On September 16 and 17 Space Messengers brought an exhibit to PASEO 2022! We featured three exhibits: a projection which was an accumulation of the work done with students over the school year, a two headset stations where you could go into the Space Messengers VRChat world, and a station where you could talk to PhysicsAndrea, an astrophysicist from LANL making a guest appearance as an avatar in VRChat to answer all your space and cat related questions.
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But before I go into the inner workings of the workshop, if you find yourself in need of information on space bears, you can check out the video below! It's what we showed the kids we worked with and is an awesome overview of all things tardigrades.
On the 22nd the Space Messengers team went to the Q Station and Very Large Array (VLA). We learned what they are and what they do as well as hanging out with each other. First on the agenda was the Q Station in Albuquerque. The Q Station is this amazing space themed collaborative space, with interior design meant to mimic that of the 1950s with space elements incorporated. For what the Q Station does, lets imagine a new startup company made by a couple of new college graduates. They are engineers and they have this thing they've made which would benefit the space industry. Unfortunately, they don't have any business experience and don't know how to properly sell what they have made and they don't have the connections to reach out to someone who would buy it. What Q Station does is they provide those startups (free of charge) with access to people who will help them market what they have as well as connections to people who would be interested. The second thing Q Station does is promote conversation and collaboration between individuals who would not have otherwise met each other, but whose projects would be mutually beneficial. Their space perfectly matches their goal with comfortable seating aplenty in a large and open room. They also have a podcast called Q Station, which we got to see a little of the behind the scenes for.
Recently the apprentices and I met up at the HIVE in Taos. It was our first where all of us were in person together and we got to spend some time just hanging out. We spent the day learning from individuals that helped to educate us on the topics that Agnes's project is teaching about. We also got to welcome in the newest member of the Space Messengers team, Alyson Martinez! She is the Director Assistant apprentice and she's working with Agnes to help organize and execute the events that go on behind the scenes.
In my last post, I talked about how I was working with Joshua Haggard to update an old HTML website of mine. The progress of the website has come along nicely, featuring a background and centered boxes for text. There's (as always) more I can nitpick about like the colors used and exact size of things but overall the layout of the website is done! The only thing left for me to do is to update the content itself since for as much fun as I had writing the website, it has references specific to the program where I first wrote it and also I find my younger self a little bit cringe. Recently, us apprentices have had some downtime before the next upcoming events. During this time, we have been working on smaller projects in groups and by ourselves. Other than my group project, I've also been working with Joshua Haggard who has been teaching me how to incorporate Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) into my HTML code. CSS is what makes a website look pretty, whether that be by making it color coded, modern, organized, or any other way you can make a website look unique. CSS is responsible for color, format, font, organization, and more. If you ever seen the HTML version of Gmail, you know how essential CSS is to making a website that doesn't look like it will ask for your social security number and credit card information as soon as the page loads in. Today I read an interesting story from space.com about medium sized black holes. Previously, the only known variations were supermassive black holes and stellar black holes. Supermassive black holes are the giants you see in the center of galaxies, our own Milky Way no exclusion, and are millions and millions of times more massive than the sun, while stellar black holes are smaller variations, around 10 to 100 times more massive than our sun. However, these were two very intense extremes, so scientists have predicted for awhile that there must be a middle variation that patches the hole between the two. Evidence supporting those predictions came in 2019, when LIGO (a super advanced machine that can measure gravitational waves via changes in ultraprecise measurements of a laser position) and Virgo detected a new kind of black hole. It wasn't supermassive, but it was also much larger than stellar black holes. It was predicted that this black hole had originated from two stellar black holes merging, however a new study has suggested that it also could have come from the collision of two stars. The reason no one had ever thought of this, however, was because no one had ever tried simulating the collision of such massive stars. The study was led by Michela Mapelli of the University of Padova in Italy and achieved the result by simulating a collision between a young hydrogen burning star and a red giant. The existence of and further study into the origins of, as I like to call, "goldilocks" black holes could be the key to understanding the existence of supermassive black holes, which have continued to stump scientists with the source of their size. Some scientists believe that medium black holes came into existence right after the Big Bang. Perhaps those first black holes have become the supermassive black holes we see today, but for now it's still a mystery, the story behind their existence waiting in plain text at the bottom of the porridge bowl.
Today Agnes shared an interesting website, space.com. This cool website has tons of articles on NASA, astronomy, Mars, and more. I decided to check out an article about Comet Leonard. I found this article particularly interesting because Comet Leonard seems to move backwards; it's tail streaks in front of it rather than behind it. Unfortunately, this delightful comet broke up recently, but during it's time it was most interesting, especially for it's unique tail structure.
This week the apprentices and I started learning about storymaps. Storymaps is a program from Esri where you can make some really cool visuals by combining map locations with photos and videos. |
AuthorAmelia Martinez is the creator of this website. In this blog she recounts activities from her time working with Agnes Chavez as a STEMArts Apprentice. Archives
October 2022
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