Teams review options for the next Artemis I launch attempt, the National Space Council meets in Houston, and Webb captures a new image of a cosmic tarantula … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!
Few conflicts have rivaled the scale and destruction of the Punic wars fought between Rome and Carthage. In this first episode I set the stage for a conflict that will reshape history!
Sources:
“The Fall of Carthage” by Adrian Goldsworthy
“In the Name of Rome” by Adrian Goldsworthy
“The Rise of Rome” by Anthony Everitt
The gameplay comes from Total War: Rome 2
“Please note this is an unofficial video and is not endorsed by SEGA or the Creative Assembly in any way. For more information on Total War, please visit www.totalwar.com.”
During ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst’s second mission to the International Space Station he supported over 60 European experiments and became Europe’s second ever Space Station Commander. This clip shares a few highlights from Alexander’s Horizons mission and gives a glimpse into life on the Station.
Alexander was launched to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 6 June 2018. He travelled to the Station with NASA astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Prokopyev in a Russian Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft, spent just over six months in orbit and returned to Earth on 20 December 2018.
Watch this journey from launch to landing for a snapshot of memorable moments.
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out http://www.esa.int/ESA to get up to speed on everything space related.
ESA can look back at a fulfilling year. It has been a year marked by new Earth Observation missions to analyse and protect our planet, in particular the completion of the first wave of Copernicus Sentinel satellites and the launch of Aeolus. Galileo also reached an important milestone – there are now 26 satellites in orbit. Other achievements include the October launch of BepiColombo, the ESA-JAXA mission to study Mercury, and the almost continuous presence of ESA astronauts on the International Space Station.
What was your favourite moment? Tell us in the comment section.
★ Subscribe: http://bit.ly/ESAsubscribe and click twice on the bell button to receive our notifications.
ESA is Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out http://www.esa.int/ESA to get up to speed on everything space related.
The Future is Here and It’s Ready to Play
Meet M.A.X., a 12-inch tall advanced robot packed with a multitude of fun, educational features. Designed for budding engineers and tinkerers aged 10 years and older, this robot-building kit offers a challenging yet rewarding build consisting of 332 parts. Once he’s assembled, M.A.X. functions as a friendly robot companion and personal assistant. He engages kids in conversation, learns from every interaction, remembers important dates, and more. He even features a built-in gaming platform. Customizable programming allows kids to personalize M.A.X. to meet their own specifications so that every assembled M.A.X. robot is truly one of a kind. And like all Meccano kits, M.A.X. can be reassembled into a huge variety of other robotics toys.
A Meccano unboxing, demo and review by Keith’s Toy Box.
A toy review by Keith’s Toy Box, a magical bottomless toy box that reveals a new surprise toy everyday! Enjoy kid-friendly videos for babies, infants, toddlers, pre-school and primary school children. Watch unboxing, exciting demos, in slow motion, and time lapse, and play with these tried and tested toys from Hot Wheels, Thomas, Chuggington, Mega Bloks, Lego, Duplo, to Takara, Tomy, Tomica, Plarail, Disney Toys, Pixar Disney Cars, and Sesame Street! Great toy reviews for toy collectors young and old alike.
Scientific notes:
Stellar mass black holes vs. supermassive black holes
* Stellar mass black holes form from the collapse of massive stars at the ends of their lives, so they have roughly the same mass as a star. Supermassive black holes are physically identical to their smaller counterparts, except they are 10 thousand to a billion times the size of the sun. However, their formation is more of a mystery. They may form from the merging of smaller black holes. http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/S/Supermassive+Black+Hole
Supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies
* Almost every large galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, but researchers are not yet sure (https://jila.colorado.edu/research/astrophysics/black-holes-galaxies) why that’s the case, how they originate, and what their role is in the creation and evolution of galaxies.
Why are stars different colors?
* The color of a star depends on its temperature (http://www.atnf.csiro.au/outreach/education/senior/astrophysics/photometry_colour.html). The hotter a star, the higher energy its light will be. Higher energy/temperature corresponds with the blue end of the visible spectrum and lower energy/temperature corresponds with the red end.
How does dark matter make stars spin faster?
* In the 1960s, astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford noticed that stars at the edges of galaxies were moving just as fast as stars at the center, which surprised them: it appeared that the force of gravity causing stars to orbit the center of the galaxy was not weakening over distance. Their observation implied that something else, distributed throughout the galaxy, was exerting a gravitation pull. We now know that that “something else,” now named dark matter, accounts for about 85% of the matter in the universe. (It existence was inferred in the 1930s, when the astronomer Fritz Zwicky(http://www2.astro.psu.edu/users/rbc/a1/week_10.html) noticed that galaxies in clusters were moving faster than they should.)
Size of the universe
* The universe is only 13.8 billion years old, but has a radius of about 46 billion light-years. If nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, how can that be? The expansion of the universe, driven by dark energy, is causing distances between objects to grow. Note that it is not moving those objects apart; rather, it is increasing the amount of space between them. https://phys.org/news/2015-10-big-universe.html
Cosmic webs
* Galaxies are not distributed randomly (http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/astro/structures/structures.asp) in space; instead, clusters of galaxies form web-like patterns. These webs consist of filaments, where dark matter and ordinary (baryonic) matter are concentrated, and voids, where galaxies are scarce. Researchers believe that these large-scale structures grew out of minor fluctuations in density at the beginning of the universe.
Composition of the early universe
* Moments after the Big Bang, the universe formed the nuclei for what would be come the universe’s hydrogen and helium atoms, with one helium nucleus for every 10 or 11 hydrogen (http://umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm). When the first stars formed, there were no heavier elements — those elements formed inside stars.
String Theory Landscape
* The String Theory Landscape is a theory that the universe we live in is one of many universes. It attempts to explain how certain constants of nature seem “fine-tuned” for life, which contradicts the anthropic principle, or the notion that we humans hold a special place in the universe. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/multiverse-the-case-for-parallel-universe/%0A
Disintegration of the universe
* In the future Degenerate Era of the universe, as space-time expands and stars burn up, all of the matter in stars will be consumed by black holes. But even black holes are not forever. Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes will slowly radiate away their mass in what is now called Hawking radiation until they too dissipate away. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/adams-universe.html
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MEDIA CREDITS:
Music provided by APM
Sound effects: Freesound.org
Additional Animations:
– Galaxy within Universe: Edgeworx;
– Stars at center of Milky Way – NASA/NCSA University of Illinois Visualization by Frank Summers, Space Telescope Science Institute, Simulation by Martin White and Lars Hernquist, Harvard University
