{ "count": 8, "next": null, "previous": null, "results": [ { "id": 10662, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10662/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2021-04-14T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "Webb Science Simulations: Planetary Systems and Origins of Life", "description": "Supercomputer simulations of planeratry evolution. Part 1: Turbulent Molecular Cloud Nebula with Protostellar ObjectsThe Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Drs. Alexei Kritsuk and Michael Norman to visualize a computational data set of a turbulent molecular cloud nebula forming protostellar objects and accretion disks approximately 100 AU in diameter, on the order of the size of our solar system. AVL used its Amore software to interpolate and render the Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) simulation generated from ENZO code for cosmology and astrophysics. The AMR simulation was developed by Drs. Kritsuk and Norman at the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics. The AMR simulation generated more than 2 terabytes of data and follows star formation processes in a self-gravitating turbulent molecular cloud with a dynamic range of half-a-million in linear scale, resolving both the large-scale filamentary structure of the molecular cloud (~5 parsec) and accretion disks around emerging young protostellar objects (down to 2 AU). Part 2: Protoplanetary Disk and Planet FormationThe Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) collaborated with NASA and Dr. Aaron Boley to visualize the 16,000 year evolution of a young, isolated protoplanetary disk which surrounds a newly-formed protostar. The disk forms spiral arms and a dense clump as a result of gravitational collapse. Dr. Aaron Boley developed this computational model to investigate the response of young disks to mass accretion from their surrounding envelopes, including the direct formation of planets and brown dwarfs through gravitational instability. The main formation mechanism for gas giant planets has been debated within the scientific community for over a decade. One of these theories is 'direct formation through gravitational instability.' If the self-gravity of the gas overwhelms the disk's thermal pressure and the stabilizing effect of differential rotation, the gas closest to the protostar rotates faster than gas farther away. In this scenario, regions of the gaseous disk collapse and form a planet directly. The study, presented in Boley (2009), explores whether mass accretion in the outer regions of disks can lead to such disk fragmentation. The simulations show that clumps can form in situ at large disk radii. If the clumps survive, they can become gas giants on wide orbits, e.g., Fomalhaut b, or even more massive objects called brown dwarfs. Whether a disk forms planets at large radii and, if so, the number of planets that form, depend on how much of the envelope mass is distributed at large distances from the protostar. The results of the simulations suggest that there are two modes of gas giant planet formation. The first mode occurs early in the disk's lifetime, at large radii, and through the disk instability mechanism. After the main accretion phase is over, gas giants can form in the inner disk, over a period of a million years, through the core accretion mechanism, which researchers are addressing in other studies.Thanks to R. H. Durisen, L. Mayer, and G. Lake for comments and discussions relating to this research. This study was supported in part by the University of Zurich, Institute for Theoretical Physics, and by a Swiss Federal Grant. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center.AVL at NCSA, University of Illinois. || ", "hits": 197 }, { "id": 12673, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12673/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2017-11-15T10:00:00-05:00", "title": "HIRMES: SOFIA's latest high-resolution Mid-infrared Spectrometer", "description": "Learn more about HIRMES, the latest addition to NASA's airplane-based infrared telescope, SOFIA.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic: \"Sparkle Shimmer\" and \"The Orion Arm\", both from Killer Tracks.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available. || SOFIA_Protoplanetary_Disk_Still_print.jpg (1024x576) [90.0 KB] || SOFIA_Protoplanetary_Disk_Still.jpg (3840x2160) [568.6 KB] || SOFIA_Protoplanetary_Disk_Still_searchweb.png (320x180) [76.3 KB] || SOFIA_Protoplanetary_Disk_Still_web.png (320x180) [76.3 KB] || SOFIA_Protoplanetary_Disk_Still_thm.png (80x40) [7.2 KB] || 12673_SOFIA_HIRMES_ProRes_1920x1080_2997.mov (1920x1080) [3.5 GB] || 12673_SOFIA_HIRMES_H264_Best_1920x1080_2997.mov (1920x1080) [768.4 MB] || 12673_SOFIA_HIRMES_Good_1920x1080_2997.m4v (1920x1080) [302.0 MB] || 12673_SOFIA_HIRMES_Compatible.m4v (960x540) [112.3 MB] || 12673_SOFIA_HIRMES_H264_Best_1920x1080_2997.webm (1920x1080) [33.6 MB] || 12673_SOFIA_HIRMES_SRT_Captions.en_US.srt [5.4 KB] || 12673_SOFIA_HIRMES_SRT_Captions.en_US.vtt [5.1 KB] || ", "hits": 53 }, { "id": 10628, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10628/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2015-01-06T13:15:00-05:00", "title": "'Disk Detectives' Top 1 Million Classifications in Search for Planetary Habitats", "description": "Volunteers using DiskDetective, a NASA-sponsored citizen science website to find potential planetary nurseries, have made 1 million classifications in less than a year. Goddard astrophysicist Marc Kuchner, the project's principal investigator, explains how it works.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.For complete transcript, click here. || Image_1mill.png (1690x944) [2.9 MB] || Image_1mill_thm.png (80x40) [10.0 KB] || Image_1mill_web.png (320x178) [144.2 KB] || Image_1mill_searchweb.png (320x180) [145.3 KB] || Image_1mill_web.jpg (319x178) [36.8 KB] || G2015_002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_appletv_subtitles.m4v (960x540) [69.2 MB] || G2015_002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_youtube_hq.mov (1280x720) [167.3 MB] || G2015_002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_prores.mov (1280x720) [2.5 GB] || G2015_002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_appletv.m4v (960x540) [69.2 MB] || G2015-002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_1280x720.wmv (1280x720) [76.0 MB] || G2015_002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_nasaportal.mov (640x360) [61.7 MB] || G2015-002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_720x480.wmv (720x480) [60.7 MB] || G2015-002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_720x480.webm (720x480) [19.6 MB] || G2015_002_Updated_DiskDetectives.en_US.srt [3.2 KB] || G2015_002_Updated_DiskDetectives.en_US.vtt [3.2 KB] || G2015-002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_ipod_lg.m4v (640x360) [28.7 MB] || G2015_002_Update_to_DiskDetectives_ipod_sm.mp4 (320x240) [14.3 MB] || ", "hits": 57 }, { "id": 11580, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11580/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-06-25T12:00:00-04:00", "title": "Disk Detective Tutorial", "description": "Have you discovered a planetary system today? At DiskDetective.org, you can help NASA scientists find new planetary systems, by searching for disks of dust around nearby stars using images from the WISE space telescope and other telescopes. This tutorial, made by top citizen scientists based on their experience, will help you get started working together with professional astronomers on cutting-edge research, hunting through the Galaxy. || ", "hits": 32 }, { "id": 11499, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11499/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-03-06T14:00:00-05:00", "title": "Beta Pictoris: Icy Debris Suggests 'Shepherd' Planet", "description": "An international team of astronomers exploring the disk of gas and dust the bright star Beta Pictoris have uncovered a compact cloud of poisonous gas formed by ongoing rapid-fire collisions among a swarm of icy, comet-like bodies. The researchers suggest the comet swarm may be frozen debris trapped and concentrated by the gravity of an as-yet-unseen planet.Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, astronomers mapped millimeter-wavelength light from dust and carbon monoxide (CO) molecules in a disk surrounding the star. Located about 63 light-years away and only 20 million years old, Beta Pictoris hosts one of the closest, brightest and youngest debris disks known, making it an ideal laboratory for studying the early development of planetary systems. The ALMA images reveal a vast belt of carbon monoxide located at the fringes of the system. Much of the gas is concentrated in a single clump located about 8 billion miles (13 billion kilometers) from the star, or nearly three times the distance between the planet Neptune and the sun. The total amount of CO observed, the scientists say, exceeds 200 million billion tons, equivalent to about one-sixth the mass of Earth’s oceans.The presence of all this gas is a clue that something interesting is going on because ultraviolet starlight breaks up CO molecules in about 100 years, much faster than the main cloud can complete a single orbit around the star. Scientists calculate that a large comet must be completely destroyed every five minutes to offset the destruction of CO molecules. Only an unusually massive and compact swarm of comets could support such an astonishingly high collision rate.The researchers think these comet swarms formed when a as-yet-undetected planet migrated outward, sweeping icy bodies into resonant orbits. When the orbital periods of the comets matched the planet's in some simple ratio – say, two orbits for every three of the planet – the comets received a nudge from the planet at the same location each orbit. Like the regular push of a child's swing, these accelerations amplify over time and work to confine the comets in a small region. || ", "hits": 114 }, { "id": 11436, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11436/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2014-01-30T11:00:00-05:00", "title": "Disk Detective: Search for Planetary Habitats", "description": "A new NASA-sponsored website, DiskDetective.org, lets the public discover embryonic planetary systems hidden among data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The site is led and funded by NASA and developed by the Zooniverse, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop and manage the Internet's largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. WISE, located in Earth orbit and designed to survey the entire sky in infrared light, completed two scans between 2010 and 2011. It took detailed measurements of more than 745 million objects, representing the most comprehensive survey of the sky at mid-infrared wavelengths currently available. Astronomers have used computers to search this haystack of data for planet-forming environments and narrowed the field to about a half-million sources that shine brightly in the infrared, indicating they may be \"needles\": dust-rich circumstellar disks that are absorbing their star's light and reradiating it as heat. Planets form and grow within these disks. But galaxies, interstellar dust clouds, and asteroids also glow in the infrared, which stymies automated efforts to identify planetary habitats. Disk Detective incorporates images from WISE and other sky surveys in the form of brief animations the website calls flip books. Volunteers view a flip book and then classify the object based on simple criteria, such as whether the image is round or includes multiple objects. By collecting this information, astronomers will be able to assess which sources should be explored in greater detail. The project aims to find two types of developing planetary environments. The first, known as young stellar object disks, typically are less than 5 million years old, contain large quantities of gas, and are often found in or near young star clusters. For comparison, our own solar system is 4.6 billion years old. The other type of habitat is called a debris disk. These systems tend to be older than 5 million years, possess little or no gas, and contain belts of rocky or icy debris that resemble the asteroid and Kuiper belts found in our own solar system. Vega and Fomalhaut, two of the brightest stars in the sky, host debris disks. Through Disk Detective, volunteers will help the astronomical community discover new planetary nurseries that will become future targets for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. || ", "hits": 48 }, { "id": 10689, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10689/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2010-11-03T01:00:00-04:00", "title": "Planetary Studies Web Feature", "description": "The Webb Space Telescope will study planetary bodies with our solar system and planets orbiting other stars to help scientists better understand how planets form and how they evolve. || ", "hits": 66 }, { "id": 10659, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10659/", "result_type": "Produced Video", "release_date": "2010-10-28T00:00:00-04:00", "title": "JWST Feature - Planetary Evolution", "description": "A fully produced video about planetary evolution and how the Webb Telelscope's ability to see inside dense clouds of gas and dust will help us better understand solar system formation and evolution. || ", "hits": 176 } ] }