So on the 31st, depending where you live, we have a Super Blue Blood Moon!! And if THAT isn't confusing enough, it will actually look RED, not Blue! OY!!! What are you doing, moon????

The moon will be multitasking that day. First of all, it will be full. That means its about on the opposite side of earth from the sun, so it looks fully illuminated. But, it just so happens that at the same time it is a full moon, it will also be at its closest point to the earth! Called its perigee. When a moon becomes full while simultaneously being at perigee, it is called super. To that's the SUPER.

Now, the moon revolves in a slightly different plane around the earth than the earth does around the sun. If you imagine the top of your roundish dinning room table as the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun, then the moon would sometimes be above the tabletop, hangin out with your SlimFast, and sometimes it would be a bit below the table, peeking at your nads.

But of course, for it go from above to below, it must sometimes pass through the plane of the table top. At that time, the sun, the earth, and the moon, are all the same plane. These are called Nodes. When the moon happens to go through a node at the exact same time it is directly on the opposite side of the sun, you get....a lunar eclipse!! Because the earth's shadow falls directly on the moon. This makes the moon appear red. Hence, BLOOD.

So we have the blood and the super. This also happens to be the second full moon in the month of January. When you have two full moons in one month, its simply called a BLUE moon.

So, a SUPER BLUE BLOOD MOON. All those things happening at the same time.

But why is it red? Did it fall down the steps at IHOP while its boo was looking? Yes.

No. Its red for the same reason a sunset is reddish, and the sky is bluish. Sunlight entered our atmosphere as being "white" or clear, because all the colors of the spectrum are travelling together. When it enters our atmosphere it starts going through all the junk in the air.....water molecules, dust particles, etc. It turns out that all these things are closest in size to the wavelength of blue light. So the blue light gets all bumped around in our atmosphere and it "scatters". So this is why our sky is blue. Because the blue light gets bumped out of the mix as it travels, and it comes down and hits our eyes.

That's why a sunset is red. Because red has the longest wavelength and is the least scattered in our atmosphere. So its the only light that ends us reaching your eyes after it travels all the way from the horizon to your eyes. When you look at a sunset, you are looking through a long distance of atmosphere, parallel with the ground. The blue has been scattered out by then and the sun looks red.

So during an eclipse, the light that is still illuminated the moon so you can see it, has passed through the atmosphere on both sides of the earth and then converged on the moon. So, the light that survived the pass through the atmosphere....was RED. The moon looks red.

 

Yesterday an Icecube followed a ghost and found a hot pocket blazar.

WHAT??

Well, sit down with your dessert wine and your microwavable hip joint macaroni and I'll tell you what.

Yesterday was likely the birth of a brand new branch of astronomy, and the story all begins about 3.7 billion years ago, on a Tuesday, and ends billions of light years later on a sunny Thursday, with a 15% chance of hail.

Our story, as all really compelling stories do, begins with a blazar. To understand what a blazar is, you have to first understand what a quasar is, and it helps if you are familiar with hot pockets. Most or all galaxies that are large enough have supermassive black holes at their centers. Black holes with masses millions or billions or trillions of times the mass of our sun. The gravity of these black holes is SOOOO strong that the stars that are closest to it get ripped apart, stretched into long thinish spaghetti strings that zip around and around the black hole at tremendous speeds sometimes approaching the speed of light. Think of putting an electric egg beater in the center of a vat of I Can't Believe Its Not Butter.

Take some red food coloring and dribble it all over the ICBINB so that it has tiny red dots all over the surface. Turn the beater on , and the ICBINB that is closest to the beater begins to spin around it like water going down a drain, and the red dots distort and stretch and eventually the slop whirling through the beater is just all red. The red dots are stars.

That's what the black hole is doing to the innermost part of many galaxies, our milky way included! This dense disk shaped plate of matter from ripped apart stars that spins around the black hole, slowly falling INTO the black hole, is called an Accretion Disk. So much energy is being created by this process that it gives off enormous amounts of electromagnetic radiation [some of it in the form of visible light], and therefore these galactic centers are some of the brightest things in the universe. When we view them through telescopes, they are called Quasars.

Quasars also have so much power that they create a magnetic funnel around the spin axis that can stretch out for light years, and shoots gamma rays and photos and neutrinos and junk straight out into space at rates of almost the speed of light.

And here is a picture of the whole mess:



The brightest part of the accretion disk at the center is what we see as the "quasar", and the two "jets" of gamma rays, photos, and neutrinos shoot off in both perpendicular directions.

Now suddenly along came these things in the sky that seemed even BRIGHTER than quasars. And they were huge like quasars but looked different. What are they, Louie Anderson wearing neon? Astronomers didn't know what else could be as bis as, and brighter than, the center of a galaxy [quasar]. But they called them Blazars.

That's where the hot pocket comes in. Look at your hot pocket. Its like a rectangle, right? Now turn it and look from the side. No wait, its like a hot dog shape. Now look at it from the end, the longways...wait, no, from this angle it looks kind of like a small mishappen oval! The point being, from different angles, the same object can look very different.

We can't hold quasars in our hands and turn them around and see the different angles and understand that all the angles are the same hot pocket. So to make a long story short, it turns out Blazars are just Quasars that just so happen to be positioned so that one of the "jets" is pointed directly at earth!

And, as the story goes, one Blazar in particular [named 0506- 056, or Uncle BewbGiggle] has its jet pointed directly towards earth. Or to really boggle the mind, one blazar, 3.7 Billion Years Ago had its jet pointed precisely at where earth was going to be on Friday, September 22, 2017, around 2:30 in the afternoon.

3.7 Billion years ago, a little baby neutrino flew at near light speed out of that jet, and it plugged along for 3.7 billion years in a straight line, until on one fateful afternoon in September 2017 it crossed paths with earth. Specifically, it crossed paths with IceCube Neutrino Observatory. In Antarctica.

Now, Neutrinos are all around us. Probably 4 billion of them pass through your nose every second. They are thought to make up as much as 25% of the elementary particles around us! But yet we know so little of about them! So little in fact, they have been nicknamed the "Ghost Particle".

Why? Why do we know so much about electrons and quarks and protons, and we even harness electrons to do our bidding, and run things like MRI machines and cell phones and the OptiGrab, but yet we have to set up gigantic underground laboratories in the Antarctic just to FIND a neutrino?

The short answer is because neutrinos have almost no mass and they almost NEVER interact with normal matter. If they don't interact with normal matter, they don't produce a signal of any kind, and they certainly don't interact with the machines we use to try to see them.

But notice the "almost". Once in a blue moon, if the evening feels just right, and enough alcohol was involved, they DO bump up against a piece of matter, and it creates an energy release which our machines can see. But this flash of light usually gets drowned out by all the background noise of millions of other flashes of light going on in our atmosphere. So how do they blunt out the background noise?

They bury the sensors a mile deep under ice, where less background shit is happening. A mile deep, in the antarctic, under IceCube.



So, our baby neutrino flew through space for 3.7 billion years, and finally, when it had a stable income and stopped using Ikea as its main source of interior design, it bumped into an H20 molecule. A molecule a mile or more directly under IceCube laboratory.

The columns of sensors [over 80 of them] that are buried deep under the ice, picked up the intense signal from this high energy neutrino, a signal much to powerful to have come from anything else. A fingerprint for a neutrino.

Because neutrinos don't normally bump into anything, they move in straight lines. So, over time, many observatories worked together and mapped out the neutrinos trajectory. They mapped out its journey through space, back to 3.7 billion years ago, and found out it was born in the jet of a Blazar, known as Uncle Bewbgiggle.

This is actually huge news, as it the first time anything like this has been achieved. And its opens up an entire new field of study. We already study what our universe 'looks like' using visible light rays. And infrared waves, and gravity waves, and so on. Now, we can start to study our universe through neutrinos. We have a new way to look at the universe. Someday we may have a "Neutrino Map" of the universe the same way we have light maps of stars, or infrared maps. This really is the birth of a brand new branch of astronomy.

This will tell us many new things about the universe we didn't know, and might even give us answers we've been looking for for a century, regarding Quantum Physics, and what is going on in the foam of spacetime.

The wonderful thing too, is that if you have a telescope of about 8 inch aperture or greater, you can SEE UncleBewbgiggle. The Blazar where baby neutrino came from. Imma try to find him later this summer, when he is out at night. Or if you just want to look at where he is, he is just a tad to the right of the star Bellatrix, which is Orion's left shoulder. Right about half way between Orions left shoulder and the vertical part of his bow.

Just LOOK UP, right there at Orion, and you are looking at our neutrino's home.

So, an IceCube followed a Ghost and Found a Blazar.

 

But it had pictures for you to look at too

 

The gravity of really massive things is strong enough that it even bends light waves, so sometimes you can actually see something that is directly behind a black hole, because the light from that something started heading in one direction but then the black hole bent that light so that it is headed towards you. So the star you are looking at isn't even where it appears to be. Its actually behind the black hole, so you shouldn't be seeing it.

Anyway, this article isn't really very groundbreaking because we've tested this concept a million times in the last decades, but its the first time we did it with a supermassive black hole. Its like testing a thousand times to see if hitting someone over the head with a salt shaker really hurts, and then one day saying hey let's try it with a pepper shaker. We already knew the answer.

But its still kinda cool because the affects of the gravitation distortion are far greater with a black hole so we can measure them with even more precision. And also, something this article kind of missed...its one more confirmation that there in fact IS a supermassive black hole at the center of our [and probably most or all] large galaxies.

As an aside, if you were sitting right on the event horizon of a black hole, you'd be dead.

but lets say you somehow did it without dying. Time would go so fast from your perspective that you would watch the entire future of the universe play out in just a few seconds time. The end of the earth and sun, the formation of the next star that is born from the explosion of our sun, and then the death of that star too. You'd watch each star explode and then wink out one at a time all around you until there was nothing left in the universe to look at except you and your black hole. All in the time it takes to eat a Lorna Doone.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/scientis...supermassive-black-hole-theory-151924741.html

 

This happens 3 evenings from now.



When one of Jupiter's moons passes in front of Jupiter from our perspective we call it a "transit". When one of Jupiter's moon's shadows crosses over the surface of the moon, we call it a "shadow transit".

VERY VERY occasionally, about as often as @Jama checks to see if anything has built up in his ear canal, you get a DOUBLE SHADOW TRANSIT......DUN DUN DUN!!

This treat happens fairly seldom, less so when Jupiter can be seen in your particular location during the right time [the united states, right now]....

This Thursday, around 9 pm, Jupiter's moon Io's shadow will begin to slide across Jupiter. About 9:30 Europa's shadow will join its most trusted friend, or at least roommate who doesn't bail on the cable bill and leave dirty underwear on the bathroom floor, on this magnificant journey...

And both shadows will be on the surface at the same time for about 1.5 hours, until approximately 11 pm.

Incidentally Europa is a largely H20 ice moon, with a water "ocean" hundreds of feet below the surface. It is one of the best candidates for life in our solar system aside from Earth. And it is the ONLY candidate for possible intelligent life in our solar system. At all.

So if you awake between 9:30 and 11 pm thursday, and you have a moderate aperture backyard telescope of at least 6 inches lens/primary mirror, or there is a public observatory near you that does, put down the crack pipe and LOOK UP....

No, look down..into the eyepiece, if you look up you'll just see stars and miss the fucking thing....look down...sorry about that...

If I have a chance to get to the observatory where my large telescope is stored, I will try to get some pics of it, but if I'm just at home in my backyard with my smaller scope, its not quite big enough for good astrophotography...

 

Yeah, with a small department store telescope without a computerized tracker you would probably see nothing more than a very faint smudge that could be something round [Jupiter]. But if there is a public observatory within 10 or 20 miles and its a clear night, no doubt they will be holding a public viewing, if they are worth their ground ginger.