Space wonder

If the Sun Is ablaze , How Does It Get Oxygen? How Does It Get Oxygen? credit:NASA Though pictures of the sun sure look fiery, the sun isn't ablaze the way you would possibly think, as when paper burns. When a bit of paper is about ablaze with a match, the atoms (mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) within the chemical compounds within the paper combine with the molecules of oxygen within the atmosphere to supply the chemical compounds CO2 and water and to release heat and lightweight . this is often a reaction that we call combustion. The sun is completing a way different process called fusion . Each second the sun converts 700,000,000 plenty of the element hydrogen into 695,000,000 plenty of the element helium. This releases energy within the sort of gamma rays. The gamma rays are mostly converted to light eventually. This process doesn't require oxygen. It does require incredibly high temperatures and pressures.

The proxima centauri ..... proximal centaur I  The star Proxima isn’t visible to the attention , but it’s one among the foremost noted stars in Earth’s sky. That’s because it's considered to be a part of the Alpha Centauri star system, a triple system, and therefore the nearest star system to our sun. Of the three stars in Alpha Centauri , Proxima is assumed to be the one actually closest to our sun, at 4.22 light-years away. The image above – from the Hubble Space Telescope – is one among the simplest we’ve seen at showing Proxima clearly. proxima centauri  If it’s so nearby, why can’t we see Proxima with the eye? It’s because Proxima is so small. It’s a red dwarf star star with only about an eighth of the mass of the sun. Faint red Proxima – at only 3,100 degrees K (5,120 F) and 500 times less bright than our sun – is almost a fifth of a light-year from Alpha Centauri A and B. This great distance from the 2 primary stars within the system is what calls into que

Interstellar dust Only about 0.7 percent of the mass of the  interstellar space  is  within the  sort of  solid grains, but these grains have a profound effect on the physical conditions within the gas. Their main effect is  to soak up  stellar radiation; for photons unable to ionize hydrogen and for wavelengths outside absorption lines or bands, the dust grains are  far more  opaque than the gas. The dust absorption increases with photon energy, so long-wavelength radiation (radio and far-infrared) can penetrate dust freely, near-infrared  very well  , and ultraviolet relatively poorly. Dark, cold molecular clouds, within which all star formation takes place, owe their existence to dust. Besides absorbing starlight, the dust acts to heat the gas under some conditions (by ejecting electrons produced by the photoelectric effect, following the absorption of a stellar photon) and  to chill  the gas under other conditions (because the dust can radiate energy more efficiently than the g

How NASA Will Protect Astronauts From Space Radiation at the Moon August 1972, as NASA scientist Ian Richardson remembers it, was hot. In Surrey, England, where he grew up, the fields were brown and dry, and other people tried to remain indoors — out of the Sun, televisions on. except for several days that month, his TV picture kept ending . “Do not adjust your set,” he recalls the BBC announcing. “Heat isn’t causing the interference. It’s sunspots.” The same sunspots that disrupted the tv signals led to enormous solar flares — powerful bursts of energy from the Sun — Aug. 4-7 that year. Between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, the solar eruptions were a mishap for lunar explorers. Had they been in orbit or on the Moon’s surface, they might have experienced high levels of radiation sparked by the eruptions. Today, the Apollo-era flares function a reminder of the threat of radiation exposure to technology and astronauts in space. Understanding and predicting solar eruptions is cru

× Has anyone ever died in space? A total of 18 people have lost their lives either while in space or in preparation for an area mission, in four separate incidents. Given the risks involved in space flight, this number is surprisingly low. The two worst disasters both involved NASA’s spacecraft . On 28 January 1986 the Challenger spacecraft blew up 73 seconds after take-off, due to a failure on a sealant ring that allowed hot gas from the boosters wont to lift the craft within the first two minutes of flight to hit the large main external tanks containing hydrogen-oxygen fuel. All seven crew members died, including Christa McAuliffe, an educator from New Hampshire selected on a special NASA programme to bring civilians into space. The Challenger disaster remains perhaps the foremost notorious within the history of spaceflight, due to the amount of individuals , many of them schoolchildren, who saw it survive TV. In 2003 an extra seven astronauts died when the shuttle Columbia bro

The term “moonshot” is usually invoked to denote a project so outrageously ambitious that it can only be described by comparing it to the Apollo 11 mission to land the primary human on the Moon. The Breakthrough Starshot Initiative transcends the moonshot descriptor because its purpose goes far beyond the Moon. The aptly-named project seeks to visit the closest stars. The brainchild of Russian-born tech entrepreneur billionaire Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Starshot was announced in April 2016 at a news conference joined by renowned physicists including Hawking and Freeman Dyson. While still early, the present vision is that thousands of wafer-sized chips attached to large, silver lightsails are going to be placed into Earth orbit and accelerated by the pressure of an intense Earth-based laser hitting the lightsail. After just two minutes of being driven by the laser, the spacecraft are going to be traveling at one-fifth the speed of light—a thousand-fold faster than any macroscopi