monstrous-mind

Latest Posts by monstrous-mind

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Winter views, Sweden

stepsisters

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Halloween cat

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Autumn Garden by Boris Groh

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From lulumoonowlbooks on instagram

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Salem, Massachusetts 🎃

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By Khanh Do

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2024 September 8

M31: The Andromeda Galaxy Image Credit: Subaru (NAOJ), Hubble (NASA/ESA), Mayall (NSF); Processing & Copyright: R. Gendler & R. Croman

Explanation: The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy. Even at some two and a half million light-years distant, this immense spiral galaxy – spanning over 200,000 light years – is visible, although as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. A bright yellow nucleus, dark winding dust lanes, and expansive spiral arms dotted with blue star clusters and red nebulae, are recorded in this stunning telescopic image which combines data from orbiting Hubble with ground-based images from Subaru and Mayall. In only about 5 billion years, the Andromeda galaxy may be even easier to see – as it will likely span the entire night sky – just before it merges with, or passes right by, our Milky Way Galaxy.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240908.html

Can’t wait to walk down the block and see decorated houses 😮‍💨🍂🎃🧡

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2024 August 14

Meteors and Aurora over Germany Image Credit & Copyright: Chantal Anders

Explanation: This was an unusual night. For one thing, the night sky of August 11 and 12, earlier this week, occurred near the peak of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. Therefore, meteors streaked across the dark night as small bits cast off from Comet Swift-Tuttle came crashing into the Earth’s atmosphere. Even more unusually, for central Germany at least, the night sky glowed purple. The red-blue hue was due to aurora caused by an explosion of particles from the Sun a few days before. This auroral storm was so intense that it was seen as far south as Texas and Italy, in Earth’s northern hemisphere. The featured image composite was built from 7 exposures taken over 26 minutes from Ense, Germany. The Perseids occur predictably every August, but auroras visible this far south are more unusual and less predictable.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240814.html

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Autumn 2024 is almost here!

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🤎🌧️🍂Rainy fall days🍂🌧️🤎

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Research alert! Two new fossils of a mouse-sized animal from the age of dinosaurs indicate that early mammals grew more slowly and lived longer than their modern descendants—rewriting our understanding of the lives of the very earliest mammals. An international study led by researchers at National Museums Scotland and published today in the journal Nature, compares two Krusatodon kirtlingtonensis fossils discovered decades apart in Scotland’s Isle of Skye. One of the fossils, the only juvenile Jurassic mammal skeleton known to science, was discovered in 2016 by Roger Benson, the Museum’s Macaulay Curator in the Division of Paleontology, and colleagues.

“These fossils are among the most complete mammals from this time period in the world,” said Elsa Panciroli, the lead author of the study and an associate researcher of paleobiology at National Museums Scotland. 

Learn how these small animals give us unprecedented insights into the lives of early mammals.

Image: © Maija Karala

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2024 June 23

The Colors of Saturn from Cassini Image Credit: NASA, ESA, JPL, ISS, Cassini Imaging Team; Processing & License: Judy Schmidt

Explanation: What creates Saturn’s colors? The featured picture of Saturn only slightly exaggerates what a human would see if hovering close to the giant ringed world. The image was taken in 2005 by the robot Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. Here Saturn’s majestic rings appear directly only as a curved line, appearing brown, in part from its infrared glow. The rings best show their complex structure in the dark shadows they create across the upper part of the planet. The northern hemisphere of Saturn can appear partly blue for the same reason that Earth’s skies can appear blue – molecules in the cloudless portions of both planet’s atmospheres are better at scattering blue light than red. When looking deep into Saturn’s clouds, however, the natural gold hue of Saturn’s clouds becomes dominant. It is not known why southern Saturn does not show the same blue hue – one hypothesis holds that clouds are higher there. It is also not known why some of Saturn’s clouds are colored gold.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240623.html

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If you’ve visited the Museum, you’re certainly familiar with today’s Fossil Friday feature: the Barosaurus and Allosaurus in the Rotunda! Rising 50 ft (15 m) above the ground, it’s the world’s tallest freestanding dinosaur mount. In this scene, a Barosaurus rears up to defend her young from an Allosaurus. How does the huge skeleton of Barosaurus—whose name means “heavy reptile”—stay up? The Barosaurus is built from casts of real fossil bones, while the originals are housed in the Museum’s collections. Real fossil bones would be too heavy to support this way.

Photo: D. Finnin / © AMNH

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Pixabay

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The Running Chicken Nebula comprises several clouds, all of which we can see in this vast image from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal site. This 1.5-billion pixel image spans an area in the sky of about 25 full Moons. The clouds shown in wispy pink plumes are full of gas and dust, illuminated by the young and hot stars within them.

Credit: ESO

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~ Orange and Brown ~

Magic night

Aleksey R.

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Mark Basarab

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mikkolagerstedt

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kitchen ghosts

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Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars

There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Credit: NASA

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Saturn - March 11 2006

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CCI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

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When witches go riding, and black cats are seen, the moon laughs and whispers, 'tis near Halloween 🎃🖤🐾