On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory
Perhaps the biggest question Stephen Hawking tried to answer in his extraordinary life was how the universe could have created conditions so perfectly hospitable to life.
Happy 89th birthday to Brooklyn-native and #TKSST fave Carl Sagan, who taught us a thing or two about the #cosmos, in words everyone could understand 🌌
Here are some of our favorite #videos featuring the legendary astronomer, who died in 1996:
The Black Widow Nebula creeps through space with an eerie symmetry. The nebula's double-lobed appearance comes from a group of stars at its center, producing intense outflows of radiation in opposite directions at the same time.
#JWST sees four exoplanets in a single system, HR 8799 ~133 light-years away.
HR 8799 is 1.5 times more massive than the sun and is almost five times more luminous. It's also surrounded by a debris disk and is only ~30 million years old.
Young solar systems are important because they can reveal the intricate details behind planet formation, one of the things the JWST was built to focus on.
They're all massive planets, between 5.7 and 9.1 Jupiter masses, barely below the point where deuterium fusion takes place, making them brown dwarfs. They range from 16 to 71 AU away from the star & have orbits from ~45 to ~460 years. All four of them have radii of ~1.2 Jupiter radii. 2/2
On the night of November 2-3 the Earth will pass between the Sun and Jupiter, which means the planet will be at its closest to the Earth around these dates.
This cosmic event is known as the opposition of Jupiter.
It's the best time of the year to see the planet with the naked eye as it also reaches its peak brightness.
On this occasion, Jupiter will be around 33 million km (20.5 million miles) closer to us than average. 1/2
There are planets in this strange and wonderful universe of ours where diamonds rain from the sky. You might think this would be quite a wonderful sight. You might think yourself mighty rich to be there. Wait until a diamond the size of a fist hits you in the head.