More space news and info at: http://www.coconutsciencelab.com - a video simulation of the merger of two black holes and the resulting emission of gravitational radiation. The colored fields represent a component of the curvature of space-time. The outer sheets (red) correspond directly to outgoing gravitational radiation, which was recently detected by the NSF’s LIGO observatories. The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. Credit: NASA, C. Henze Please rate and comment, thanks! ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hev836eKd-A

More space news and info at: http://www.coconutsciencelab.com - what to look for in the night sky during December 2016. Please rate and comment, thanks! Credits: STScI ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoFaVzKxPq0

More space news and info at: http://www.coconutsciencelab.com - astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe A2744_YD4, the youngest and most remote galaxy ever seen by ALMA. They were surprised to find that this youthful galaxy contained an abundance of interstellar dust — dust formed by the deaths of an earlier generation of stars. Follow-up observations using the X-shooter instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope confirmed the enormous distance to A2744_YD4. The galaxy appears to us as it was when the Universe was only 600 million years old, during the period when the first stars and galaxies were forming. Cosmic dust is mainly composed of silicon, carbon and aluminum, in grains as small as a millionth of a centimeter across. The chemical elements in these grains are forged inside stars and are scattered across the cosmos when the stars die, most spectacularly in supernova explosions, the final fate of short-lived, massive stars. Today, this dust is plentiful and is a key building block in the formation of stars, planets and complex molecules; but in the early Universe — before the first generations of stars died out — it was scarce. The team estimates that A2744_YD4 contained an amount of dust equivalent to 6 million times the mass of our Sun, while the galaxy’s total stellar mass — the mass of all its stars — was 2 billion times the mass of our Sun. The team also measured the rate of star formation in A2744_YD4 and found that stars are forming at a rate of 20 solar masses per year — compared to just one solar mass per year in the Milky Way. Please rate and comment, thanks! Credits: ESO ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA, ESA, ESO and D. Coe (STScI)/J. Merten (Heidelberg/Bologna)/spaceengine.org/Digitized Sky Survey 2, M. Kornmesser ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI1ooKI03q4

More space news and info at: http://www.coconutsciencelab.com - members of the NASA Intern Repertory Drama Society (NIRDS) try a few simple tasks while wearing the gloves that astronauts wear during spacewalks. The results will help you understand why there are no buttons on spacesuits. Please rate and comment, thanks! ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JH1z6ChJlc