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Godzilla Lives on Forever as NASA Designated Constellation

posted on by Lynzee Loveridge

The king of monsters earned his place among the stars this week as NASA announced Godzilla is joining heroes like Hercules, Perseus, and Orion as a constellation.

Scientists found a perfect place in space for Godzilla based on the kaiju's own attributes. They considered Godzilla's famous heat ray attack and its similarity to black holes and neutron stars' gamma-ray jets when placing him among other gamma-ray constellations. His neighbors include other pop-culture icons like the Starship Enterprise, the TARDIS, the Hulk, and Schrödinger's Cat constellations.

Inside the Godzilla constellation are several possible blazars, a starburst galaxy, a gamma-ray pulsar, and an unknown object. A blazar is an active galactic nucleus that expels energy in a direction near Earth, causing it emit a bright light.

The Godzilla constellation, and other gamma-ray constellations, are mapped by NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. Fermi is specifically tasked with gathering data to study black holes, the matter they absorb, and the matter they expel at a rate close to the speed of light. Fermi was first launched into space on June 11, 2008.

Source: ComicBook.com (Megan Peters)


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