Happy Valentine's Day, Kimmy!

Happy Holidays! https://www.instagram.com/p/BroSlILgeTY/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=l5400fyporq0

Think big, be your best, and reach out farther than you can imagine. #furtherthanbefore #pathwaytothestars #scifi #longevity #clarityofmind #health #neuroscience #physics #theoreticalphysics https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq7vZXDgX4J/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=aa9nsjpqc86t

I am thrilled to announce that I have found and am working with a brilliant narrator, a Princeton Alumni, who has a wealthy breadth of experience in the science, technology, and creative industries. • Further than Before: Pathway to the Stars, Part 1, will be released first, followed by Part 2 and the Tome (for those who are patient). Otherwise, Part 1 and Part 2 will help to break down the cost, since the Tome is a half-million-worded heft of a manuscript, for all who dare! • “Life is about to get quite fantastic, and I assure you there is a lot of benevolent purpose behind all of this. For one, we need to preserve life, and in a way that brings joy and meaning to our very being. We need to have the ability to adapt to environments already teeming with life, rather than destroy entire sentient ecosystems wherever we travel. We need to have a healthy and robust focus of love, beauty, and kindness that will allow us to advance civilization in a manner that demonstrates genuine empathy, compassion, and respect for each other’s uniqueness and irreplaceable individuality. We can enjoy our uniqueness while attaining full understanding of each other and mitigating issues that would threaten our existence throughout the cosmos." • ~ Eliza Williams during a very important presidential address to the public, in "Further than Before: Pathway to the Stars, Tome," Chapter 55, "State of the Union" • #thetomechallenge #spaceoperanovels #sciencefictionnovels #politicalsciencefiction #darkmatter #exoticparticles #neuroscience #biotech #nanotech #futurism #matthewopdyke #pathwaytothestars #furtherthanbefore https://www.instagram.com/p/BvtieWwgamY/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1i71kzia7fjkw

Dive... (Trancend your limits!) https://youtu.be/05LG-Fnq6lI https://www.instagram.com/p/BsPgWaJnTQr/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=hp1xikiusa5z

Meet Fermi: Our Eyes on the Gamma-Ray Sky

Black holes, cosmic rays, neutron stars and even new kinds of physics — for 10 years, data from our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have helped unravel some of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos. And Fermi is far from finished!

On June 11, 2008, at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the countdown started for Fermi, which was called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) at the time. 

The telescope was renamed after launch to honor Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American pioneer in high-energy physics who also helped develop the first nuclear reactor. 

Fermi has had many other things named after him, like Fermi’s Paradox, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the synthetic element fermium.

Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory

The Fermi telescope measures some of the highest energy bursts of light in the universe; watching the sky to help scientists answer all sorts of questions about some of the most powerful objects in the universe. 

Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), which can view 20% of the sky at a time and makes a new image of the whole gamma-ray sky every three hours. Fermi’s other instrument is the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. It sees even more of the sky at lower energies and is designed to detect brief flashes of gamma-rays from the cosmos and Earth.

This sky map below is from 2013 and shows all of the high energy gamma rays observed by the LAT during Fermi’s first five years in space.  The bright glowing band along the map’s center is our own Milky Way galaxy!

So what are gamma rays? 

Well, they’re a form of light. But light with so much energy and with such short wavelengths that we can’t see them with the naked eye. Gamma rays require a ton of energy to produce — from things like subatomic particles (such as protons) smashing into each other. 

Here on Earth, you can get them in nuclear reactors and lightning strikes. Here’s a glimpse of the Seattle skyline if you could pop on a pair of gamma-ray goggles. That purple streak? That’s still the Milky Way, which is consistently the brightest source of gamma rays in our sky.

In space, you find that kind of energy in places like black holes and neutron stars. The raindrop-looking animation below shows a big flare of gamma rays that Fermi spotted coming from something called a blazar, which is a kind of quasar, which is different from a pulsar… actually, let’s back this up a little bit.

One of the sources of gamma rays that Fermi spots are pulsars. Pulsars are a kind of neutron star, which is a kind of star that used to be a lot bigger, but collapsed into something that’s smaller and a lot denser. Pulsars send out beams of gamma rays. But the thing about pulsars is that they rotate. 

So Fermi only sees a beam of gamma rays from a pulsar when it’s pointed towards Earth. Kind of like how you only periodically see the beam from a lighthouse. These flashes of light are very regular. You could almost set your watch by them!

Quasars are supermassive black holes surrounded by disks of gas. As the gas falls into the black hole, it releases massive amount of energy, including — you guessed it — gamma rays. Blazars are quasars that send out beams of gamma rays and other forms of light — right in our direction. 

When Fermi sees them, it’s basically looking straight down this tunnel of light, almost all the way back to the black hole. This means we can learn about the kinds of conditions in that environment when the rays were emitted. Fermi has found about 5,500 individual sources of gamma rays, and the bulk of them have been blazars, which is pretty nifty.

But gamma rays also have many other sources. We’ve seen them coming from supernovas where stars die and from star factories where stars are born. They’re created in lightning storms here on Earth, and our own Sun can toss them out in solar flares. 

Gamma rays were in the news last year because of something Fermi spotted at almost the same time as the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo on August 17, 2017. Fermi, LIGO, Virgo, and numerous other observatories spotted the merger of two neutron stars. It was the first time that gravitational waves and light were confirmed to come from the same source.

Fermi has been looking at the sky for almost 10 years now, and it’s helped scientists advance our understanding of the universe in many ways. And the longer it looks, the more we’ll learn. Discover more about how we’ll be celebrating Fermi’s achievements all year.

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

New Podcast: Starts With A Bang #35 - Do We Live In A Multiverse

There’s been a lot of speculative ideas put forth about the Multiverse, and I dare say that a great many of them are nothing more than wishful thinking. But that doesn’t mean the Multiverse itself is ill-motivated at all. Rather, if you take two of our best theories that have been well-confirmed in a wide variety of different ways, you’re going to find that you arrive at a bizarre but unavoidable picture: one of an inflating spacetime, eternal to the future, where regions that look like our Universe, complete with a hot Big Bang, are spawned continuously.

The evidence might not be there, observably, to confirm or deny the existence of a Multiverse. But as a theoretical consequence, it certainly has a motivation that’s far stronger than practically anyone realizes. Here’s the cosmic story.

Further than Before: Pathway to the Stars, Tome (Parts 1 & 2 Combined!)

View this post on Instagram

Combined as one! Further than Before: Pathway to the Stars, Parts 1 & 2 in an 8.3 x 11.7 inch novel of 400K words that hit the intellect in the best and most sophisticated ways,… through #scifi #fantasy #mustread #physics #theoreticalphysics #spaceopera #strongfemalelead #strongmalerolemodel #physiology #neuroscience #nanotechnology…

View On WordPress

Promo video put together by my spouse. Thank you, Kimmy! @k1mberly0 #spaceopera #scifiauthor #booksofinstagram #furtherthanbefore #pathwaytothestars #politicalsciencefiction #longevity #CRISPR #physiology #neuroscience #biotechnology #physiology #physics #theoreticalphysics #biopods #spacecraft #architecture #preservationoflife #strongfemalelead #strongfemalerolemodel #strongmalerolemodel (at Papillion, Nebraska) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtmnWFLg52P/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=t7arij83thzf

Hubble’s Greatest Discoveries Weren’t Planned; They Were Surprises

“And if we head out beyond our own galaxy, that’s where Hubble truly shines, having taught us more about the Universe than we ever imagined was out there. One of the greatest, most ambitious projects ever undertaken came in the mid-1990s, when astronomers in charge of Hubble redefined staring into the unknown. It was possibly the bravest thing ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope: to find a patch of sky with absolutely nothing in it — no bright stars, no nebulae, and no known galaxies — and observe it. Not just for a few minutes, or an hour, or even for a day. But orbit-after-orbit, for a huge amount of time, staring off into the nothingness of empty space, recording image after image of pure darkness.

What came back was amazing. Beyond what we could see, there were thousands upon thousand of galaxies out there in the abyss of space, in a tiny region of sky.”

28 years ago today, the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed. Since that time, it’s changed our view of the Solar System, the stars, nebulae, galaxies, and the entire Universe. But here’s the kicker: almost all of what it discovered wasn’t what it was designed to look for. We were able to learn so much from Hubble because it broke through the next frontier, looking at the Universe in a way we’ve never looked at it before. Astronomers and astrophysicists found clever ways to exploit its capabilities, and the observatory itself was overbuilt to the point where, 28 years later, it’s still one of the most sought-after telescopes as far as observing time goes.

Hubble’s greatest discoveries weren’t planned, but the planning we did enabled them to become real. Here are some great reasons to celebrate its anniversary.