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What Is The Cosmic Microwave Background?

cosmic microwave background

The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in the universe, imprinted on the sky when the universe was just a baby in cosmic terms.

It is essentially the afterglow radiation from the hot, dense state of the universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang, a time known as the recombination era. At this point, the universe had cooled enough for protons and electrons to combine into neutral hydrogen atoms, allowing photons (light particles) to travel freely for the first time without being constantly scattered by charged particles.

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Picture of the Day

pale blue dot

That dot is Earth. A mote of dust, suspended between the rings of Saturn, photographed by the Cassini spacecraft at a distance of 1.4 billion kilometers.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

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Which Direction Is The Big Bang?

mark cuban cost plus drugs

The one misconception most people have regarding the Big Bang is the idea that the Big Bang originated from a singular point IN space – but that’s not the case! Instead, the entirety of our current 3D space WAS a singular point (this is difficult to picture, since we can’t really imagine a 3D-point without any 3D-space surrounding it, but that’s exactly what it was).

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Picture of the Day

NASA’s innovative AX-3 spacesuit

NASA’s innovative AX-3 spacesuit, 1970s

The AX-3 was designed at NASA Ames Research Center in the middle 1970s. A prototype, it was created to prove that a highly mobile suit requiring little effort to operate could use an internal operating pressure of 8 pounds per square inch.

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Picture of the Day

ham chimpanzee

Ham, the chimp who was the first hominid in space, trained by NASA to operate a capsule in space. His trainer described the moment he was recovered from his capsule following the project – “I have never seen such terror on a chimp’s face”

Ham was born in 1957 in a rainforest in the Central African nation of Cameroon, then a French territory. He was captured and taken to an astronaut school for chimps at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The astrochimps were trained to pull levers, with a banana pellet as a reward and an electric shock to the feet for failure. The chosen chimp would test life support systems and demonstrate that equipment could be operated during spaceflight. Ham showed great aptitude, and was selected the day before the flight.

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Picture of the Day

This is what the toilet on the International Space Station looks like

In 2018, NASA spent $23 million on a new and improved toilet for astronauts on the International Space Station. To get around the problems of zero-gravity bathroom breaks, the new toilet is a specially designed vacuum toilet. There are two parts: a hose with a funnel at the end for peeing and a small raised toilet seat for pooping.

The bathroom is full of handholds and footholds so that astronauts don’t drift off in the middle of their business. To pee, they can sit or stand and then hold the funnel and hose tightly against their skin so that nothing leaks out.

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Picture of the Day

black hole picture

The second ever picture of a black hole was just released

Two years after producing the first-ever image of a black hole, an international team of researchers has released an updated view of the magnetic fields surrounding it — a development they say brings them one step closer to understanding the M87 galaxy’s ability to “launch energetic jets from its core.”

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Picture of the Day

ryugu asteroid

This photograph was taken on the surface of asteroid Ryugu by the Hayabusa 2 mission. The rocky boulders resemble a rare type of meteorite — carbonaceous chondrites — that we find here on Earth after they fall from the sky.

The Hayabusa 2 mission’s return to Earth earlier this month completed a six-year round-trip mission to asteroid Ryugu. The craft launched in December 2014 aboard a Japanese H-2A rocket, and arrived near Ryugu in 2018 to begin several months of surveys before attempting the first landing.

The spacecraft dropped a fleet of landers and rovers to the explore the asteroid’s surface in late 2018, including a hopping robot developed by engineers in Germany and France.

Scientists are eager to analyse the specimens, which they expect may contain organic molecules. Researchers believe asteroids like Ryugu, or a larger body like the one from which Ryugu split off, could have seeded Earth with the ingredients necessary for life.

Hayabusa 2 departed Ryugu in November 2019 to begin the year-long trip back to Earth.

Picture of the Day

james webb space telescope

NASA is about to launch a telescope that can witness the creation of stars and planets 13.8 billion years ago

The James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch in 2021. The Webb telescope will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.

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