During one of my daily internet quests of doing research and looking for articles about a different topic, I got side tracked and just decided to google “space bagels,” just out of curiosity for what would come up (and wondering if my blog would… It didn’t). What came up out of the search was, to my surprise, not just photo-shopped bagels in space, but articles about ACTUAL bagels in space.

Story goes that back in 2008, astronaut Greg Chamitoff was asked what food he wanted to bring with up to to the International Space Station. His response was bagels, but not just any bagels. He brought 18 sesame seed bagels from his cousins shop, Fairmount Bagels in Montreal, Canada, his hometown.

According to his aunt, Mona Chamitoff, who also works at the family shop, “he couldn’t imagine leaving Earth for six long months without his favorite indulgence.

They even made a branding out of it, having some residents who also enjoy their bagels be surprised from how they didn’t hear about bagels going into space, like April Colosimo (credits of the bagel bag photo goes to her).

So there’s the story as to how Fairmount bagels then became the very first bagels in space. Space bagels are now a thing and its fantastic.

SOURCES:

https://blogs.library.mcgill.ca/schulich/bagels-in-space/

http://fairmountbagel.com/bagels-in-space/

https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal-born-astronaut-brings-bagels-into-space-1.299619

The Milky Way Galaxy is our home, it holds our Solar System which holds our Earth.

I’d say that’s a pretty good group photo, don’t you think?

Besides it being our home, the Milky Way is just like a typical barred spiral galaxy, like millions of others out in the universe including our large neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, which speaking of the Andromeda galaxy, its on course to collide with ours in about 5 billion years.  But, you know, even though it is where we are located in the universe, I don’t know much about it, besides a couple fun facts and how we are able to see a stretch of it in the night sky.

The Milky way is made up of about 100-400 billion stars and is about 13.6 billion years old. Here on Earth we are about 27,000 light years away from the center. We also don’t exactly flow at the same level as the galaxy, but instead our solar system is tipped at about 63 degrees. So we’re just floating along sideways, what else is new.

As said before, the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, and it has two major arms, arms being the part that make galaxy’s look all spun and curled together. Along with the arms, it has two minor arms, and two smaller spurs, one of which the sun and our solar system are located on called the Orion arm. The arms have high amounts of dust and gas, the ingredients to make new stars. There are new stars constantly being made within the arms, and billions more can be made with the amount of gas and dust. At the center, there’s even more gas, dust, and stars. The center is called the galactic bulge, since everything is jam packed into there. Did you know the bulge is the reason we can only see a small percentage of the stars in the galaxy because the gas and dust are immensely thick to see into, much less see the other side of it? I didn’t. There’s also a supermassive black hole the mass of 4.3 million suns in the center. Shocking!

Outside of all the bulge and arms, the Milky way is surrounded by what’s called a “spherical halo” made up of hot gases, old stars, and globular clusters. This only contains 2 percent as many stars than there are in the actual disk of the galaxy. Dark matter is also estimated to make up about 90 percent of our galaxy’s mass. We may just beat out Andromeda for largest galaxy in the local cluster after all.

So the Milky Way is way more impressive than just sustaining life in a little fragment of its disk. It’s constantly spinning and moving through space as we move along within it. So, we live in a bagel why? It’s because of the spiral shape, just imagine the disk of the galaxy instead being a bagel and the bulge at the center is the hole, since the black hole will get bigger anyways at some point, right? Not any time soon though.

SOURCES:

https://www.space.com/19915-milky-way-galaxy.html

https://space-facts.com/milky-way/

One of the things I get happy thinking about is how the Hubble Space Telescope exists. The photos it has been able to take since the 90’s is BEYOND impressive. It allowed us to enter into a new age of space exploration because it showed us how much more there is to learn out in the universe having it captured images from distances never gone to, and how amazing it all looks.

One of the most remarkable discoveries that still sends me, and I’m sure others, in a frenzy is how it captured the beginning of our universe. In December 1995, Hubble spent 10 days watching a small section of what seemed to be empty sky in the constellation Ursa Major. Hubble ended up capturing nearly 3,000 galaxies that’s also the longest look back to the beginning of the universe. The fact that all that was captured in a small patch of our sky is mind blowing, because imagine what else we could find within larger sections of sky, and of course beyond that. After this image was produced, it pushed astronomers to push telescopes to look further and further back into time.

While capturing what the universe had looked like, it has also captured the life of stars, from birth to death. Scientists got more than what they bargained for when they were studying nebula IC 418 back in 1999. They were able to see what happens when a star like our sun starts to die. A planetary nebula forms around it. There’s a balance with the pull of gravity towards the center and the outward pressure from the nuclear fusion shifts since the hydrogen fuel has run out. The heat from the pressure explodes helium as the star collapses and the atmosphere has a large gas cloud that protrudes outwards into space, covering an area hundreds times bigger than our solar system. In my opinion, it does look like a bagel though (had to tie it in somehow).

The final example I’ll give of some of Hubble’s fantastic discoveries (although I HIGHLY recommend looking up more) is about black holes. But how could it see it? Well, scientists began with looking for high energy radiation from matter being sucked into them. So with Hubble, it searched for the signature emission spectra of black holes in the center of galaxies, theorized where they would exist, and it was able to see through dusty regions of space and measure movements of stars. In 1997, in the galaxy Centaurus A (12 million LY away) they found a black hole with the mass of 55 million suns in the center.  “Needless to say, we do not see the black hole itself in this picture,” explains Ethan Schreier, leader of the investigating team at the time. “However, its location is not far from the forefront star in the dark region right near the center of the image.” Using infrared, Hubble was able to also show how a “warped disk” of materials go around black holes as well. We also now know that most of the known galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers. Also, what’s a black hole but the center part, or the hole, of a bagel. If the universe is a bagel, then the black holes are its center with everything revolving around it to be eaten (literally).

SOURCE:

https://www.airspacemag.com/space/gateway-universe-180954890/?page=5

So, I’m not a fan of numbers, or math. But, I am a fan of stars. Through my astronomy class, I have learned a few more things about them besides that they are pretty, sparkling lights in the sky a million plus light years away.  But just how much light is being produced by those stars? How much has been produced? In a study published to the journal Science earlier today (Nov.29), scientists may have found the answer, but not just to the stars we can see in our night sky. They found how much light has been produced by all the stars since the Big Bang. But how?

While stars are still pretty and sparkly, that is all just photons that are able to escape a star’s density as a product of stars fusing hydrogen to make helium. Those are the photons we see as visible light. Visible light is the easiest for scientists to measure because, well, its visible. But there is so much more out there in the universe that is unseen, due to it being in the dark areas of sky in between the stars we can see. “[It is] difficult, because it is very, very dim,” Marco Ajello, an astrophysicist and this studies co-author stated. (LiveScience). There is also what’s known as extragalactic background light, which is the portion of near-infared, optical, and UV radiation produced by stars that manage to make it into space, rather than colliding with dust around the stars. “It’s basically starlight that ended up everywhere,” Ajello told Space.com. “All the light emitted by stars that is able to escape to space basically becomes this background” (Space.com), and it’s all outshone by the stars closer to Earth since it’s spread out so thinly.

So what was there to do?

Ajello and his team used NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope and the information it’s gathered from blazars, which are bright galaxies that have supermassive black holes which shoot out gamma rays and other high energy material towards us. As it moves towards us through the universe, the photons in the gamma rays interact with the extragalactic background light, only occurring at a specific energy level, which is when the lower energy levels are compared with higher levels, calculating the difference and getting a way to measure the extragalactic background light. The team studied 739 blazars at different distances from Earth, so they could see how starlight evolved through the universe over time.

From the study of the starlight, they found that most of the stars in the universe had been born about 10 billion years ago. And how much light has been produced since the Big Bang?

Around 4 x 10^84 photons.

Not that impressive looking, and like I said, I’m personally not a big numbers person so looking at that has not a big effect on me, besides a big question mark. But when you think about it, that’s counting all the stars even further than any human eye, or telescope, can see. It’s also pretty impressive that people were able to take all that information and condense it down into a readable number for the masses, even if it may not be fully understood. What can be understood is that all that starlight, billions of years ago traveled all those light years so that average people like you and me can see a daily bagel we eat before solving more questions the universe has to answer.

SOURCES:

https://www.space.com/42581-extragalactic-background-light-calculates-star-formation-history.html

https://www.livescience.com/64193-all-starlight-universe.html

Breaking News! All the way from Mars to you on Earth. In our time this morning (Nov. 26) it was said that the new InSight Mars Lander was to officially hit Martian soil around 3pm EST, which was about an hour ago since I’m writing this from the GMT zone and it’s currently 2pm.

So, it’s landed. What does this mean? What does any of this mean?

Well first off, InSight is a new robot that’s meant to study the interior of Mars. It’s the first robot to be sent to Mars since the Curiosity Rover in 2012.

The image above is the first image it took a few minutes after touchdown. It’s explained that the photo shows the plains of Elysium Planitia, which is just a broad plain close to the equator of Mars. The black speckles are assumed to be just dust collected onto the camera during the whole landing process. Future photos will be much clearer.

So why is this little guy so significant? Well first off, its the first outer space robot explorer to study in depth the inner part of Mars; its crust, mantle, and core (nasa.gov). Although it is going to be a slow moving process, or as InSight’s principal investigator Bruce Banerdt put it: “InSight is a slow-motion mission,” what scientists will learn is important to knowing how terrestrial planets have formed. By studying the interior structure and composition of Mars, we will see how rocky formations evolve into a planet that we know today. It will also study how meteorites have had an impact on Mars tectonic activity.  The reason scientists have selected Mars is because since it is neither too big or small, it has kept its planetary signature formation intact the best, and although it has some tectonic activity, the overall geological activity is low, making it the perfect site to get more information without any major disruptions.

While landing kept everyone holding their breaths, now everyone at Nasa can kick back and enjoy a bagel while they await the information from InSight to pour in over the next few months.

SOURCES: 

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/mission/overview/

https://www.space.com/42531-insight-mars-lander-arrives-today.html

https://www.space.com/42544-insight-mars-landing-first-photo.html

Something that I’ve always been fascinated with and that is a MAJOR bucket list item is to see the polar lights, or auroras. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, you’re missing out on one of the most beautiful phenomena that occurs on Earth, despite it only happening along the poles. Aurora borealis for the North and aurora australis in the South.

But these lights aren’t just a pretty spectacle. There’s a reason involving our planet and the sun. These lights streak across the sky when high charged electrons from solar winds caused by coronal mass ejections from the sun come into contact with Earth’s atmosphere. The solar winds follow the Earth’s magnetic force through the magnetosphere. The magnetic fields and solar particles are interacting and reacting constantly, which causes nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere to react and release light photons, and gives movement to the lights, making them dance across a dark sky. Since they follow the magnetosphere, the auroras occur in “auroral ovals,” around the magnetic poles, which is why you typically can only see the lights in areas around the Arctic and Antarctic circles the best.

NOAA’s Northern Hemisphere Live Aurora Forecast via: NASA

NOAA’s Southern Hemisphere Live Aurora Forecast via: NASA

Looking at the aurora forecasts for both poles in 2018 above, it almost looks like someone took a bite of a bagel 😀 which is how the title ties in ha ha.

But what determines the prettiest factor of the lights: the colors? Well, how the electrons interact with oxygen and nitrogen in the upper atmosphere, at altitudes from 20 to 200 miles above the earth’s surface, the colors depend on which atom is struck, and the altitude of the meeting.

• Green – oxygen, up to 150 miles in altitude
• Red – oxygen, above 150 miles in altitude
• Blue – nitrogen, up to 60 miles in altitude
• Purple/violet – nitrogen, above 60 miles in altitude

(via: howstuffworks)

It reminds me of a chemical reaction, like when you light copper on fire and the flame changes color. Either way the science behind these admired lights is just as awesome as the lights themselves. If it’s on your bucket list too, I recommend taking a blanket, hot chocolate and some bagels for a snack.

SOURCES:

https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/question471.htm

https://www.nasa.gov/content/about-auroras

You heard it here folks, the Earth is a bagel!

Well, not really.

I came across this meme posted by a Twitter user and all I thought of was “well what is a donut but a glazed up fluffy bagel.” They’re essentially the same shape.

What they said doesn’t really make sense either but on the search for the meme I came across an article posted by astronomy.com back in May of last year, about how the Earth may have been shaped like a donut at one point in time. At first I was like “…no way,” but reading the article kind of makes sense.

Synestia is the theory proposed “where a celestial body violently collides with another body, resulting in a donut-shaped disk of vaporized rock,” and after some time, that body cools down turning into round solid planets of today (picture example below). This idea came from modeling after an example of angular momentum: ice skaters. When they have their arms out, they slow down, but when they bring them in, they conserve their momentum.

Sarah Stewart, a planetary scientist at the University of California Davis, and Simon Lock, a graduate student at Harvard University, who both co-wrote the study in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, believed that the collision that made Earth caused a synestia before it formed round and solid, although it is thought not to have lasted more than 100 years, which is relatively very short compared to the billions of years that takes to form everything.

So yeah… the Earth’s a bagel, if we go off the thought that we are currently everything that was, is, and ever will be, but thats a theory for another day.

Source:

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2017/05/synestia-planetary-object 

Think back to a few weeks ago. Was life at an all time low for the first time in months? Were things just not going the way they could have gone. If you were on the internet like me, you might have seen many people experiencing the same and blaming it on the planet Mercury. Why? Well, because Mercury was in retrograde, of course!

I had no idea what it meant. But, you know, now that I think about it life wasn’t as tip top as it could’ve been.

So what is Mercury Retrograde?

Simply put, it is just when Mercury begins to travel in the opposite direction from an earthly point of view. The planet itself isn’t actually rotating backwards, it just looks like it changes from when we look at it. Since Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and the fastest in our solar system, it goes into retrograde a few times a year. Most recently it was from July 26 to August 19. Those into astrology blame the misfortune that comes around those times of the year to the planet being in retrograde, greatly influencing the zodiac star sign it is in when it happens the most. To their belief, Mercury helps rule over anything that deals with communications and travel (just like the Roman god the planet is named after).

So is Mercury Retrograde actually bad?

Nope. Whatever happens happens and that’s just life. Misfortune happens to the best of us and it seems like it isn’t a coincidence when you talk to your friend and you both seem to be having a rough time. But it is. For centuries, people have been looking towards the sky and planetary effects to give reason to their actions or occurrences. But at the end of the day, it’s just a pseudo-science. Jean-Luc Margot, a planetary astronomer and professor at UCLA, is quoted stating “The idea that the gravity from these very distant bodies affects our lives in some way just doesn’t work in the framework of physics” (LiveScience). But while it doesn’t hold up to scientific fact, putting the blame up on something that can’t call you out on it is kind of fun and helpful.

The next time you hear about Mercury Retrograde, which will probably be November 17 to December 6, don’t panic or think about changing plans. Just move about your daily routine, keep calm, eat a bagel, and enjoy.

Here’s a quick, fun little video on Mercury Retrograde that I found 😀

Sources:

https://www.almanac.com/content/mercury-retrograde-dates

https://www.livescience.com/54675-mercury-retrograde-will-not-mess-up-your-life.html

http://time.com/5207161/mercury-retrograde-astrology-history/

Hi there!

I don’t know about the title either. I’m sure there is a better, more scientific and or philosophical explanation behind it, but really it was all I could think of in the moment when making this blog. We look to our surroundings and interests when creating, and I enjoy anything that deals with everything up past our earthly atmosphere… and I happened to be eating a bagel because, yes, I also enjoy bagels.

So with that, welcome to the Galactic Bagel blog and read up on future posts.