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When Dead Stars Collide!

Gravity has been making waves - literally.  Earlier this month, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the first direct detection of gravitational waves two years ago. But astronomers just announced another huge advance in the field of gravitational waves - for the first time, we’ve observed light and gravitational waves from the same source.

There was a pair of orbiting neutron stars in a galaxy (called NGC 4993). Neutron stars are the crushed leftover cores of massive stars (stars more than 8 times the mass of our sun) that long ago exploded as supernovas. There are many such pairs of binaries in this galaxy, and in all the galaxies we can see, but something special was about to happen to this particular pair.

Each time these neutron stars orbited, they would lose a teeny bit of gravitational energy to gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are disturbances in space-time - the very fabric of the universe - that travel at the speed of light. The waves are emitted by any mass that is changing speed or direction, like this pair of orbiting neutron stars. However, the gravitational waves are very faint unless the neutron stars are very close and orbiting around each other very fast.

As luck would have it, the teeny energy loss caused the two neutron stars to get a teeny bit closer to each other and orbit a teeny bit faster.  After hundreds of millions of years, all those teeny bits added up, and the neutron stars were *very* close. So close that … BOOM! … they collided. And we witnessed it on Earth on August 17, 2017.  

Credit: National Science Foundation/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet

A couple of very cool things happened in that collision - and we expect they happen in all such neutron star collisions. Just before the neutron stars collided, the gravitational waves were strong enough and at just the right frequency that the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo could detect them. Just after the collision, those waves quickly faded out because there are no longer two things orbiting around each other!

LIGO is a ground-based detector waiting for gravitational waves to pass through its facilities on Earth. When it is active, it can detect them from almost anywhere in space.

The other thing that happened was what we call a gamma-ray burst. When they get very close, the neutron stars break apart and create a spectacular, but short, explosion. For a couple of seconds, our Fermi Gamma-ray Telescope saw gamma-rays from that explosion. Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor is one of our eyes on the sky, looking out for such bursts of gamma-rays that scientists want to catch as soon as they’re happening.

And those gamma-rays came just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal. The galaxy this occurred in is 130 million light-years away, so the light and gravitational waves were traveling for 130 million years before we detected them.

After that initial burst of gamma-rays, the debris from the explosion continued to glow, fading as it expanded outward. Our Swift, Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer telescopes, along with a number of ground-based observers, were poised to look at this afterglow from the explosion in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray and infrared light. Such coordination between satellites is something that we’ve been doing with our international partners for decades, so we catch events like this one as quickly as possible and in as many wavelengths as possible.

Astronomers have thought that neutron star mergers were the cause of one type of gamma-ray burst - a short gamma-ray burst, like the one they observed on August 17. It wasn’t until we could combine the data from our satellites with the information from LIGO/Virgo that we could confirm this directly.

This event begins a new chapter in astronomy. For centuries, light was the only way we could learn about our universe. Now, we’ve opened up a whole new window into the study of neutron stars and black holes. This means we can see things we could not detect before.

The first LIGO detection was of a pair of merging black holes. Mergers like that may be happening as often as once a month across the universe, but they do not produce much light because there’s little to nothing left around the black hole to emit light. In that case, gravitational waves were the only way to detect the merger.

Image Credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)

The neutron star merger, though, has plenty of material to emit light. By combining different kinds of light with gravitational waves, we are learning how matter behaves in the most extreme environments. We are learning more about how the gravitational wave information fits with what we already know from light - and in the process we’re solving some long-standing mysteries!

Want to know more? Get more information HERE.

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ISRO is the best growing space research organisation and NASA is the pre-established organisation.

Eclipse Across America

August 21, 2017, the United States experienced a solar eclipse! 

An eclipse occurs when the Moon temporarily blocks the light from the Sun. Within the narrow, 60- to 70-mile-wide band stretching from Oregon to South Carolina called the path of totality, the Moon completely blocked out the Sun’s face; elsewhere in North America, the Moon covered only a part of the star, leaving a crescent-shaped Sun visible in the sky.

During this exciting event, we were collecting your images and reactions online. 

Here are a few images of this celestial event…take a look:

This composite image, made from 4 frames, shows the International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, as it transits the Sun at roughly five miles per second during a partial solar eclipse from, Northern Cascades National Park in Washington. Onboard as part of Expedition 52 are: NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson, Jack Fischer, and Randy Bresnik; Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy; and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Paolo Nespoli.

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

The Bailey’s Beads effect is seen as the moon makes its final move over the sun during the total solar eclipse on Monday, August 21, 2017 above Madras, Oregon.

Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

This image from one of our Twitter followers shows the eclipse through tree leaves as crescent shaped shadows from Seattle, WA.

Credit: Logan Johnson

“The eclipse in the palm of my hand”. The eclipse is seen here through an indirect method, known as a pinhole projector, by one of our followers on social media from Arlington, TX.

Credit: Mark Schnyder

Through the lens on a pair of solar filter glasses, a social media follower captures the partial eclipse from Norridgewock, ME.

Credit: Mikayla Chase

While most of us watched the eclipse from Earth, six humans had the opportunity to view the event from 250 miles above on the International Space Station. European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Paolo Nespoli captured this image of the Moon’s shadow crossing America.

Credit: Paolo Nespoli

This composite image shows the progression of a partial solar eclipse over Ross Lake, in Northern Cascades National Park, Washington. The beautiful series of the partially eclipsed sun shows the full spectrum of the event. 

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

In this video captured at 1,500 frames per second with a high-speed camera, the International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, is seen in silhouette as it transits the sun at roughly five miles per second during a partial solar eclipse, Monday, Aug. 21, 2017 near Banner, Wyoming.

Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

To see more images from our NASA photographers, visit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/albums/72157685363271303

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Renewable energy

Humans have been harnessing water power for thousands of years, but in the past century, advancements have made water an integral part of the energy mix in the U.S. From hydropower to the new frontier of marine energy, here are five things you should know about water power. 1. Water power is everywhere Did you know that hydropower projects are in just about every state? Hydropower accounts for about 6% of the nation’s electricity, generating renewable energy for American homes and businesses. It’s projected that U.S. hydropower could still grow from 101 gigawatts (GW) to nearly 150 GW of combined electricity generation and storage capacity by 2050 by unlocking untapped hydropower resources. Marine energy has the potential to generate electricity for millions of homes from predictable and consistent waves and tides along our coasts. Since marine energy is an early-stage market, the Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) makes investments supporting key technology innovations to harness this new frontier of energy. 2. Hydropower plays a major role in maintaining the reliability and the resiliency of the U.S. power grid Hydropower has long been the nation’s largest source of renewable electricity, providing not only baseload energy, but energy storage and essential services to the electric grid. In short, hydropower is the ultimate grid stabilizer — it quickly delivers power after an outage, addresses peak demands, and maintains proper voltage levels and frequencies across the grid, which are all necessary to ensure our energy security. Also, because hydropower can act like a battery by storing energy, it’s complementary to other forms of generation such as wind and solar. Hydropower makes sure power supplies stay constant. The Azura wave energy device at the U.S. Navy's Wave Energy Test Site in Hawaii Northwest Energy Innovations 3. Marine energy can revitalize infrastructure along our coastlines Marine energy is an emerging science and technology sector, with potential to stimulate new industry opportunities, create jobs, and increase manufacturing. Just this year, the Energy Department announced its partnership with Oregon State University to build a world-class wave energy testing facility in the coastal community of Newport, Oregon. This new facility can test up to 20 wave energy converters, allowing smaller nearby ports to take advantage. For example, the Port of Toledo can leverage its maritime resources to support the manufacturing and maintenance of marine equipment needed for the test site. Marine energy can be a source of economic revitalization to communities across the United States as the industry grows. 4. There’s room for more pumped-storage hydropower (PSH) 36 GW of it, in fact. The U.S. PSH fleet provides 97% of our nation’s utility-scale storage—all generated from 42 plants across the country. Because PSH has the ability to function as a battery and integrate variable renewable energy or excess electricity from base-load sources such as coal or nuclear, more storage like it is needed to support the grid. WPTO is funding early-stage research on new, transformative PSH designs that would improve sustainability and environmental performance and shorten development timeframes for new facilities. 5. Marine energy has the potential to provide power in remote locations By converting the energy of waves, tides, river, and ocean currents into electricity, marine energy technologies have the potential to provide cost-effective energy for remote or coastal areas military bases and smaller communities —where electricity costs are high from a reliance on imported fuels. Marine energy can also assist with a number of distributed ocean applications, including charging for ocean-based sensors and underwater vehicles, and non-electric uses like desalination-- the process of removing salt from seawater. These opportunities could more rapidly allow industry to develop and reduce technology costs in the near term while providing domestic energy independence from imported fuels.

Peng Yang’s poster at @UWM on Phase sensitive thermography for detection of magnetostrictive strains

Treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

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