Grand Spiral Galaxy

scinerds:

We Can Survive Killer Asteroids — But It Won’t Be Easy
By Neil deGrasse Tyson for Wired Opinion

The chances that your tombstone will read “Killed by Asteroid” are about the same as they’d be for “Killed in Airplane Crash”.

Solar System debris rains down on Earth in vast quantities — more than a hundred tons of it a day. Most of it vaporizes in our atmosphere, leaving stunning trails of light we call shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks — comets and asteroids — that wander interplanetary space in search of targets.

Most asteroids are made of rock. The rest are metal, mostly iron. Some are rubble piles — gravitationally bound collections of bits and pieces. Most live between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and will never come near Earth.

But some do. Some will. More than a thousand known asteroids are classed as “potentially hazardous,” based on size and trajectory. Currently, it looks doable to develop an early-warning and defense system that could protect the human species from impactors larger than a kilometer wide. Smaller ones, which reflect much less light and are therefore much harder to detect at great distances, carry enough energy to incinerate entire nations, but they don’t put the human species at risk of extinction.

Read the rest of Neil’s post on Wired

(via itsfullofstars)

(Source: catscientists, via itsfullofstars)

beautyandterrordance:

The Munsters

egonkey:

Theo Mindell - Spider Murphy’s

<3 Pinkytoast <3

beautyandterrordance:

Mae Clarke as Elizabeth Lavenza, in Frankenstein.

npr:

I thought it would be fun to start the year addressing some questions that many people have about the universe. Mind you, some of these are far from simple, true to what Milan Kundera once wrote, “the only truly serious questions are the ones that even a child can formulate.”

—Marcelo Gleiser fills us in on “What Happened Before The Big Bang? And Other Weird Cosmic Questions”

(via itsfullofstars)

geneticist:

Oxytocin, aka “love hormone”, The hormone responsible for love
Photo by Alfred Pasieka

Charlie Chaplin

Elsie Wright

1917

Rebel Angel nebula