In Case You Missed It: A Weekly Summary of Top Content from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
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Galaxy With Black Hole Shines In Image From NASA’s Chandra, IXPE
The galaxy Centaurus A (Cen A) shines brightly in this image combining data from multiple observatories. In the center of this galaxy is a supermassive black hole feeding off the gas and dust encircling it, and large jets of high-energy particles and other material spewing out. The jet shown at the upper left of this image extends for about 13,000 light-years away from the black hole. Also visible is a dust lane, wrapping around the middle of the galaxy, which may have resulted from a collision with a smaller galaxy millions of years ago.
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Satellite Data, Applications Flowing Through SERVIR to Southeast Asia
More than 50 million people in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar draw water for drinking and agriculture from the Mekong River. With customized tools that use NASA observations and data, the people who manage that water supply have been improving their decision-making. It is a prime example of the work NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been doing to make Earth data more accessible and useful in countries around the world. The work springs out of SERVIR, an initiative first launched in 2004 by NASA and USAID. With a name derived from the Spanish word "to serve," SERVIR builds collaborative projects and conducts training to help bring Earth data into regional, national, and local decision-making.
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The eta Aquariid Meteor Shower Outburst to Peak the Night of May 4-5
The eta Aquariid meteor shower is active throughout April and May, peaking in the pre-dawn hours of May 5. This year could be particularly impressive as an outburst year with 120-160 meteors per hour expected. Despite the full moon lighting up the sky and washing out the faint meteors, this year’s eta Aquariid meteor shower is not one to miss. In terms of producing fireballs, NASA camera data places it #6 among meteor showers. These bright fireballs are caused by Earth running into a dense stream of debris from Comet Halley, a lot of which was ejected more than 3,000 years ago.
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'H' is for Hot and Huge in Chandra Image
With a single letter seemingly etched in the X-ray glow around it, a giant black hole at the center of a massive elliptical galaxy is making a mark on its surroundings. This “H”-shaped structure is found in a detailed new X-ray map of the multimillion-degree gas around the galaxy Messier 84 (M84). As gas is captured by the gravitational force of the black hole, some of it will fall into the abyss, never to be seen again. Some of the gas, however, avoids this fate and instead gets blasted away from the black hole in the form of jets of particles. These jets can push out cavities, in the hot gas surrounding the black hole. Given the orientation of the jets to Earth and the profile of the hot gas, the cavities in M84 form what appears to resemble the letter “H.”
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New Video Series Captures Team Working on NASA’s Europa Clipper
Destined for Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, the Europa Clipper spacecraft – the largest NASA has ever flown on an interplanetary mission – is being readied to launch in October 2024. Between now and then, thousands of hours of work will go into assembling and testing the spacecraft to ensure it’s hardy enough to survive a six-year 1.6-billion-mile (2.6 billion kilometer) journey and sophisticated enough to perform a detailed science investigation of this mysterious moon. The new video series “Spacecraft Makers: Europa Clipper” offers quick updates on the mission’s progress and lifts the curtain on the exacting work that goes into making sure the spacecraft reaches the Jupiter system in 2030. Europa Clipper aims to help answer questions about the ocean that scientists strongly believe lies below Europa’s icy crust.
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