Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one's death.
- Rollo May
Welcome to one of the most active galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood: NGC 1569. This starburst galaxy creates stars at a rate 100 times faster than in our own galaxy, the Milky Way – and it’s been doing so for the past 100 million years.
NGC 1569 is about 11 million light-years away in the constellation Camelopardalis. Find out more about this sparkling galaxy here.
For the past few weeks, our Hubble Space Telescope explored #GalaxiesGalore! You can find more galaxy content and spectacular new images on Hubble’s Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and A. Aloisi (STScI/ESA)
Something that continues to play through my mind this week is how much people can “mean” to each other. Odd to think of with such a versatile word. Mean can be the mathematical average (Nana would have the mean of 3 bottles of wine per week), it can indicate a particular purpose (that cake was meant for Nana…) , the consequence of a behaviour (because Nana shouted at the ice cream man, it means we won’t get one), and it can signify importance (Nana means so much to me) amongst a variety of other uses. I continue to dwell on this idea of “meaning the world” to someone and what that entails.
This week we have been grappling with the pain of losing someone who is still here. We are saying goodbyes, telling stories, sharing pictures as she slowly fades away from us in her hospital room. This is arduous to write, gut-wrenching to think about, and excruciating to witness. Walking into the room and seeing the person who embodied immense life as a shadow is not something I will easily forget and yet I am grateful for that moment with her. Even in the drug induced stupor she was able to convey a love that is so unique to herself. I will always cherish that love and the memories that are saturated with laughter and adventure.
So, “you mean so much to me.” It isn’t half of what can be conveyed to someone in moments like this. The signified importance doesn’t represent the memory of us sitting and listening to Frank Sinatra together as she belted out the lyrics, cruising around Bents like we own the place with a train of baskets overflowing with flowers, hearing shouts from aisle 4 as she ran into people in Tesco with a motorized scooter. There is no quantifiable word that encapsulates the experience of being in your presence and knowing your love.
Being your grandchild has blessed my life beyond measure. My friends from all over the world know your name because of how impactful you have been and the larger than life personality that permeates even the very air around you. You are unapologetically you, which is entirely rare these days and something that brought contention and adoration from us family members. Your storytelling and the inevitable cackle that punctuated nearly every conversation is so enshrined in my memory because of how much fun it was to talk to you. In moments when I felt entirely alone, you were there with absolutely no belief in mental health somehow saving mine.
When I think of what you, “mean” to me, the word “foundation” comes to mind. With you started a long line of strong, smart, opinionated, funny women and men. You being the person who took no shit and gave opinions out like sour candy have permeated all of our lives and enabled us to laugh frequently at your expense and occasionally at our own. You “mean” losing a part of my identity in a way, as talking about my Nana is(?) was(?) one of my favourite things to do with friends as there was always a hilarious anecdote involved and everything was just “so you.” Memories with you have a different flavour than others due to this and a little smirk inescapably creeps to my lips thinking about them. I have such pride in being related to you, as you clearly did for me.
Your legacy with us is powerful Nan. I’ve learned so much from you and what a meaningful impact can be; it doesn’t have to be extravagant but it does have to be purposeful and filled with love. You’ve given me that Nana, and there’s no word in any language that can encapsulate how grateful I am to and for you.
It’s a strange feeling being on the cusp of immense personal change. Physically I’ve been seeing change for months now and feeling it in my bones. Walking comes with the twinge of a hip pain, sitting comes with the impending dread of having to get back up, and going to bed…. there’s always the knowledge that it will be a repeat ritual of having to rebuild the increasing pillow construction after every bathroom visit.
People approach me differently already. I’ve been given unsolicited advice from strangers; most notably the mailman who’s partner had quite a challenging experience. I don’t want to discount the lady on Amazon returns (we were returning a baby monitor, dead giveaway) who preached the efficacy of coconut oil for everything. Then there was the woman who walked by the house and I heard about her own AND her sister’s birth experiences. Double whammy. I don’t leave the house much due to the pandemic so I feel as if I’ve been shielded from even more war stories and dubious advice. No longer am I just Ashley, I’m a conduit which everyone has an opinion for.
On an emotional level I worry I haven’t come to terms with this change. I dread the lack of sleep that is coming our way, the “new body” after birth that I won’t recognize. I’m scared of losing my identity- however, I have done this before just on a different level. The idea that I will forever have a part of me out in the world where I can’t protect her entirely… it’s terrifying. My time with my partner and my family will forever be altered in ways I have yet to comprehend. Relationships are already being redefined as everyone prepares for the nugget’s arrival. I think it’s the idea that soon; the predictability and ease in which I’ve been living my life will forever be altered.
I worry about my relationship with my partner; mourning the change in our lives as I feel as if I haven’t had enough time to be just me and just him. I know everything, including feelings, will change but I already miss our casual life together. It’s the everyday mundane tasks that I’ll miss; just getting in a car easily to B&Q together, strolling through Chester holding hands, meeting up with friends for a walk, going on a date that we haven’t been able to do since March 2020, quiet cuddles on the sofa… Some we will be able to keep but it will never be the same. Everything already revolves around this little life we are bringing into the world and it is vast to comprehend.
I’m bloody scared that baby girl will have something wrong, that she may be dealt a harder card in life- despite trying everything I can think of to make this not happen. If she stops kicking; the panic sets in. If there’s too much hiccupping, I go on red alert. She’s not even here yet and my thoughts are mostly consumed with making sure my body is a safe place for her. I’ve arranged and rearranged the diaper bags, hospital bag, nursery, etc in anticipation of making it easier for us so that I can be nicer to myself and hopefully keep my cool when I’m running on no sleep. In the back of my mind I worry about postpartum depression due to my background; I don’t want postpartum to steal my first months with her. There’s so much to process but for once I don’t want more time to come to terms- I’ll learn to be her mum as soon as she is ready to make her grand entrance…and likely keep relearning how to be her mum for the rest of my life.
Despite all of this I can’t wait to meet her. She will make me a new person, it won’t always be easy, my relationships will be redefined, and life will never be the same. I can’t wait to see her face and feel those tiny little hands in mine or to see Jon hold her for the first time. I can’t wait to introduce her to our families and show her how much love there is in her world. Zoo trips, garden picnics, reading her books as she falls asleep, her and her dad kicking a football in the back garden… there’s just so much we want to give her but mostly we want her to feel and know the unconditional love that we have for her already.
I want all of that out there so that in a few years time I can look back on this form of Ashley and see how much I’ve changed. This new life for our family reforming how we experience the world and adding an even deeper meaning to it all. Any day now our lives will forever altered.
Well, I think I’ve dug up the repressed emotions that were lying in wait!
We’re going to talk about some of the amazing new things NICER is showing us about black holes. But first, let’s talk about black holes — how do they work, and where do they come from? There are two important types of black holes we’ll talk about here: stellar and supermassive. Stellar mass black holes are three to dozens of times as massive as our Sun while supermassive black holes can be billions of times as massive!
Stellar black holes begin with a bang — literally! They are one of the possible objects left over after a large star dies in a supernova explosion. Scientists think there are as many as a billion stellar mass black holes in our Milky Way galaxy alone!
Supermassive black holes have remained rather mysterious in comparison. Data suggest that supermassive black holes could be created when multiple black holes merge and make a bigger one. Or that these black holes formed during the early stages of galaxy formation, born when massive clouds of gas collapsed billions of years ago. There is very strong evidence that a supermassive black hole lies at the center of all large galaxies, as in our Milky Way.
Imagine an object 10 times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City — or cramming a billion trillion people into a car! These two examples give a sense of how incredibly compact and dense black holes can be.
Because so much stuff is squished into such a relatively small volume, a black hole’s gravity is strong enough that nothing — not even light — can escape from it. But if light can’t escape a dark fate when it encounters a black hole, how can we “see” black holes?
Scientists can’t observe black holes directly, because light can’t escape to bring us information about what’s going on inside them. Instead, they detect the presence of black holes indirectly — by looking for their effects on the cosmic objects around them. We see stars orbiting somethingmassive but invisible to our telescopes, or even disappearing entirely!
When a star approaches a black hole’s event horizon — the point of no return — it’s torn apart. A technical term for this is “spaghettification” — we’re not kidding! Cosmic objects that go through the process of spaghettification become vertically stretched and horizontally compressed into thin, long shapes like noodles.
Scientists can also look for accretion disks when searching for black holes. These disks are relatively flat sheets of gas and dust that surround a cosmic object such as a star or black hole. The material in the disk swirls around and around, until it falls into the black hole. And because of the friction created by the constant movement, the material becomes super hot and emits light, including X-rays.
At last — light! Different wavelengths of light coming from accretion disks are something we can see with our instruments. This reveals important information about black holes, even though we can’t see them directly.
So what has NICER helped us learn about black holes? One of the objects this instrument has studied during its time aboard the International Space Station is the ever-so-forgettably-named black hole GRS 1915+105, which lies nearly 36,000 light-years — or 200 million billion miles — away, in the direction of the constellation Aquila.
Scientists have found disk winds — fast streams of gas created by heat or pressure — near this black hole. Disk winds are pretty peculiar, and we still have a lot of questions about them. Where do they come from? And do they change the shape of the accretion disk?
It’s been difficult to answer these questions, but NICER is more sensitive than previous missions designed to return similar science data. Plus NICER often looks at GRS 1915+105 so it can see changes over time.
NICER’s observations of GRS 1915+105 have provided astronomers a prime example of disk wind patterns, allowing scientists to construct models that can help us better understand how accretion disks and their outflows around black holes work.
NICER has also collected data on a stellar mass black hole with another long name — MAXI J1535-571 (we can call it J1535 for short) — adding to information provided by NuSTAR, Chandra, and MAXI. Even though these are all X-ray detectors, their observations tell us something slightly different about J1535, complementing each other’s data!
This rapidly spinning black hole is part of a binary system, slurping material off its partner, a star. A thin halo of hot gas above the disk illuminates the accretion disk and causes it to glow in X-ray light, which reveals still more information about the shape, temperature, and even the chemical content of the disk. And it turns out that J1535’s disk may be warped!
Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI and Artist: John Kagaya (Hoshi No Techou)
This isn’t the first time we have seen evidence for a warped disk, but J1535’s disk can help us learn more about stellar black holes in binary systems, such as how they feed off their companions and how the accretion disks around black holes are structured.
NICER primarily studies neutron stars — it’s in the name! These are lighter-weight relatives of black holes that can be formed when stars explode. But NICER is also changing what we know about many types of X-ray sources. Thanks to NICER’s efforts, we are one step closer to a complete picture of black holes. And hey, that’s pretty nice!
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
I work in the “care” industry as a drug and alcohol worker for kids. There are some pretty amazing highs (of a natural variety) and some devastating lows in this line of employment. One day you have a kid that has just signed up for college and is getting along with their family again, the next day police are involved and criminal exploitation is being suggested. It is such an unpredictable and challenging area to work in.
My partner could see this. He saw me coming home burdened by the pain of the lives the children were living and how heavy it could be. So.. he started drawing me little “lunchbox” drawings every day.
It started out one day last March when I was heading off to work I found a little piece of paper with a sketch of me saying “you can change the world.” Gosh, it absolutely brightened that day! He knows I absolutely love cheesy puns and just started illustrating hilarious scenes to make me smile.
He kept up, every day at work I would find some little drawing or sketch with puns and adorable animals. It was and is his way of trying to brighten my day no matter what came at me and it worked.
He has now drawn about 300 puns and somehow I keep having them show up in my bag! So in hopes of brightening some days, here’s @thepundoodler
There is a well of emotion churning just beneath the surface. An undercurrent of self-doubt paired with moments of clear certainty. I feel it in my chest; like a balloon that is struggling to be inflated but also could burst at any moment.
Tuesday was a big day for me. It was the day I had a breakdown; but I would be lying if it was the first this year. After a day at the “dream job” I got into my car and drove away from the beautiful monstrosity that I have been working 9-5. Something cracked open- uncontrollable torrents of tears clouded my eyes and sobs wracked my body. Mere minutes after leaving the “dream” behind, I pulled off of the road and did all I could think of doing… and called my mum. As a 32 year old woman, this is not a moment of pride but it was one of necessity. I had fallen to pieces. I haven’t been back to the dream job since and I’ve realized some things in the time between then and now.
How do you define success? In January I would have said being able to work at a center where I helped people recover from addiction and using what I’ve learned to bring comfort to others. In January I believed that dream would be realized as I walked into the new decade with a new therapeutic job at a new and luxurious addiction rehab. I would have told you that success to me was about moving upward; both in money and in prestige. I could have painted you a picture of my ideal environment; a place of serenity and growth. It was the exact position I was sold last year, everything I could have imagined in an unbelievable package.
My dream job turned into a beautiful nightmare. Every day I continued to show up and was greeted by overwhelming anxiety, a near constant state of fear, immense uncertainty, and the worst of all was that I saw myself withering in the shadows and quite literally hiding in the bathrooms. There was a time not so long ago that I took pride in being an advocate and feeling as if I had worth- that now seems like ages ago. Over and over when I asked questions I got, “it will all be fine,” and “don’t worry,” or “that’s not our problem.” After 3 months of this, it became glaringly apparent that I could not longer look people in the eyes when they asked me questions. Being kept in the dark and never having definitive answers took a deep toll and left massive insecurity, self-doubt, and incongruence. I was being asked to sell an addiction program that I knew next to nothing about. What I signed up for was to work side by side with peopled to be authentic; not a fake reassurance over the phone trying to sell a perfectly impossible reality.
On Tuesday I was asked by a man who had come in looking for help: “what do you do when everything feels wrong?” I responded with the script that I had been coached, feeling tainted as the false promises dripped from my own lips. Everything has felt wrong since I walked into this- it’s about time I did something right again.
So my perception of success has entirely altered. Today, I would say that it is being able to come home and feel as if I have put more kindness into the world. My own success, just now, is being able to step away from toxicity and finally being kind to myself.
You put your name in my phone as “Sexual Chris” McKinney; not to be confused with any other Chris out there. You started every conversation with, “girllllll,” leading us in and preparing us for the tea you would share. You played “Strawberry Wine” on loud as we drove around Lexington, singing at the top of our lungs to an empty backseat audience. You made hot chocolate on the stove top and it took ages, so long we thought the stove was broken…we hadn’t turned it on. You created the annual Drag Race Draft where we picked our queens and watched on a weekly basis as they lip synced for their lives. You invited me over for a Disney night where we wore onesies and I watched Frozen for the first and last time. You always picked up the phone when I called and always had a plan- no matter what time of day or where we were.
I hear your voice now even as it fades away. My memories with you never fail to bring a smile to my face but one that is always quickly followed by a pit in my stomach. How could you possibly not be with us anymore? Why were our future memories stolen from us, it simply isn’t fair.
There’s also a huge chasm of regret that is never far from my mind. You asked me to stand by you as you married the love of your life. I said yes, I wanted to so incredibly badly. I didn’t though, I let you down. Life got in front of me and between us. How much I wish I could turn back the time to see you on that day and hear your voice as you told Nick “I do.” I will always regret not being there for you as I know, in every fibre of my being, you would be there for me if you could.
I promise you I will never forget you and the long talks we had. I promise to listen to the words that you wrote me on graduation- measure my own success by the person I want to become. I haven’t been able to listen to the Deena Carter “Strawberry Wine,” since you left us but I promise I will, in time, and I will sing it as loudly as possible. I promise that when my day to marry my best friend comes, you will be there with me. The love you gave to all of us was such a gift and I promise to give as much as I can for as long as I can just like you did.
