Nora's Guide to the Galaxy

Just a girlie sitting on my couch watching Love is Blind while I hand classify inputs for my machine learning model ☺️

Oh good news I forgot about winds so it's only a 14 hour flight!

Feels like it! Sydney to LA

Chandra Release - November 17, 2011 Visual Description: Cygnus X-1 The graphic features two panels on the stellar-mass black hole Cygnus X-1. On the left, an optical image from the Digitized Sky Survey shows a large field around the black hole, outlined in a red box at the very center. Cygnus X-1 is located near large active regions of star formation in our Milky Way, as pictured in this image that spans some 700 light years across. An artist's illustration on the right depicts what astronomers think is happening within the Cygnus X-1 system. Cygnus X-1 is part of a class of black holes that comes from the collapse of a massive star. The black hole is shown pulling material from a massive, blue companion star toward it. This material forms a disk (colored in bright red and orange) that rotates around the black hole before falling into it or being redirected away from the black hole in the form of thin, powerful jets. The Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes combined to determine the spin, mass, and distance to this black hole more precisely than ever before.

Year of Space Facts: Week 8/52 🔭🧪🛰️

Cygnus X-1, the first known black hole, was discovered as an X-ray source in 1964 and is observable only because of mass being accreted from its stellar companion. It is so compact that it has to be a black hole!

📸: DSS; NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Just love that I'm about to spend 15 hours on a plane and then not even get to use my global entry because Noem is throwing a tantrum 😒

The game 😅 I have not done the math for insect gonads

Year of Space Facts: Week 7/52 🔭🧪🛰️

Given that we knew of 0 exoplanets 40 years go, it's kind of insane that we can now estimate that there is, on average, one Earth-sized or larger planet for every Sun-like star!That doesn't mean every Sun-like star has a planet...but half or more probably do!

Comparison truly is the thief of joy and sometimes my brain really just doesn't get it 😭

Year of Space Facts: Week 6/52 🔭🧪🛰️

The twinkling of stars isn't caused by anything happening at the star—it's actually an effect of atmospheric turbulence and refraction making small changes to the path of the light before it reaches our eyes.

📸 Sirius scintillating (Bautsch CC0)

I know I'm a nerd, but c'mon, how does Word not recognize the word libration?!?

NASA delays Artemis II moon mission after critical test raises issues NASA will review data gathered during a simulated launch of the Artemis II rocket before revealing a new date for its upcoming moon mission

NASA will review data gathered during a simulated launch of the Artemis II rocket before revealing a new date for its upcoming moon mission

A field of stars and galaxies, one galaxy is zoomed in an inset, a fuzzy oblong shape

Year of Space Facts: Week 5/52 🔭🧪🛰️

NGC 1277 is a rare relic galaxy. Even rarer? Its lack of dark matter! This is the first massive galaxy (it has a stellar mass of ~180 billion solar masses) to show signs of dark matter deficiency, a surprise given our understanding of the universe.

📸 NASA/ESA

A cluster of bright blue stars tucked into a dusty nebula

A cluster of bright blue stars tucked into a dusty nebula

Year of Space Facts: Week 4/52 🔭🧪🛰️

The Sun is big to us, but compared to other stars? Not so much! Consider the R136 cluster, which contains 7 VMSes (Very Massive Stars, of course) of over 100 solar masses, including R136a1, the most massive known star at ~250 solar masses.

📸: Hubble, JWST

Lol I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse 🫠 I promise all the stupid ish in my videos is 100% human made!! In this same video I had to hack at a part where I accidentally said the HZ is closer in for a brighter star like wtf

Editing a video today and realized I said "conservitable" instead of "conservative" when talking about the habitable zone and that's what I get for recording videos before coffee 😅

I am so lucky to have an awesome job that I really like, but the downside is that it's soo hard to stop thinking about it and I get so stressed because I care so much 😭

38 years old and I just learned tonight watching Jeopardy that the word "blaggard" is the word "blackguard" 🤯

I would be ashamed to put my byline on this

I Woke Up Before My Alarm So I Had Some Time to Kill and Now I'm Late: A Story of My Life

It's a very hypothetical, thought experiment scale 😅

Yep 🤯 big numbers! The "non" suffix indicates 9, and in the short scale used in the US, that means the power of 10 is 3*9+3 (an octillion, then, is 10^(3*8+3) or 10^27). The long scale uses a 6x framework, so a nonillion is 10^(6*9) and an octillion is 10^(6*8) or 10^48. I always use short scale!

A drawing of a gas giant planet disintegrating into a ring around a bright star

Year of Space Facts: Week 3/52 🔭🧪🛰️

Stars can consume their planets if tidal dissipation causes a planet's orbit to decay fast enough. Nom nom. 🌞🌏😋

🖼: NASA/ESA/G. Bacon (STScI)

Spent some time reading MLK this morning. He was a very inspiring speaker and writer whose words and actions continue to reverberate across history. Happy MLK Day!

"Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows." -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2016 is also the year I got my adult (second round!) of braces off and damn I am jealous of how straight my teeth were! I have consistently worn my retainers ever since, but they still have shifted 😭

A collage of 2 selfies of a woman with brown and pink hair

2016 eh? Fun fact, 2016 is the year I first dyed my hair pink! It's funny how similar these office selfies are 😅 Except my office now gets natural light, my phone takes better pictures, and oh now I have PhD and actually like my job. Still pink though!

Hell yeah!

I needed to look up something from one of my old papers for a video script I'm writing, and I ended up getting sucked in and reading my whole paper. This shit is fascinating, who wrote this?? She was smart!!

Just casually getting this insane view during my dermatology appointment

A view from above of a large cyclonic storm that is mainly a grey colour, set against a swirling backdrop of more bluish smaller storms. At the 12 o'clock position in the large storm is a small point of green light, which is a lightning bolt. This scene is on Jupiter.

Psst.

This is a lightning bolt.

On fucking Jupiter.

So cool!!