KAKaran Akbari

Notes

Space things I like

Hubble's 2014 image of the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula.
NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team. Source (CC BY 4.0)

The Eagle Nebula

The picture that started all of this, from a preset in Sky Map on my dad's phone. The pillars are clouds of gas and dust a few light years tall, and new stars are forming inside them. Hubble photographed them in 1995, again in 2014, and Webb went back in 2022 in infrared.

And it's amazingly pretty.

Star field around GRS 1915+105 with Chandra's X-ray view in an inset.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Harvard/J.Neilsen; Optical & IR: Palomar DSS2. Source

GRS 1915+105

A black hole of about 12 solar masses around 8.6 kiloparsecs away, pulling gas off a companion star. In one of its states it flares every 50 to 100 seconds, over and over, which is why it gets called a heartbeat. It was my master's thesis and my first paper.

It's amazingly complex, and beautiful in how much it varies and in all the data it gives you.