Quarks to Quasars

NGC 7822 in Cepheus 

Hot, young stars and cosmic pillars of gas and dust seem to crowd into NGC 7822. At the edge of a giant molecular cloud toward the northernconstellation Cepheus, the glowing star forming region lies about 3,000 light-years away. Within the nebula, bright edges and dark shapes are highlighted in thiscolorful skyscape. The image includes data from narrowband filters, mapping emission from atomic oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur into blue, green, and red hues. The atomic emission is powered by energetic radiation from the hot stars, whose powerful winds and radiation also sculpt and erode the denser pillar shapes. Stars could still be forming inside the pillars by gravitational collapse, but as the pillars are eroded away, any forming stars will ultimately be cutoff from their reservoir of star stuff. This field spans around 40 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 7822.

A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star that blasts radiation from its poles.

(Source: news.discovery.com)

Majestic Milky Way

Credit: Phil McGrew

The Milky Way shines over McWay Falls south of Big Sur, Calif. Photographer Phil McGrew pulled an “all-nighter” to get this shot.


Saturn’s Most Habitable Moon Offers Ice, Water, Killer Views

1. Enceladus’ southern tiger stripes are actively spewing jets of ice into space. The region is also anomalously warm relative to the rest of the planet, and releasing three times more heat than a similar sized area on Earth. Until recently, scientists didn’t know why.

A study in Nature Geoscience in January explains that the heat is caused by blobs of warmer ice moving toward the surface and pushing colder ice down. Scientists think these eras of churning ice last around 10 million years, while the intervening quiet times last 100 million to 2 billion years, so Cassini is lucky to have visited during one of the active times that make up between 1 and 10 percent of the moon’s history.

“Cassini appears to have caught Enceladus in the middle of a burp,” UC Santa Cruz planetary scientist Francis Nimmo, co-author of the new study, said in a press release. “These tumultuous periods are rare, and Cassini happens to have been watching the moon during one of these special epochs.”

2. Enceladus is the sixth largest of Saturn’s 62 moons. The plumes emanating from its southern pole are just visible in this image.

3. This spectacular image of Enceladus nestled next to Saturn below the planet’s rings was taken by Cassini on Christmas Day, 2009. It was captured by the spacecraft’s wide-angle camera from 384,000 miles away.

4. Here, Enceladus is speeding by Dione, a moon more than twice its size. Enceladus orbits faster and closer to Saturn than Dione. The ring is Saturn’s outermost F-ring.

(Source: Wired)

Amature Astronomers Boost Asteroid Hunt

Amateur astronomers have an invaluable role in the detection and tracking of potentially hazardous asteroids. 

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The ISS Crosses the Moon

Credit: Phil McGrew

Photographer Phil McGrew said this photograph of the International Space Station traversing the face of the moon was the most technically challenging photograph he’s ever taken. The shot involved a lot of data triangulation to make sure McGrew would be in the right place to see the ISS cross, visible here as a series of tiny dots. “Even if you miss it by half a mile the space station wont be across the moon,” McGrew told LiveScience.

NGC 1579: Trifid of the North 

Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth’s sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula’s central regions. In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light.


Green by Bernhard Edmaier


The Galaxy Evolution

1. Rainbow of Galaxies

This image of the Cartwheel galaxy shows multi-wavelength observations from several NASA missions, including the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, whose data is seen in blue. The Hubble Space Telescope is in green, the Spitzer Space Telescope is in red and the Chandra X-ray Observatory is in purple.

2. Jellyfish Galaxy

Wispy tendrils of hot dust and gas glow brightly in this ultraviolet image of the Cygnus Loop nebula.

3. Plowing Through the Depths of Space

GALEX captured a second runaway star, similar to Mira, also speeding through the cosmos.

4. Dissecting a Galaxy

By combining ultraviolet data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer with infrared observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers get a clearer picture of the various components of a galaxy.

(Source: popsci.com)

Ghosts of Milky Way’s Powerful Past Revealed

In the image: This artist’s conception shows an edge-on view of the Milky Way galaxy. Newly discovered gamma-ray jets (pink) extend for 27,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane, and are tilted at an angle of 15 degrees. Previously known gamma-ray bubbles are shown in purple. The bubbles and jets suggest that our galactic center was much more active in the past than it is today. 

Today the Milky Way Galaxy is a relatively quiet place. Our galaxy has grown up, and intense activity seen in other galaxies is a thing of our past. But scientists have long assumed the past was more hectic. A new study finds ghosts of past activity in the form of twin jets spat into space from the Milky Way’s central black hole.

Unlike our quiescent galaxy, active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material and exciting the gas and dust around them to grow brightly in many wavelengths, from visible light to X-rays and gamma rays. Active galaxies also often shoot twin jets in opposite directions — beams of material thought to be directed by intense magnetic energy.

The new evidence of ghostly gamma-ray beams suggests that the Milky Way’s central black hole was much more active in the past.

“These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago,” said Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and lead author of a new paper in the Astrophysical Journal. “They strengthen the case for an active galactic nucleus in the Milky Way’s relatively recent past.”

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Dark Side Ring of Light

The Cassini spacecraft looks toward the dark side of Saturn’s largest moon as a circle of light is produced by sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan’s atmosphere.

A detached, high-altitude global haze layer encircles the moon. Small particles that populate high hazes in Titan’s atmosphere scatter short wavelengths more efficiently than longer visible or infrared wavelengths, so the best possible observations of the detached layer are made in ultraviolet light. The image was taken in visible blue light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 9, 2009.

Weird Galaxy Glows Bright in Amazing Telescope

PhotoCredit: ESO

The strange galaxy Centaurus A is pictured in a new image from the European Southern Observatory. The image was produced by the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. [Full Story]


Earth from Space

1. Desert’s End 

Photograph courtesy NASA via NASA Earth Observatory

 In Eastern Algeria’s stretch of the Sahara, the Tifernine Dune Field - a section of the Grand Erg Oriental dune sea - meets the Tinrhert Plateau, as seen in a 2008 astronaut photograph.

2. Sea Snakes

Photograph courtesy CNES/Spot Image/ESA

 Gullies slithering through sandbanks are seen in the Wadden Sea, near the Netherlands, in a 2006 satellite image.

3. Circulation System

Photograph courtesy NASA and NASA Earth Observatory 

Tidal flats and channels on the western side of the Bahamas’ Long Island are seen in a 2010 astronaut photograph.

4. Circles of Life

 Photograph courtesy NASA and NASA Earth Observatory

 Fields near the city of Perdizes, in the Minas Gerais state of Brazil, are seen in a 2011 astronaut photograph. 


Omega Centauri Shines Over Dark Forest in Skywatcher Photo

Credit: Tunc Tezel / TWAN

Omega Centauri, the brightest and largest known globular cluster in the Milky Way, shines brightly over a dark forest in this skywatching photo. [Full Story]

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