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SPACE JELLYFISHFrom today ’s SpaceX launching . Beautiful pic.twitter.com/98mzIGHDOmMay 6 , 2022
In the itty-bitty morning hour of Thursday(May 5 ) , a television camera in Waycross , Georgia witnessed a mysterious object streaking through the sky . brilliant , fast and trail by a glowing oblong glory , the objective looked a number like a space jellyfish , as Chris Combs , a prof of aeromechanics and mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio put iton chirrup .
Of course , as Combs pointed out , this quad jelly was no UFO – it was aSpaceX Falcon 9 rocketlaunching from Florida ’s Kennedy Space Center , about 250 miles ( 400 kilometers ) to the south of the camera . Dozens of skyrocket leave behind the pad at Kennedy every yr , but few of them could rightly be false for a bioluminescent invertebrate in the sky . So , what happened here ?
harmonize to Combs , it ’s a combination of natural philosophy and perfect timing .
For starters , the long , blobby " body " of the jellyfish is simply exhaust leaving the Falcon 9 ’s rocket locomotive snout , Combs wrote . The reason the fumes direct on such a bulbous build has to do with the insistence difference inside and outside the nozzle . In this suit , the exhaust fumes leaving the beak is " under - expanded " – meaning the gas is at higher pressure than the ambient zephyr around it as the exhaust system leave the railway locomotive ’s nozzle .
To equalise the ambient background knowledge press in the atm , the arugula fumes drops its own pressing by expanding as soon as it allow for the schnoz , according to Combs .
" In under - expanded exhaust you get expansion fans at the nozzle exit to diminish pressure and match background : jellyfish , at high-pitched altitude,“Combs tweeted .
That explains the blob . But what about the glow ?
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This is much uncomplicated to square , Combs enjoin – and it just comes down to timing . Because the rocket launching occurred in the pre - dawn hours of Thursday morning ( around 5:45 a.m. local time ) , light fromthe suncame from just over the horizon , illuminating up the exhaust system plumage , do it to glow bright against the drear sky .
Physics plus everlasting timing equals space jellyfish . A simple equivalence for a high - elevation spectacle .
Of of course , if you ’d like to see arealspace jellyfish , you ’ll need to look just a bit further into space – about 300 millionlight - yearsfurther to be exact . That ’s how far away the galaxy cluster Abell 2877 is ; when astronomers of late see at the object with a radio scope , they saw the spectral outline of a jellyfish swimming through aloof space . Thatbig jelly in the skyis also the result of a large accelerator blowup – in this case , a monolithic eruption from a gaggle of ancient black holes , Live Science antecedently reported .
Originally published on Live Science .
