#cold planet

[technicallyclassyperfection]

Vincent Di Fate art from "Di Fate's Catalog of Science Fiction Hardware," 1980.

[manyworldsmw]

Polaris

(poe-LAR-iss) Polaris is one of the coldest planets in Astera, being covered in snow and ice. It has very little plant life, and any fauna that resides on the planet has adapted to the severely cold climate. Those who live on Polaris are referred to as Polarans (or Polarians) and are ruled over by a King and Queen. The Polarans range from large creatures that can smash through solid ice, to smaller ones who can quickly dig themselves a burrow to hide in. If they can survive the cold, then they can live in it, too.

Polaris, and it's two moons.

Polaris closely neighbors three other planets. Florin, Lavarra, and Maris. However, the Polarans have rarely had peace with them, and the four planets have been at war for many years now, fighting without end.

They definitely have a strong hatred towards the Lavarrans, especially after what they did.

[nasa]

A Tour of Cosmic Temperatures

We often think of space as “cold,” but its temperature can vary enormously depending on where you visit. If the difference between summer and winter on Earth feels extreme, imagine the range of temperatures between the coldest and hottest places in the universe — it’s trillions of degrees! So let’s take a tour of cosmic temperatures … from the coldest spots to the hottest temperatures yet achieved.

First, a little vocabulary: Astronomers use the Kelvin temperature scale, which is represented by the symbol K. Going up by 1 K is the same as going up 1°C, but the scale begins at 0 K, or -273°C, which is also called absolute zero. This is the temperature where the atoms in stuff stop moving. We’ll measure our temperatures in this tour in kelvins, but also convert them to make them more familiar!

We’ll start on the chilly end of the scale with our CAL (Cold Atom Lab) on the International Space Station, which can chill atoms to within one ten billionth of a degree above 0 K, just a fraction above absolute zero.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Just slightly warmer is the Resolve sensor inside XRISM, pronounced “crism,” short for the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission. This is an international collaboration led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) with NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). Resolve operates at one twentieth of a degree above 0 K. Why? To measure the heat from individual X-rays striking its 36 pixels!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Resolve and CAL are both colder than the Boomerang Nebula, the coldest known region in the cosmos at just 1 K! This cloud of dust and gas left over from a Sun-like star is about 5,000 light-years from Earth. Scientists are studying why it’s colder than the natural background temperature of deep space.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Let’s talk about some temperatures closer to home. Icy gas giant Neptune is the coldest major planet. It has an average temperature of 72 K at the height in its atmosphere where the pressure is equivalent to sea level on Earth. Explore how that compares to other objects in our solar system!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

How about Earth? According to NOAA, Death Valley set the world’s surface air temperature record on July 10, 1913. This record of 330 K has yet to be broken — but recent heat waves have come close. (If you’re curious about the coldest temperature measured on Earth, that’d be 183.95 K (-128.6°F or -89.2°C) at Vostok Station, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.)

We monitor Earth's global average temperature to understand how our planet is changing due to human activities. Last year, 2023, was the warmest year on our record, which stretches back to 1880.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

The inside of our planet is even hotter. Earth’s inner core is a solid sphere made of iron and nickel that’s about 759 miles (1,221 kilometers) in radius. It reaches temperatures up to 5,600 K.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We might assume stars would be much hotter than our planet, but the surface of Rigel is only about twice the temperature of Earth’s core at 11,000 K. Rigel is a young, blue star in the constellation Orion, and one of the brightest stars in our night sky.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger 

We study temperatures on large and small scales. The electrons in hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, can be stripped away from their atoms in a process called ionization at a temperature around 158,000 K. When these electrons join back up with ionized atoms, light is produced. Ionization is what makes some clouds of gas and dust, like the Orion Nebula, glow.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We already talked about the temperature on a star’s surface, but the material surrounding a star gets much, much hotter! Our Sun’s surface is about 5,800 K (10,000°F or 5,500°C), but the outermost layer of the solar atmosphere, called the corona, can reach millions of kelvins.

Our Parker Solar Probe became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona in 2021, helping us answer questions like why it is so much hotter than the Sun's surface. This is one of the mysteries of the Sun that solar scientists have been trying to figure out for years.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Looking for a hotter spot? Located about 240 million light-years away, the Perseus galaxy cluster contains thousands of galaxies. It’s surrounded by a vast cloud of gas heated up to tens of millions of kelvins that glows in X-ray light. Our telescopes found a giant wave rolling through this cluster’s hot gas, likely due to a smaller cluster grazing it billions of years ago.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Now things are really starting to heat up! When massive stars — ones with eight times the mass of our Sun or more — run out of fuel, they put on a show. On their way to becoming black holes or neutron stars, these stars will shed their outer layers in a supernova explosion. These layers can reach temperatures of 300 million K!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman

We couldn’t explore cosmic temperatures without talking about black holes. When stuff gets too close to a black hole, it can become part of a hot, orbiting debris disk with a conical corona swirling above it. As the material churns, it heats up and emits light, making it glow. This hot environment, which can reach temperatures of a billion kelvins, helps us find and study black holes even though they don’t emit light themselves.

JAXA’s XRISM telescope, which we mentioned at the start of our tour, uses its supercool Resolve detector to explore the scorching conditions around these intriguing, extreme objects.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Our universe’s origins are even hotter. Just one second after the big bang, our tiny, baby universe consisted of an extremely hot — around 10 billion K — “soup” of light and particles. It had to cool for a few minutes before the first elements could form. The oldest light we can see, the cosmic microwave background, is from about 380,000 years after the big bang, and shows us the heat left over from these earlier moments.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

We’ve ventured far in distance and time … but the final spot on our temperature adventure is back on Earth! Scientists use the Large Hadron Collider at CERN to smash teensy particles together at superspeeds to simulate the conditions of the early universe. In 2012, they generated a plasma that was over 5 trillion K, setting a world record for the highest human-made temperature.

Want this tour as a poster? You can download it here in a vertical or horizontal version!

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger

Explore the wonderful and weird cosmos with NASA Universe on X, Facebook, and Instagram. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[spacewonder19]

Cold Moon: Last Full Moon of 2023 © astronycc

[without-ado]

The Last Full Moon of 2023 l Rami Ammoun

[abyssruler]

POPULAR KID SCARA CANON?!??!

[ylceon]

love from all directions

[dragonballclassic]

[teojira]

QUEEN loved your noa hcs ty for feeding us!! would you pretty please write some about him realizing he has feelings for the reader and trying to impress them/drop hints/confess :3c

[Youth][Noa x reader drabble/headcanons]

Summary: Noa is down bad for you, and he doesn't know what to do about it.

Warnings: Nothing that I can think of!

Word count:

A/N: I miss Noa so bad, can you tell? I hope these r okay anon! Sorry it took me so long to get to these </3

There was never any preparation for this, no recorded interactions between Echo and Apes that ended in them being mates.

How the hell was Noa supposed to proceed?

He's not ready for this. He's been shoving it down deep inside, telling himself what he feels for you is friendship. He's just worried for you, is all.

You're just a human that lives with them, that's all. A really pretty human. He certainly doesn't daydream of you, running his fingers through your hair, staring into your eyes for hours, teaching you how to hunt and fish. He doesn't. It'd never work between you both.

Ape and Echo, Caesar made it work, Noa had learned as much.

It wasn't until his mother started pestering him, shooting him looks whenever he would randomly bring you up in conversation, despite the subject having nothing to do with you.

"You like them." The rate at which Noa snaps his neck back at Dar is concerning. She's almost positive she heard a snap.

"No? Why-"

"I am your mother, I know you."

"Mother, maybe if I had to-" Noa tries to sign fast, but the blush rushing to his face isn't helping.

"Had to? Why would you ever have to love them?"

"...oh."

She got him there.

"But we are so...different. It would never work." Noa stares down at his hands, exhaling harshly.

"Noa, listen to me." Dar rests his hand under Noa's chin, tilting it towards herself.

"Don't wait. Follow your heart."

"But what if-"

Dar shakes her head, bring her palm to cover Noa's heart. "Follow."

Now, with his mother's blessing, Noa is a lot more confident in courting you.

Doesn't mean he's good at it.

He doesn't have any basis for this. Give him a break. His mother and father weren't particularly keen on letting their relationship be for everyone to see, even to their son. So yes, he's struggling.

He starts off with spending more time with you, offering to take you on day trips to the city, under the guise of looking for more "Echo books" for you.

He has to subtly tell Anaya to fuck off when he tries to invite himself and Soona with you both. Poor Noa is shaking his head behind you with death and horror in his eyes until Anaya finally gets the hint.

Speaking of which, Anaya and Soona try and help. They mean well, but Noa is not trying to rush into it. The two have other plans.

They trade jobs with Noa, with the intent that it'll push you into Noas proximity more.

Sorry! You can't ride with Soona, you have to be with Noa!

You had cooking duty with Anaya? Well, he actually isn't feeling good, so Noa will help you with tonight's meal.

Noa both hates and loves his friends for it, especially when you two grow closer.

He feels a sense of pride when he shows off his strength in front of you, biting back a smirk when he sees your eyes widen when he climbs. When he makes you laugh when he picks you up and swings you around.

Noa gets an ego the first time he protects you from an wild animal, obviously not while the threat is there, but when you cling to him and thank him profusely and you're so close, his brain is short circuiting and he feels like the strongest ape in the world.

He'll start to bring you back relics he's found on his trips, stuff ranging from books to jewelry to clothing he's found that are in salvageable condition.

"Noa! Where did you even find this?" You reach out to slap at his shoulder, staring down at the hoodie in your hand (it's slightly damp, Noa washing it to the best of his ability before gifting it to you).

"I have my ways." He's so smug. He knows you're gonna hug him in return, and it damn near makes him feral.

Eventually his courting is so blatant that everyone knows his intentions, all silently rooting for him.

Everyone knows, but you don't. And it makes him want to rip his fur out.

Noa thinks he couldn't be clearer. He feeds you, hunts and gathers for you, checks on you constantly, and follows you around when able.

He's even picked you wild flowers, something he has seen in one of the Echo books that 'boyfriends' would do.

He is fighting for his life, please, you can't be this dense.

[io-lu-art]

Just some random, stupid idea I had during the middle of the night... so I started scribbling around...

Oh, dear Rey...

"Webtoon" format after the page break (I guess). You choose your fav.

(if the quality feels bad, it's because I started drawing this with a height of 1080 pixels in landscape format *cries*)

I am still debating whether or not to include this in my fanfiction. There are some shots missing, just to illustrate how anxious and hopelessly in love he is. Well, we'll see. I may or may not continue this.

The context? Do you even need it? Spoilers in the hashtags.

[kobadit]

loneliness, sadness, and stress nest

[neoboots1]

I might be overzealous or huffing copium. But if Scar wins I want to assign him Mercury. Like the planet. Because it's the closest to the sun.

[tennessoui]

ok but werewolf gffa au. stay with me stay with me ok 

Stewjoni people are all werewolves, even prim and “that’s so uncivilized” Obi-Wan Kenobi, but it doesn’t usually affect him much at all, because the artificial full moon on Coruscant doesn’t trigger his transformation -- he spends most of his time on the planet and almost never experiences his “wolf” side as any travel he does falls on days when there isn’t a full moon, so most people don’t even know he’s Stewjoni.

This changes when Anakin becomes his padawan because now he’s taking him off-planet on missions so often that he’s experiencing way more partial transformations. He has enough control that even on full moon nights, he doesn’t go full wolf, but his instincts take over and he becomes more violent, more protective, more sensitive to smells along with minor physical changes when his control slips.

It’s still not much of a problem. They just schedule their off-planet trips when there won’t be a full moon on their destination planet, and if there is, Obi-Wan deals with it the best he can, and Anakin deals with an overprotective and coddling Master for a few days.

But then the Clone Wars break out, and scheduling their trips to planets based on that planet’s lunar cycles is impossible because there are so many other priorities; Obi-Wan and his troops need to go where the fighting is; no one is able to predict how long a siege would take anyway.

And then Dooku’s seen on a planet in the Mid-Rim. Obi-Wan and Anakin are deployed to capture him immediately. The only problem is this planet has like. eight moons, and at least one is always full. No one realizes how much the moons are affecting Obi-Wan until Dooku taunts Anakin about the loss of his arm, and Obi-Wan responds by ripping his throat out with his teeth.

[spacewonder19]

Full Cold Moon–Mars Conjunction © astrofalls

[without-ado]

Full Cold Moon around sunrise l Ely Cathedral l VeronicaJoPo

[varilien]

since when did the stars stop shining so brightly?

Palestine: Funds | Action | eSims | Info Sudan Resources | Congo Resource | Lebanese Red Cross