S2017-04-27-0729ut_IrRGB-EMr By Efrain Morales Via Flickr: Saturn - Moon Tethys (small Dot Top) On April

I love you. I feel as though we were never strangers, you and I, not even for a moment.

Friedrich Nietzsche, from a letter to Mathilde Trampedach c. April 1876 (via violentwavesofemotion)

Me …………. 

*looks up at the night sky* *sees more stars than usual* *mood immediately lifts by 93%*

It’s May the 4th: Are Star Wars Planets Real?

Look at what we’ve found so far.

Is your favorite Star Wars planet a desert world or an ice planet or a jungle moon?

It’s possible that your favorite planet exists right here in our galaxy. Astronomers have found over 3,400 planets around other stars, called “exoplanets.”

Some of these alien worlds could be very similar to arid Tatooine, watery Scarif and even frozen Hoth, according to NASA scientists.

Find out if your planet exists in a galaxy far, far away or all around you. And May the Fourth be with you!

Planets With Two Suns

From Luke Skywalker’s home world Tatooine, you can stand in the orange glow of a double sunset. The same could said for Kepler-16b, a cold gas giant roughly the size of Saturn, that orbits two stars. Kepler-16b was the Kepler telescopes’s first discovery of a planet in a “circumbinary” orbit (that is, circling both stars, as opposed to just one, in a double star system). 

The best part is that Tatooine aka Kepler-16b was just the first. It has family. A LOT of family. Half the stars in our galaxy are pairs, rather than single stars like our sun. If every star has at least one planet, that’s billions of worlds with two suns. Billions! Maybe waiting for life to be found on them.

Desert Worlds

Mars is a cold desert planet in our solar system, and we have plenty of examples of scorching hot planets in our galaxy (like Kepler-10b), which orbits its star in less than a day)! Scientists think that if there are other habitable planets in the galaxy, they’re more likely to be desert planets than ocean worlds. That’s because ocean worlds freeze when they’re too far from their star, or boil off their water if they’re too close, potentially making them unlivable. Perhaps, it’s not so weird that both Luke Skywalker and Rey grew up on planets that look a lot alike.

Ice Planets

An icy super-Earth named OGLE-200-BLG-390Lb reminded scientists so much of the frozen Rebel base they nicknamed it “Hoth,” after its frozen temperature of minus 364 degrees Fahrenheit. Another Hoth-like planet was discovered last month; an Earth-mass icy world orbiting its star at the same distance as Earth orbits the sun. But its star is so faint, the surface of OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb is probably colder than Pluto.

Forest worlds

Both the forest moon of Endor and Takodana, the home of Han Solo’s favorite cantina in “Force Awakens,” are green like our home planet. But astrobiologists think that plant life on other worlds could be red, black, or even rainbow-colored!

In February 2017, the Spitzer Space Telescope discovered seven Earth-sized planets in the same system, orbiting the tiny red star TRAPPIST-1.

The light from a red star, also known as an M dwarf, is dim and mostly in the infrared spectrum (as opposed to the visible spectrum we see with our sun). And that could mean plants with wildly different colors than what we’re used to seeing on Earth. Or, it could mean animals that see in the near-infrared.

What About Moons?

In Star Wars, Endor, the planet with the cute Ewoks, is actually a habitable moon of a gas giant. Now, we’re looking for life on the moons of our own gas giants. Saturn’s moon Enceladus or Jupiter’s moon Europa are ocean worlds that may well support life. Our Cassini spacecraft has explored the Saturn system and its moons. Watch the video and learn more about the missions’s findings.

And Beyond

The next few years will see the launch of a new generation of spacecraft to search for planets around other stars. TESS and the James Webb Telescope are slated to launch in 2018, and WFIRST in the mid-2020s. That’s one step closer to finding life.

You might want to take our ‘Star Wars: Fact or Fiction?’ quiz. Try it! Based on your score you may obtain the title of Padawan, Jedi Knight, or even Jedi Master! 

You don’t need to visit a galaxy far, far away to find wondrous worlds. Just visit this one … there’s plenty to see.

Discover more about exoplanets here: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Czeslaw Milosz, from “Selected Poems,” [x]

I love this sign. It’s like pointing me to my destiny.

You Need People

You have to accept that some people 

are not made for deep conversations, 

or for holding you together when you’re about to fall apart, 

or for keeping you from unzipping your skin, 

or for talking you out of suicide, 

or for loving you through the worst moments. 

Some people are made for shallow exchanges, and ridiculous banter, and nothing more, and that’s okay. 

That doesn’t make them horrible people 

simply because they aren’t able to handle a storm like you. 

It doesn’t make you a bad person because you won’t divulge all the gritty details of your horror show. 

It makes you smart. 

It doesn’t mean they are not worth keeping in your life. 

You just have to figure out who these ones are before you’re disappointed, 

and you have to keep them at arm’s length. 

You cannot expect everyone in your life to understand, 

to be nonjudgmental, 

to get it. 

But that’s okay, because not everyone was made to impart wisdom, 

or wax-poetic, 

or speak on politics 

and the depravity of society, 

or discuss how crucial it is that the stigma of mental illness be abolished. 

There are times when you have to get away from all that heaviness. 

You have to. 

You will need superficial conversation about Kim Kardashian’s arse, 

or a debate on the color of The Dress to do that. 

You will need those ones, 

so don’t go round cutting people off and dropping your friends. 

You need people for all your seasons. 

You need people or you won’t survive this.

Pastel Solar System 

May the 4th be with you!

Cactus pattern design for wrapping paper. . . . #freelance #illustration #artistofig #digitalart #illustrator #vectorart #surfacedesign #repeatingpattern #wrappingpaper #cactus #bright#colorful