A big surprise from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. It detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before. Scientists think the antimatter...

Full movie coming very soon. Welcome to Inner Space. Seven decades ago, in March 1940, the author John Steinbeck and his friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, sailed down the coast of California and Mexico to the Sea of Cortez. "The abundance of life here gives one an exuberance," they wrote, "a feeling of fullness and richness." Their stated purpose was to document the creatures that inhabit shallow waters and tide pools on the margins of the Sea of Cortez. But it became much more. In these mysterious, phosphorescent waters they sought an understanding of mankind s relationship to the natural world, and a wellspring of hope for a world headed toward war. Looking beyond the events of the day, the two friends foresaw our rising impact on the oceans, and the devastating impact that over fishing would have on this rich sea. And yet, in their journey, they encountered a periodic cooling of the eastern Pacific Ocean known as La Niña that can still set off an explosion of life. Can the story of their journey inspire new efforts to preserve the Sea of Cortez?

From NASA s Scientific Visualization Studio. Supercomputer models of merging black holes reveal properties that are crucial to understanding future detections of gravitational waves. This movie follows two orbiting black holes and their accretion disk during their final three orbits and ultimate merger. Redder colors correspond to higher gas densities. The initial magnetic field of the gas is amplified by 100 times. Magnetic fields evacuate the region above the black hole and produce a thinner, hotter, denser disk in the immediate vicinity of the black hole than in simulations without them. The merged black hole resides within a hot, dense disk of ionized gas. The base of the low-density funnel is visible near the center. Such a structure could support a jet of particles moving near the speed of light, although one was not yet produced before the simulation ended. This model, which includes the effects of general relativity, magnetic fields and gas dynamics, produced an electromagnetic signal 10,000 brighter than in simulations that ignored the gas effects. The sequence ends with a simulation of the merger of two black holes and the resulting emission of gravitational radiation. The colored fields represent a component of the curvature of space-time. The outer red sheets correspond directly to the outgoing gravitational radiation that one day may be detected by gravitational-wave observatories. The brighter yellow areas near the black holes do not correspond to physical structures but generally indicate where the strong non-linear gravitational-field interactions are in play. Such outgoing gravitational radiation one day may be detected by gravitational-wave observatories.

This video is adapted from an intriguing episode of Hubblecast. nature s telescopes. It explores a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. The gravitational force of a galaxy, full of stars, gas, dark matter, and dust, is so enormous that it affects the region it sits in and distorts the very fabric of the surrounding space. It isn t only galaxies that do this. Any object that has mass distorts the space around it with its gravity, from large galaxy clusters down to individual stars. In space, light travels invariably along straight lines. But what is a straight line? Well, it is the shortest distance between two points. But in a curved space, the shortest distance between two points may not look particularly straight to us. Now what that means is that when light passes very near by a massive object that curves the space around it, the light ray is bent. As a result, this massive object, or rather the curved space around it produced by its gravity, acts like a lens; a gravitational lens that deflects light into our telescopes that would have otherwise never made it there. This deflection means that distant and faint objects can suddenly be seen peeking from around the edge of a nearer "lens" — although they may look quite different than expected. We see distant galaxies that have been "lensed" as arcs on the sky around their lenses. For example, the arc around this galaxy cluster is not a photographic error, but a second more distant galaxy -- deformed, but visible.

Hey Everyone, You can find our 4K UHD content and more great space and science shows on: https://www.magellantv.com/genres/space Two scientists have laid out the basic technical specifications of a black hole powered starship. The concept embodies a surprisingly hopeful vision of the future promoted by Stephen Hawking. How feasible is it technically? How far could it take humanity one day in the distant future?

From Hubblecast, consider NGC 5189, the remnants of a dead sun-like star in our galaxy. This planetary nebula has a chaotic shape, like a ribbon in space. How it got that way is a long running mystery that the Hubble Space Telescope recently unraveled.

From ESO-Cast. A new image from ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, reveals extraordinarily fine detail that has never been seen before in the planet-forming disc around a young star. These are the first observations that have used ALMA in its near-final configuration and the sharpest pictures ever made at submillimetre wavelengths. The new results are an enormous step forward in the observation of how protoplanetary discs develop and how planets form. For ALMA’s first observations in its new and most powerful mode, researchers pointed the antennas at HL Tauri — a young star, about 450 light-years away, which is surrounded by a dusty disc. The resulting image exceeds all expectations and reveals unexpectedly fine detail in the disc of material left over from star birth. It shows a series of concentric bright rings, separated by gaps.

From NASA Heliophysics. The number of sunspots increases and decreases over time in a regular, approximately 11-year cycle, called the sunspot cycle. The exact length of the cycle can vary. It has been as short as eight years and as long as fourteen, but the number of sunspots always increases over time, and then returns to low again. More sunspots mean increased solar activity, when great blooms of radiation known as solar flares or bursts of solar material known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) shoot off the sun s surface. The highest number of sun spots in any given cycle is designated "solar maximum," while the lowest number is designated "solar minimum." Each cycle, varies dramatically in intensity, with some solar maxima being so low as to be almost indistinguishable from the preceding minimum. Sunspots are a magnetic phenomenon and the entire sun is magnetized with a north and a south magnetic pole just like a bar magnet. The comparison to a simple bar magnet ends there, however, as the sun s interior is constantly on the move. By tracking sound waves that course through the center of the sun, an area of research known as helioseismology, scientists can gain an understanding of what s deep inside the sun. They have found that the magnetic material inside the sun is constantly stretching, twisting, and crossing as it bubbles up to the surface. The exact pattern of movements is not conclusively mapped out, but over time they eventually lead to the poles reversing completely. The sunspot cycle happens because these poles flip -- north becomes south and south becomes north--approximately every 11 years. Some 11 years later, the poles reverse again back to where they started, making the full solar cycle actually a 22-year phenomenon. The sun behaves similarly over the course of each 11-year cycle no matter which pole is on top, however, so this shorter cycle tends to receive more attention.

This is a parody of some over-the-top narrators we know. However, it touches on the subject of more straightforward 25-minute show we re editing on plasma rockets and the future of spaceflight. In case you re interested, here s the introductory section of the script: The ancients saw them as messages from the Gods... mysterious supernatural winds blowing from the realm of spirits. Modern science linked these polar light shows, auroras, to fierce, and lethal outbursts from the sun as they slammed into Earth s atmosphere. Today, researchers from a whole new generation believe they may one day tap into this cosmic energy source... to fuel humanity s expansion into space. Can this mysterious and explosive form of matter provide the fuel to finally vault us out beyond our home planet? Since the dawn of rocketry, we ve relied on the same basic technology to get us off the ground. Fill a cylinder with volatile chemicals... then ignite them in a controlled explosion. The force of the blast is what pushes the rocket up. Nowadays, chemical rockets are the only vehicles with enough thrust to overcome Earth s gravity and carry a payload into orbit. But they are not very efficient. The heavier the payload, the more fuel you need to lift it into space. But the more fuel a rocket carries, the more fuel it needs. For long-range missions, most spacecraft rely heavily on the initial speed gained from the launch, then coast to their destination. To reach distant targets, flight planners often design circuitous routes to give the craft a gravitational boost from the moon or another planet. A small cadre of scientists believes it has a quicker and more efficient way to get around in space.

As Rover Curiosity hurtles through space on its way to Mars, it is confronted with many issues that NASA scientists must constantly account for. See the next step of Curiosity s journey to the red planet.

Scientists have further narrowed the search for a hypothetical particle that could be dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up 80 percent of all the mass in the universe. This video from NASA Astrophysics presents the new results, compiled from two years worth of data from NASA s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Gamma rays are very energetic light, and the telescope looks for faint gamma-ray signals that are generated by a variety of sources, such as gas and dust spiraling into supermassive black holes or exploding stars. But another potential source of gamma rays is dark matter. Although no one is sure what dark matter is, one of the leading candidates is a yet-to-be-discovered particle called a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP). When two of these WIMPs meet, the theory goes, they can annihilate one another and generate gamma rays. There are many possible versions of WIMPs, and they re expected to span a wide range of masses, producing a range of gamma rays with different energies. Using Fermi, the scientists focused on 10 small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way, searching for gamma-ray signals within a specific range of energies. They found no signs of annihilating WIMPs, which rules out certain kinds of WIMPs as dark-matter candidates.

Unknown to the general populace, young men and women from around the globe are being raised in a secret, underground facility. Using a library of alien knowledge that was uncovered early in the 21st century—code name: The Quantum Guide—these future astronauts prepare for the day when they will set out to colonize the galaxy. They must learn to decode the myriad of enigmas that exist in the great beyond if there is to be any hope of the human race becoming an interstellar power. Jarl Quarkson is one such student. His first lesson starts now.

From NASA and Bela Lugosi. An enormous alien planet that some astronomers thought was dead and buried has come back to life, a new study suggests. A new analysis of observations from NASA s Hubble Space Telescope found that the bright nearby star Fomalhaut does indeed host a huge exoplanet, which scientists dubbed a "zombie" world in an aptly Halloween-themed video on the alien planet. This conclusion contradicts other recent studies, which determined that the so-called planet — known as Fomalhaut b — is actually just a giant dust cloud. "Given what we know about the behavior of dust and the environment where the planet is located, we think that we re seeing a planetary object that is completely embedded in dust rather than a free-floating dust cloud," co-author John Debes, of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement.

For more 4K space, and more great History and Science than you ll ever watch, check out our sister network... https://www.magellantv.com/featured As the Cassini-Huygens mission winds down to its Grand Finale, we recognize it as one of the greatest voyages of discovery in the history of science. We have learned and discovered more things about a previously unknown dynamic system--a system that s a billion miles from us: the Saturn system--than we ever could have imagined. One of the pinnacles of that has been the discoveries on Titan. Titan has turned out to be a very complex world. It has geology. It has methane rain. It has lakes and seas. It has dunes of organic molecules. And it has a lot more secrets that it s still hiding from us. I think that really what makes people so excited about Titan is this combination of familiarity and alienness.

Our latest episode of Cosmic Journeys. We ask the question: Are the universe and its physical laws so fine-tuned that the rise of life is inevitable? Or is life a fluke, a lucky roll of cosmic dice? The film investigates the rise of one important component of life, water. It turns out that the universe is laden with water, a byproduct of dust kicked out and spread around by supernovas and black holes.

"The sun & the stars dear, they ll shine on our highway. They ll shine on our home here, by my highway of light." Images: European Southern Observatory Music: "Moonlight Hall" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

From Hubblecast. Using images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered unique and totally unexpected structures within the dusty disc around the star AU Microscopii. These fast-moving wave-like features are unlike anything ever observed, or even predicted. What are they, and what do they tell us about the restless early years of a solar system in the making?

See how the Webb Space Telescope will study planetary bodies with our solar system and planets orbiting other stars. Its operations in the years to come promise to help scientists better understand how planets form and how they evolve. Planets begin as dense knots in clouds of dust swirling around a young star. But how do they go from something like this, to something like this? With the James Webb Space Telescope astronomers will be able to study how planets come to be and how they change as they get older. After centuries of searching, astronomers are finding exoplanets just about everywhere. Ranging from giant planets with masses much greater than Jupiter s to worlds only a few times more massive than Earth. But where do the planets we know best fit into the menagerie of worlds astronomers are finding? How did our solar system come to be the way it is? Why is Earth a balmy water rich world and are there other worlds like it elsewhere in the galaxy? These are the kind of questions astronomers will address with Webb. For planets that pass directly in front of their stars, Webb will search for chemical fingerprints, identifying atmospheric gases like water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane that absorb specific wavelengths of the star s light. Webb will also study the dusty disks where new planets form to reveal how the chemical compositions of younger and older disks change with time, and identifying how these changes are reflected in the planets we find. Such studies will be revolutionary in their own right. And by applying Webb s capabilities closer to home, astronomers will better understand planetary systems. For example, how do our asteroids, comets, and other small bodies like Pluto relate to the objects that create dusty disks around other stars? The Webb telescope will determine the physical and chemical properties of these bodies with unprecedented sensitivity in wavelengths unavailable to telescopes on the ground. By learning more about the small bodies in our solar system, scientists will be able to address questions about the solar system s past, and compare it to other planetary systems we find in similar phases of construction. For example, did Earth s oceans arrive by impacts with small icy bodies? If so, is the same process happening elsewhere and can we find those locations? Webb also will study the outer planets and their moons. Of particular interest is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, now being explored by NASA s Cassini spacecraft. Titan is as big as the planet mercury, possesses an atmosphere half again as thick as Earth s, and a frigid surface with lakes of liquid hydrocarbons. Webb will map Titan s chemical makeup with six times Cassini s resolution and monitor the moon s seasonal changes over a decade or more. Next stop Uranus. When Voyager 2 returned this image in 1986, the planet s south pole was facing the sun and few clouds could be seen. But as Uranus neared its equinox in 2007, bright clouds suddenly materialized. So far scientists are at a loss to explain this profound seasonal change. During Voyager s visit, the northern hemispheres of Uranus s big moons were all in shadow. But when Webb begins service, the moons northern halves will face the sun and give astronomers abundant new real estate to explore. Three years later, in 1989, Voyager 2 passed Neptune and imaged its strange dark spot. Over the following years, astronomers have seen the dark spot disappear, and then reappear. Voyager easily picked out clouds despite Neptune s greater distance from the sun. Why is weather on Neptune and Uranus so different? Neptune s big moon Triton is unusual too. Nitrogen-spewing volcanoes and other geological forces reshaped this frozen surface in ways we re just beginning to understand. Comets, asteroids, the outer planets and their moons, and beyond them, the icy bodies of the Kuiper belt: these objects provide us with the closest and most detailed look at how our own solar system evolved. The James Webb Space Telescope makes it possible to take that understanding a step further, to probe the makeup of nearby planetary systems at comparable distances from their stars. Webb will allow astronomers to directly compare the chemical and physical properties of our outer solar system with similar zones around nearby stars.

A video from NASA s Dawn spacecraft takes us on a flyover journey above the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta. The data obtained by Dawn s framing camera, used to produce the visualizations, will help scientists determine the processes that formed Vesta s striking features. It will also help Dawn mission fans all over the world visualize this mysterious world, which is the second most massive object in the main asteroid belt. The video, which shows Vesta as seen from Dawn s perspective, can be viewed at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1020. You ll notice in the video that Vesta is not entirely lit up. There is no light in the high northern latitudes because, like Earth, Vesta has seasons. Currently it is northern winter on Vesta, and the northern polar region is in perpetual darkness. When we view Vesta s rotation from above the south pole, half is in darkness simply because half of Vesta is in daylight and half is in the darkness of night . Another distinct feature seen in the video is a massive circular structure in the south pole region. Scientists were particularly eager to see this area close-up, since NASA s Hubble Space Telescope first detected it years ago. The circular structure, or depression, is several hundreds of miles, or kilometers, wide, with cliffs that are also several miles high. One impressive mountain in the center of the depression rises approximately 9 miles (15 kilometers) above the base of this depression, making it one of the highest elevations on all known bodies with solid surfaces in the solar system. The collection of images, obtained when Dawn was about 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers) above Vesta s surface, was used to determine its rotational axis and a system of latitude and longitude coordinates. One of the first tasks tackled by the Dawn science team was to determine the precise orientation of Vesta s rotation axis relative to the celestial sphere. The zero-longitude, or prime meridian, of Vesta was defined by the science team using a tiny crater about 1,640 feet (500 meters) in diameter, which they named "Claudia," after a Roman woman during the second century B.C. Dawn s craters will be named after the vestal virgins-the priestesses of the goddess Vesta, and famous Roman women, while other features will be named for festivals and towns of that era. The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate s Discovery Program, managed by NASA s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Other scientific partners include Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany; DLR Institute for Planetary Research, Berlin, Germany; Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome; and the Italian Space Agency, Rome. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

From NASA s legendary Scientific Visualization Studio, here s news of one of the nearest and richest stellar associations in our galaxy. Cygnus OB2, located about 4,700 light-years away, hosts some 3,000 hot stars, including about 100 in the O class. Weighing in at more than a dozen times the sun s mass and sporting surface temperatures five to ten times hotter, these ginormous blue-white stars blast their surroundings with intense ultraviolet light and powerful outflows called stellar winds. Two of these stars can be found in the intriguing binary system known as Cygnus OB2 #9. In 2011, NASA s Swift satellite, the European Space Agency s XMM-Newton observatory and several ground-based facilities took part in a campaign to monitor the system as the giant stars raced toward their closest approach. The observations are giving astronomers a more detailed picture of the stars, their orbits and the interaction of their stellar winds. An O-type star is so luminous that the pressure of its starlight actually drives material from its surface, creating particle outflows with speeds of several million miles an hour. Put two of these humongous stars in the same system and their winds can collide during all or part of the orbit, creating both radio emission and X-rays. In 2008, research showed that Cygnus OB2 #9 emitted radio signals that varied every 2.355 years. In parallel, Yael Nazé, an astronomer at the University of Liège in Belgium, detected for the first time a signature in the system s optical spectrum that indicated the presence of two stars. The binary nature of Cygnus OB2 #9 provided a natural explanation for the periodic radio changes. To maximize their chances of catching X-rays from colliding winds, the researchers needed to monitor the system as the stars raced toward their closest approach, or periastron. The first opportunity arose in 2011. NASA s Swift made five sets of X-ray observations during the 10 months around the date of periastron, and XMM-Newton carried out one high-resolution observation near the predicted time of closest approach. The new data indicate that Cygnus OB2 #9 is a massive binary with components of similar mass and luminosity following long, highly eccentric orbits. The most massive star in the system has about 50 times the sun s mass, and its companion is slightly smaller, with about 45 solar masses. At periastron, these stellar titans are separated by less than three times Earth s average distance from the sun. Two sets of measurements taken 5.5 days apart near the time of periastron — one in late June by XMM-Newton and one in early July by Swift — show that the X-ray flux increased by four times when the stars were closest together. This is compelling evidence for the interaction of fierce stellar winds.