Space is a Cruel Mistress

Shocking right! Even though the Hubble telescope has shown us many beautiful images of nebulas, galaxies, and stars, at the same time it has shown us chaos and pure natural destruction.  Here are two examples of the theme "Beauty and the Beast."

The Eagle Nebula

This is the Eagle Nebula, which looks amazing.  But first what is a nebula, well a nebula is just a giant cloud of dust, helium, hydrogen and ionized gas in space. These huge clouds are light years across and this one is around 9.5 light years across.  But what is so amazing about these nebula is that they are a great source of material to form new stars.  When the dust and gasses clump up together they will start the process of creating new stars and even exoplanets of many kinds and forms.  From afar we see a beautiful cloud filled with beauty, but upon a closer look, there is huge amounts of collapses happening around, material flying around, temperatures reaching thousands of Kelvin just an environment of chaos and disorder in order to form new stars and systems.

This picture is a section of the Eager nebula, known as the Pillars of Creation, where currently many new stars are being born in huge amounts. 

NGC 6503

This galaxy know as NGC 6503 has an amazing color spectrum.  It shows red and blue stars all around it, and huge amounts of dust lanes with in it as well. All this shows that the galaxy is very active, it has many old stars, and new ones forming, which are filled by the abundant dust and material with in itself.  Even though this galaxy looks very active and promising it is located in a region of space where it is practically alone.  Galaxies have only so much material to keep it going, once a galaxy has exhausted its resources most of its stars will die off and eventually the galaxy will turn OFF and freeze all the planets with in it.  Every galaxy has this fate in store, but fortunately there are galaxy clusters where many galaxies surround each other, and some of these eventually collide with one another to make an even bigger galaxy.  When this happens the galaxy is able to live longer since it has more material and resources, but for GNC 6503 it is literally alone with no galaxy near it to provide more material, This is one of the loneliest places in the galaxy, even though it contains billions of star systems. 


Sources:
http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/lonely-galaxy-lost-in-space

Atlantic Ocean Currents and Climate Change

As we have seen in these past few years and specially past few months, temperatures have been rising and are now in an all record high.  For the month of October 2015, The city of downtown Los Angeles reported an average temperature of 75.6 degrees which broke the previous record of 71.6 degrees set in 1983.  The city of San Diego reported an average temperature of around 73 degrees which was 7 degrees higher from the previous record, and South Africa reported on the October 27, 2015 the highest recorded temperature in human history of 119 degrees. Now a group of NASA and university scientist are planning to measure how currents in the Atlantic Ocean change over time, to see how these changes affect climate change.  The current carries warm water north and as the water travels north it cools down and becomes denser, which makes it sink deeper into the ocean.  At this point the current carries the colder water back down south and as it travels south it distributes nutrients and heat into the ocean.  So this current is responsible of distributing heat and energy through out the Atlantic cooling of the excess heat.  But now the current called AMOC is gradually slowing down which means that less water is being carried and cooling down.  So warm waters will get warmer, which increase temperature around the Earth, and also provide more fuel for hurricanes making them more dangerous.  The satellite called GRACE will be used to measure the data of how much mass of the water on the Earths surface changes, and by doing this we will be able to see how the ocean pressure changes over time, and how it affects the surroundings. 

 Here is an artist picture of how the satellites will be measuring the ocean directly below.

Information gotten from:

http://news.yahoo.com/blistering-october-temperatures-continue-hottest-record-222400245.htmlhttp://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-finds-new-way-to-track-ocean-currents-from-space