REFORMATION

A Vampire Fever Dream. 👀

Centuries ago, one chilly winter night,

You smiled, held my hand in yours to leave behind,

Memories that twists my heart like a dagger,

While I wish my every sigh to be the last one

Since then I searched those amber eyes everywhere,

The color of maple leaves during the fall

I searched for you knowing that you are nowhere

Until I met someone who understood my pain.

Years passed away, and my companions with it.

I stayed the same, and so did our memories.

The only immortal things I've come across.

The living me, and the intangible us.

Now centuries later, this chilly winter

With this lovely human curled up next to me

I feel mortal. Not alive, just plain mortal.

Every second prized, every moment precious

With those same amber eyes, like a setting sun

One that threatened to burn me eons ago.

Have I wished for you often and hard enough?

That you had no other choice but to come back.

when stephen chbosky wrote "we accept the love we think we deserve" and hanya yanagihara wrote "x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x."

Black Holes: Seeing the Invisible!

Black holes are some of the most bizarre and fascinating objects in the cosmos. Astronomers want to study lots of them, but there’s one big problem – black holes are invisible! Since they don’t emit any light, it’s pretty tough to find them lurking in the inky void of space. Fortunately there are a few different ways we can “see” black holes indirectly by watching how they affect their surroundings.

Speedy stars

If you’ve spent some time stargazing, you know what a calm, peaceful place our universe can be. But did you know that a monster is hiding right in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy? Astronomers noticed stars zipping superfast around something we can’t see at the center of the galaxy, about 10 million miles per hour! The stars must be circling a supermassive black hole. No other object would have strong enough gravity to keep them from flying off into space.

Two astrophysicists won half of the Nobel Prize in Physics last year for revealing this dark secret. The black hole is truly monstrous, weighing about four million times as much as our Sun! And it seems our home galaxy is no exception – our Hubble Space Telescope has revealed that the hubs of most galaxies contain supermassive black holes.

Shadowy silhouettes

Technology has advanced enough that we’ve been able to spot one of these supermassive black holes in a nearby galaxy. In 2019, astronomers took the first-ever picture of a black hole in a galaxy called M87, which is about 55 million light-years away. They used an international network of radio telescopes called the Event Horizon Telescope.

In the image, we can see some light from hot gas surrounding a dark shape. While we still can’t see the black hole itself, we can see the “shadow” it casts on the bright backdrop.

Shattered stars

Black holes can come in a smaller variety, too. When a massive star runs out of the fuel it uses to shine, it collapses in on itself. These lightweight or “stellar-mass” black holes are only about 5-20 times as massive as the Sun. They’re scattered throughout the galaxy in the same places where we find stars, since that’s how they began their lives. Some of them started out with a companion star, and so far that’s been our best clue to find them.

Some black holes steal material from their companion star. As the material falls onto the black hole, it gets superhot and lights up in X-rays. The first confirmed black hole astronomers discovered, called Cygnus X-1, was found this way.

If a star comes too close to a supermassive black hole, the effect is even more dramatic! Instead of just siphoning material from the star like a smaller black hole would do, a supermassive black hole will completely tear the star apart into a stream of gas. This is called a tidal disruption event.

Making waves

But what if two companion stars both turn into black holes? They may eventually collide with each other to form a larger black hole, sending ripples through space-time – the fabric of the cosmos!

These ripples, called gravitational waves, travel across space at the speed of light. The waves that reach us are extremely weak because space-time is really stiff.

Three scientists received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for using LIGO to observe gravitational waves that were sent out from colliding stellar-mass black holes. Though gravitational waves are hard to detect, they offer a way to find black holes without having to see any light.

We’re teaming up with the European Space Agency for a mission called LISA, which stands for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. When it launches in the 2030s, it will detect gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes – a likely sign of colliding galaxies!

Rogue black holes

So we have a few ways to find black holes by seeing stuff that’s close to them. But astronomers think there could be 100 million black holes roaming the galaxy solo. Fortunately, our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide a way to “see” these isolated black holes, too.

Roman will find solitary black holes when they pass in front of more distant stars from our vantage point. The black hole’s gravity will warp the starlight in ways that reveal its presence. In some cases we can figure out a black hole’s mass and distance this way, and even estimate how fast it’s moving through the galaxy.

For more about black holes, check out these Tumblr posts!

⚫ Gobble Up These Black (Hole) Friday Deals!

⚫ Hubble’s 5 Weirdest Black Hole Discoveries

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

t h o u g h t s

It's been a few minutes,

My head on your shoulder, your arm around me

Neither of us utters a word.

What are you thinking?

You ask, breaking the silence.

I'm thinking,

About the day we finally accepted how we felt,

And then the world tilted, the hourglass turned,

How every day we're slipping away, gradually

One sand grain at a time.

I'm thinking,

How unfortunate it is that our fate's already written

That we were to be like parallel lines

Destined to be together

But not with each other.

I'm thinking,

How long are we going to take it, one day at a time?

One call, one heart emoji, one I miss you at a time.

Like a recovering addict,

Each day takes us twelve steps away from each other.

I'm thinking,

How the time we are together is snowglobe moments.

How we are confined to only a moment in time.

While the world around us moves on and on.

And we relive one perfect yet fragile moment.

I'm thinking,

How we belong to each other today,

For now.

How wonderful it'll be if the world ends today.

While you are mine and I'm yours.

So I don't have to see tomorrow.

When the hourglass is finally empty

When either of the parallel lines ends.

When we are so apart that we stand out of sight

When the snow globe falls to the floor, waking us up.

Instead,

I try to come back to that second,

To your voice, eyes, and presence,

Instead, I say,

I'm thinking about getting ice cream.

Never felt more seen.

"Dark academic?" More like "someone please help me holy shit I can't continue living like this and the only thing keeping me from falling off my rocker is literature."

Moments and Memories

A home is sometimes a person,

sometimes a place.

But mostly it's million tiny feelings you can't erase.

A nostalgia,

A flutter in your heart or

An aching memory that makes you fall apart.

It's in the familiarity

Of a touch, sound, and smell.

How you can recognize footsteps so well.

It's in the fragrance of an old detergent,

The coolness of a freshly made bed or

Within the worn-out pages of a book, you once read.

The way you can recognize

The chair that wobbles and,

The coordinates of every dent from squabbles.

You'll be taken back in time

At the sound of a video game

When new high scores were the only mark of fame.

You're back at your childhood home

When you smell your favorite meal

Reminiscing how mum's food has powers to heal

Home could be right now,

Right here, but the feeling is

Forged out of moments that were once dear.

Writing period dramas in the discord, lads

Finding that one scene in a book that you love to read again and again because you just can’t get over it is the best part of reading in my opinion

Reblog, Reblog, Reblog , cause I love this thread!!! 😂😂

Every single odd number has an “e” in it.

on soulmates

f. scott fitzgerald / friedrich nietzsche / florence and the machine / andrea dworkin / kiersten white / euripides / audre lorde / phillip pullmann / bob hicok