#vicisastro

BepiColombo mission is about to arrive at Mercury! It's a pretty nifty design: ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio) are travelling to #Mercury as a compostive spacecraft, stacked on top of a transfer module. So separation & arrival will happen in stages. ▶️ https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/10/BepiColombo_arrival_at_Mercury_timeline?p Planetary science is a good reminder that science needs long-term planning and foresight. #BepiColombo was launched in 2018! #astrodon #space #ESA #JAXA #VicisAstro

I'd love to post more in #VicisAstro but every time I start thinking about it, I'm lost as to what people want to hear about. So and especially if you know little about astronomy and astrophysics: what would you like to read about here on mastodon? Comment with ideas and I may (though I don't promise) write a thread about it. Any question or topic about astronomy and astrophysics, both about the science and about how we do the science, is allowed. Boosts welcome. So are multiple replies.

We are all stardust. The oxygen you breath? That comes from dying massive stars, ending their life in a supernova. The iron in your blood? Some from massive stars dying, but mainly fron white dwarfs, the leftovers of dwarf stars like our own Sun, exploding. Carbon, the basis of life? Mostly from dying low mass stars. The gold ring on your finger? Mostly from merging neutron stars, leftovers from supernovae. #VicisAstro #astrodon #astronomy #astrophysics

Scales of the Universe: Out Sun is five billion years old and will live another five billion. A star with ten times the mass, lives some twenty million years, larger stars have an even shirter lifetime. A star with half the mass of the Sun will live hundred billion years. Our universe is 13.7 billion years old -- the oldest low mass stars are not even past their teenage years yet. #VicisAstro #astrodon #SciComm #astrophysics #astronomy