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What Can We Learn from the Universe’s Baby Picture?
If you look at your baby photos, you might see hints of the person you are today — a certain look in the eyes, maybe the hint of your future nose or ears. In the same way, scientists examine the universe’s “baby picture” for clues about how it grew into the cosmos we know now. This baby photo is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a faint glow that permeates the universe in all directions.
In late September, NASA plans to launch a balloon-based astronomical observatory from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, to study the universe’s baby picture. Meet PIPER! The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer will fly at the edge of our atmosphere to look for subtle patterns in the CMB.
The CMB is cold. Really, really cold. The average temperature is around minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit. It formed 380,000 years after the big bang, which scientists think happened about 13.8 billion years ago. When it was first discovered, the CMB temperature looked very uniform, but researchers later found there are slight variations like hot and cold spots. The CMB is the oldest light in the universe that we can see. Anything before the CMB is foggy — literally.
Credit: Rob van Hal
Before the CMB, the universe was a fog of hot, dense plasma. (By hot, we’re talking about 500 million degrees F.) That’s so hot that atoms couldn’t exist yet – there was just a soup of electrons and protons. Electrons are great at deflecting light. So, any light that existed in the first few hundred thousand years after the big bang couldn’t travel very far before bouncing off electrons, similar to the way a car’s headlights get diffused in fog.
After the big bang, the universe started expanding rapidly in all directions. This expansion is still happening today. As the universe continued to expand, it cooled. By the time the universe reached its 380,000th birthday, it had cooled enough that electrons and protons could combine into hydrogen atoms for the first time. (Scientists call this era recombination.) Hydrogen atoms don’t deflect light nearly as well as loose electrons and the fog lifted. Light could now travel long distances across the universe.
The light we see in the CMB comes from the recombination era. As it traveled across the universe, through the formation of stars and galaxies, it lost energy. Now we observe it in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is less energetic than visible light and therefore invisible to our eyes. The first baby photo of the CMB – really, a map of the sky in microwaves – came from our Cosmic Background Explorer, which operated from 1989 to 1993.
Why are we so interested in the universe’s baby picture? Well, it’s helped us learn a lot about the structure of the universe around us today. For example, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe produced a detailed map of the CMB and helped us learn that the universe is 68 percent dark energy, 27 percent dark matter and just 5 percent normal matter — the stuff that you and stars are made of.
Right after the big bang, we’re pretty sure the universe was tiny. Really tiny. Everything we see today would have been stuffed into something smaller than a proton. If the universe started out that small, then it would have followed the rules of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics allows all sorts of strange things to happen. Matter and energy can be “borrowed” from the future then crash back into nothingness. And then cosmic inflation happened and the universe suddenly expanded by a trillion trillion times.
All this chaos creates a sea of gravitational waves. (These are called “primordial” gravitational waves and come from a different source than the gravitational waves you may have heard about from merging neutron stars and black holes.) The signal of the primordial gravitational waves is a bit like white noise, where the signal from merging dead stars is like a whistle you can pick up over the noise.
These gravitational waves filled the baby universe and created distinct patterns, called B-mode polarization, in the CMB light. These patterns have handedness, which means even though they’re mirror images of each other, they’re not symmetrical — like trying to wear a left-hand glove on your right hand. They’re distinct from another kind of polarization called E-mode, which is symmetrical and echoes the distribution of matter in the universe.
That’s where PIPER comes in. PIPER’s two telescopes sit in a hot-tub-sized container of liquid helium, which runs about minus 452 degrees F. It’ll look at 85 percent of the sky and is extremely sensitive, so it will help us learn even more about the early days of the universe. By telling us more about polarization and those primordial gravitational waves, PIPER will help us understand how the early universe grew from that first baby picture.
PIPER’s first launch window in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, is in late September. When it’s getting ready to launch, you’ll be able to watch the balloon being filled on the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility website. Follow NASA Blueshift on Twitter or Facebook for updates about PIPER and when the livestream will be available.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Measuring Cosmic Rays at the Edge of Space
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a… SuperTIGER?
No, that’s not the latest superhero spinoff movie - it’s an instrument launching soon from Antarctica! It’ll float on a giant balloon above 99.5% of the Earth’s atmosphere, measuring tiny particles called cosmic rays.
Right now, we have a team of several scientists and technicians from Washington University in St. Louis and NASA at McMurdo Station in Antarctica preparing for the launch of the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder, which is called SuperTIGER for short. This is the second flight of this instrument, which last launched in Antarctica in 2012 and circled the continent for a record-breaking 55 days.
SuperTIGER measures cosmic rays, which are itty-bitty pieces of atoms that are zinging through space at super-fast speeds up to nearly the speed of light. In particular, it studies galactic cosmic rays, which means they come from somewhere in our Milky Way galaxy, outside of our solar system.
Most cosmic rays are just an individual proton, the basic positively-charged building block of matter. But a rarer type of cosmic ray is a whole nucleus (or core) of an atom - a bundle of positively-charged protons and non-charged neutrons - that allows us to identify what element the cosmic ray is. Those rare cosmic-ray nuclei (that’s the plural of nucleus) can help us understand what happened many trillions of miles away to create this particle and send it speeding our way.
The cosmic rays we’re most interested in measuring with SuperTIGER are from elements heavier than iron, like copper and silver. These particles are created in some of the most dynamic and exciting events in the universe - such as exploding and colliding stars.
In fact, we’re especially interested in the cosmic rays created in the collision of two neutron stars, just like the event earlier this year that we saw through both light and gravitational waves. Adding the information from cosmic rays opens another window on these events, helping us understand more about how the material in the galaxy is created.
Why does SuperTIGER fly on a balloon?
While cosmic rays strike our planet harmlessly every day, most of them are blocked by the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. That means that scientists have to get far above Earth - on a balloon or spacecraft - to measure an accurate sample of galactic cosmic rays. By flying on a balloon bigger than a football field, SuperTIGER can get to the edge of space to take these measurements.
It’ll float for weeks at over 120,000 feet, which is nearly four times higher than you might fly in a commercial airplane. At the end of the flight, the instrument will return safely to the ice on a huge parachute. The team can recover the payload from its landing site, bring it back to the United States, repair or make changes to it, if needed, and fly it again another year!
There are also cosmic ray instruments on our International Space Station, such as ISS-CREAM and CALET, which each started their development on a series of balloons launched from Antarctica. The SuperTIGER team hopes to eventually take measurements from space, too.
Why do we launch from Antarctica?
McMurdo Station is a hotspot for all sorts of science while it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere (which is winter here in the United States), including scientific ballooning. The circular wind patterns around the pole usually keep the balloon from going out over the ocean, making it easier to land and recover the instrument later. And the 24-hour daylight in the Antarctic summer keeps the balloon at a nearly constant height to get very long flights - it would go up and down if it had to experience the temperature changes of day and night. All of that sunlight shining on the instrument's array of solar cells also gives a continuous source of electricity to power everything.
Antarctica is an especially good place to fly a cosmic ray instrument like SuperTIGER. The Earth’s magnetic field blocks fewer cosmic rays at the poles, meaning that we can measure more particles as SuperTIGER circles around the South Pole than we would at NASA scientific ballooning sites closer to the Earth’s equator.
The SuperTIGER team is hard at work preparing for launch right now - and their launch window opens soon! Follow @NASABlueshift for updates and opportunities to interact with our scientists on the ice.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.
Science Balloons on Parade
You might see some of your favorite characters bobbing through the streets of New York City during Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but did you know that NASA's got some balloons of our own? Early December in Antarctica, we're planning to launch some behemoth balloons carrying science experiments and instruments to help unravel mysteries of our universe.
Like the parade balloons, these scientific balloons are filled with helium. But the science balloon is designed to soar above 130,000 feet, past the clouding views of our atmosphere. They can stay in the air from 2 hours to 100 days, depending on the balloon type and how heavy the science payload is (up to 6000 lbs). A typical, fully-inflated scientific balloon can be 460 ft in diameter and 396 ft in height, made of acres of sandwich bag-looking film. That’s MUCH larger than some parade balloons, and probably a pain to bring down 6th Avenue.
Like the parade balloons, these scientific balloons are filled with helium. But the science balloon is designed to soar above 130,000 feet, past the clouding views of our atmosphere.
So why launch these balloons in Antarctica? Winter in the South Pole means 24 hours of non-stop sunlight, which is great for studying our sun. Being at the poles, which has a weaker magnetic field than the rest of our planet, also means we can capture and study cosmic ray particles that would be too scattered by the Earth’s magnetic field elsewhere. Depending on the kind of science we'd like to do, we also launch balloons from places all over the world.
These balloons are great, inexpensive test-beds for scientific instruments that could one day end up on a space-bound mission. NASA's NuSTAR mission started out as a balloon experiment before it was refined and launched into space to study black holes and other supernova remnants. Learn more about our balloons, and see where these balloons are going using our tracker.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
Parade Photo: U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Brian Ferguson
This is Bob. Bob the balloon. Bob just wanted you to know that you’re amazing and he hopes you have a great day!
Day 25: Prickly. But soft on the inside 🌼
Day 17: Swollen. A continuation from last year’s inktober 🐛🐡
i was given a balloon so i drew on it
Different angles because balloon
Baloon orb shape
Not goot at 2d image
Not very different angles but slight difference (teeny tiny)
Pretty much my childhood in a nutshell.
If you dropped a water balloon on a bed of nails, you’d expect it to burst spectacularly. And you’d be right – some of the time. Under the right conditions, though, you’d see what a high-speed camera caught in the animation above: a pancake-shaped bounce with nary a leak. Physically, this is a scaled-up version of what happens to a water droplet when it hits a superhydrophobic surface.
Water repellent superhydrophobic surfaces are covered in microscale roughness, much like a bed of tiny nails. When the balloon (or droplet) hits, it deforms into the gaps between posts. In the case of the water balloon, its rubbery exterior pulls back against that deformation. (For the droplet, the same effect is provided by surface tension.) That tension pulls the deformed parts of the balloon back up, causing the whole balloon to rebound off the nails in a pancake-like shape. For more, check out this video on the student balloon project or the original water droplet research. (Image credits: T. Hecksher et al., Y. Liu et al.; via The New York Times; submitted by Justin B.)
Music is powerful because it hurts. It actually, very physically hurts. It feels like a thick balloon is inflating behind your chest and it's spreading to your stomach and arms and fingers and you want to curl into yourself as if that will stop it from growing but it continues on. The nostalgia will only ever be nostalgia. The weekly visits with a friend are now barely even a text every few months. The fandom you dedicated your life to is barely even a passing thought anymore. The ideas that ran through your head now gather dust as a forgotten word document. Life is better, sure, but life used to have them. Why couldn't life be better and still keep them?
This would have never happened if you hadn’t listened to that music. But oh how beautiful those memories are, and there's a smile on your face despite the balloon threatening to pop if you listen a moment longer.
Are you READY, kids?!??!?
the correct answer was: “yes, I will watch your let’s play video, max”
" Balloon. "
Scroll down.
The end.. ?
(This art is brief introduction to the my balloon-world lore.)