Space News & Blog Articles

OK, LEGO fans, it’s time to vote this awesome new LEGO Idea into existence! A stunning new 2,360-piece Lego Art space poster called “The Moon: Earth’s Companion” is currently gathering supporters on the LEGO Ideas website. If it gets enough votes, LEGO will review it and possibly create it.

This highly detailed, retro-style brick-built Moon map is not only beautiful, but educational. When put together, it shows the Moon’s craters and terrain features, displaying lunar geology and maria. It also includes geometrical phases of the Moon and a brick-built panorama depicting the Earth rising over the lunar landscape.

Not surprisingly, the idea was chosen as one of the LEGO Ideas Staff Picks, which celebrates “fantastic projects that show off something out of the ordinary.” In just a matter of weeks, the submission has already notched up over 8,800 supporters, and is well on its way to the 10,000-supporter milestone needed for it to be considered for production by Lego. Let’s do this, vote here!

Another view of “The Moon: Earth’s Companion” on the LEGO Ideas site. Image courtesy Marc Sloan.

It measures roughly 15.5 inches (40 cm) wide and 20.2 inches (51 cm) in height and can be hung on a wall.

The idea was submitted by Marc Sloan, aka @Sharky_Bricks who said it took him over a year to design this piece.

When it comes to the brightest, most powerful objects in the Universe, not much can beat a Quasar. A Gamma Ray Burst from a supernova might be more energetic, but doesn’t last very long. Quasars, by comparison, can churn out 1000 times the radiation of the Milky Way, and keep doing it for hundreds of millions of years.

They get all this energy from the supermassive black holes that live at the center of galaxies. As material falls towards the black hole, an accretion disk forms around it: a swirling cloud of energetic material which heats up through friction and releases electromagnetic radiation. The resulting Quasar can be so bright it drowns out the light from the rest of its galaxy from our perspective.

On April 5th, researchers announced the discovery of a rare double quasar in the early Universe. The two quasars are gravitationally bound, spiraling in towards each other. Their host galaxies are in the process of merging, and the supermassive black holes generating the quasars will also eventually collide and merge.

“We’re starting to unveil this tip of the iceberg of the early binary quasar population,” said Xin Liu, a researcher from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a press release. “This is the uniqueness of this study. It is actually telling us that this population exists, and now we have a method to identify double quasars that are separated by less than the size of a single galaxy.”

A Hubble Space Telescope photograph of a pair of quasars that existed when the universe was just 3 billion years old. Credits: NASA, ESA, Yu-Ching Chen (UIUC), Hsiang-Chih Hwang (IAS), Nadia Zakamska (JHU), Yue Shen (UIUC).

As bright as quasars are, detecting – and interpreting – the signals received from distant quasars is not easy. This pair of quasars existed just three billion years after the Big Bang, during a time period known as cosmic noon: the era between 10 and 11 billion years ago when star formation in the Universe was at its peak. They are very, very distant objects.