ve grown a bit in the past 4 years art wise.

(2020 one here)

[lucabyte]

hole

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 257

Now Danny loves space. He loves everything about it, to the point his core quite literally is space. And he’s also a baby ghost, even if he could argue he’s not in human form. But see, being baby has an honestly great consequence once it’s noticed- despite the Observants’ best attempts at hiding it, the assholes. 

Of course he would be far more worried- and even a bit pissed- if his caretaker wasn’t who it was. Look, he’d never met Clockwork’s siblings before, but apparently everyone was really against Clockwork himself adopting. 

But Clockwork as his uncle is fine. Besides, his caretaker is Space! Space itself is holding him, cooing gentle words in the sounds of the very cosmos. And they’re huge, like parts of their body going through portals so they can fit outside Long-Now sized big- and apparently Clockwork can get just as big and they can get even bigger- 

Okay, he needs to take a breath- even if he doesn’t need to breathe- to stop his squealing because holy Realms this is so cool. 

Space is awesome! And he’s getting so much more rest than he did in Amity- and even if Space sort of shrugged at the idea of school at first, they did help him set up online schooling. So there’s that, and it’s just the start! 

He gets to learn so much about space and it’s honestly kind of… nice? To be taken care of? And he can do whatever he needs for his Core and Obsession with only a few interruptions to take care of his living needs. Erm, sort of living needs? 

But even that gets turned into a bit of play or even a lesson too! He’s honestly having such a good time right now! He’s learning so much about spaaace! And dimensions! And interdimensional portals and- oops! No one saw that. 

Ahem- But he’s learning so much about space and getting to explore other dimensions with Cosmos! And sure he no longer looks as human as he once did and all that, but he’s seen so many people who also don’t look human that does it really matter? 

Of course it doesn’t, and he matches his sort-of-dad! Even though the streaks of color in their hair are more of a brown-red like they’re literally bleeding out the cosmos around them instead of it fading to void and space like his own. But still! They match and it’s fun! 

And they’re going to go on another trip from the in-between to one of the dimension realities! He’s going to start a game of tag this time he thinks! But no cheating with portals or bending space! Tag! 

Look, the Justice League? Not paid enough for this. In fact, technically not paid at all due to being volunteers (not that it stopped them from finding money in their accounts) but still. 

There is some sort of figure… being… thing… zooming around the asteroid belt, about the size of Earth itself. Let them repeat themselves. A planet-sized creature (are those hands or paws? Tail or simply its body stretching? Hair or the Abyss-) is currently darting around the asteroid belt like a child running through grass. 

That is, without noticing or caring if something bug-sized might be crushed. And they are very much bug sized, as the governments are concerned about. Like really concerned about. Like talking about trying to nuke the entity if it wanders closer sort of concerned. 

Which they are all very concerned and very much like, against. Because it isn’t seeming to notice the asteroids it’s knocking into their area. It’s like… not a space whale or eel or anything like that but also is something like that. 

And they would also maybe like to see if they can attempt to talk it down first maybe and-

oh. 

Oh. 

That creature is the baby. And mama just arrived, stretching across the entire galaxy, from them to Pluto and beyond, like something took the cosmos and shaped it like clay into some sort of form. Like reality itself has wandered into their galaxy with what they are suddenly realizing must be a very young child. 

Shit, they really have to make sure no one tries to piss either of these things off-

[remxedmoon]

black hole.

(full version below! also, tap to see the full effect!)

aaaaa i saw this trend on twitter and had to hop on the bandwagon!! and of course i had to play around with transparency again. it’s enrichment for me. also!! shoutout to this drawing for giving me actual wrist pain. not from actually drawing or anything but from having to resize the pieces 20 times because discord wouldn’t display them properly. but hey it turned out cool and that’s all that matters heart emoji

anyways!! here’s the full version + the version without the star! because for Some Reason i fully rendered the coin knowing it would get covered up. miseries!

[anxiousapplepie]

Siffrin's always giving everyone flowers so it's only fair they get flowers in return too, right?

[53v3nfrn5]

No one has ever seen a black hole, but in 2019, scientists presented the silhouette of one at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy more than 50 million light-years away. photo: LIA MEDEIROS from National Geographic (oct. 2023)

[qimir-the-stranger]

We get it, Disney. We get it.

Star Wars is not for women.

Star Wars is not for Black people.

Star Wars is not for Asian people.

Star Wars is not for Queer people.

Star Wars is not for anyone who is marginalized and has different lived experiences.

Nope. Star Wars is ONLY for cishet white men. We hear you loud and clear. We know you don’t care about us at all.

[emthimofnight]

May we hear more of this "dark" version of Stellar👀?

have some angst I drew surrounding this exact subject :)

[maxxxthewpoet]

Jesus bless us and save us from hell.

[three-fold-symmetry]

Crawling out of the hole I disappeared into to post the art I did for day 3 of @sithobiwanevent.

[nasa]

Black Hole Friday Deals!

Get these deals before they are sucked into a black hole and gone forever! This “Black Hole Friday,” we have some cosmic savings that are sure to be out of this world.

Your classic black holes — the ultimate storage solution.

Galactic 5-for-1 special! Learn more about Stephan’s Quintet.

Limited-time offer game DLC! Try your hand at the Roman Space Observer Video Game, Black Hole edition, available this weekend only.

Standard candles: Exploding stars that are reliably bright. Multi-functional — can be used to measure distances in space!

Feed the black hole in your stomach. Spaghettification’s on the menu.

Act quickly before the stars in this widow system are gone!

Add some planets to your solar system! Grab our Exoplanet Bundle.

Get ready to ride this (gravitational) wave before this Black Hole Merger ends!

Be the center of attention in this stylish accretion disk skirt. Made of 100% recycled cosmic material.

Should you ever travel to a black hole? No. But if you do, here’s a free guide to make your trip as safe* as possible. *Note: black holes are never safe. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[thresholdbb]

Admiral Janeway's adding espresso shots to her coffee black now. Icon behavior

[lucabyte]

A belief in Nominative Determinsim

[ryllen]

OH NO CRINGEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

.

[spacewonder19]

NGC 1275 Core with a black hole © Hubble