Mammoth stars seen by Hubble
This Hubble image shows a pair of massive stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina, the Keel. WR 25 is the brightest, situated near the centre of the image. The neighbouring Tr16-244 is the third brightest, just to the upper left of WR 25. The second brightest, to the left of WR 25, is a low mass star located much closer to Earth than the Carina Nebula.
Credits:NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)
Star trails above the forest of peaks in Yingde,Guangdong.
Submitted to APOD in April, 2012.
Pop. astronomy for the Victorian about town.
In the area covered by the umbra (the darkest part of the shadow), a total eclipse is seenIn the region covered by the penumbra (where only some of the light source is obscured) a partial eclipse is seen
Gas and Dust of the Lagoon Nebula
Credit & Copyright: Fred Vanderhaven
“This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Eighteenth century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8, while modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as an active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in the direction of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Striking details can be traced through this remarkable picture, processed to remove stars and hence better reveal the Lagoon’s range of filaments of glowing hydrogen gas, dark dust clouds, and the bright, turbulent hourglass region near the image center. This color composite view was recorded under dark skies near Sydney, Australia. At the Lagoon’s estimated distance, the picture spans about 50 light-years.”
Ring of Fire: Clint Melander
Valenitnes Day Aurora (by Cold Blogger)
Asteroid Caught Marching Across Tadpole NebulaThis infrared image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole Nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by. The asteroid, called 1719 Jens, left tracks across the image. A second asteroid was also observed cruising by.
But that’s not all that WISE caught in this busy image — two natural satellites orbiting above WISE streak through the image, appearing as faint green trails. This Tadpole region is chock full of stars as young as only a million years old — infants in stellar terms — and masses over 10 times that of our sun. It is called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot, young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and Sim 130. These “tadpoles” appear as the yellow squiggles near the center of the frame. The knotted regions at their heads are likely to contain new young stars. WISE’s infrared vision is helping to ferret out hidden stars such as these.
The 1719 Jens asteroid, discovered in 1950, orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock, which has a diameter of 19 kilometers (12 miles), rotates every 5.9 hours and orbits the sun every 4.3 years.
Carina and the Tower
The Eta Carina Nebula and a water tower. The Large Magellan Cloud can be seen at the bottom left.
Alpha & Beta Centauri are at the top left of the photo followed by the dark patch of the coalsack nebula.
Photographed by Luis R. Argerich
Okay I give up. This is too astronomically astounding beyond reason. :)
Seen via the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, the Sombrero galaxy, aka M104, really lights up its local neighborhood. Now, new data hint at what was happening back when the seeds of such galaxies were deep in the universe’s dark ages.
Shortly after the big bang, the universe was shrouded in an opaque fog of neutral hydrogen that absorbed the light from the first stars. These cosmic dark ages came to an end about 13 billion years ago, when enough stars and galaxies had formed to blast the fog with plenty of ultraviolet radiation, charging the hydrogen and making the fog transparent—a process called reionization.
In a new study, scientists looked for ancient signs of reionization in nearby galaxies—including the Sombrero. The results allowed the team to trace the path of reionization across the cosmos, offering an unprecedented glimpse at how the process swept away the galactic dark ages.
Our Friend the Atom
Making Music With Real Stars: Kepler Telescope Star Data Creates Musical Melody |
Why stop at the dark side of the moon to make music when you can look thousands of light years into space? That’s what a team of Georgia Tech researchers have done, using data from two stars in our galaxy to create sounds for a national recording artist.
Over the years, researchers in Georgia Tech’s Sonification Lab (SonLab) have converted numerical data into sounds to analyze stock market prices, election results and weather data. When the reggae/rock band Echo Movement called wanting to turn the movements of celestial bodies into music, SonLab looked to the heavens.
“The Sonification Lab receives a lot of requests to convert scientific data into sound, but this one was truly unique,” said School of Psychology Professor Bruce Walker. “It’s not often that we have a chance to help an actual star compose music.”
Although pitches, tempos and rhythms could be created and tweaked, the band insisted that the finished product remain true to all data and feature a musically appealing, “heavenly” sound. With those restrictions in place, the musicians and Walker’s team of students went to work with existing data gathered by NASA’s Kepler telescope. Focused on a binary star (Kepler 4665989), Kepler recorded its brightness levels for more than a year. The star dimmed and brightened each time its companion star crossed its path, providing varying brightness measurements.
“Those numerical values were loaded into our Sonification Sandbox software to create sequences of sonified musical pitches,” said Riley Winton, a psychology student and leader of the project. “The process put us on the right track. When the band reviewed it and requested timbres instead of pitches, we audified the data.
In other words, the team played the varying brightness levels as waveforms to create a different sound. The lab then cleaned the signal and removed some of the ambient sound before sending audio pitches to the band. Echo Movement looped the sounds and composed them into a four-part harmony.
For the final step, the students used a different binary star (Kepler 10291683) to adjust the timbre even further by adding a tremolo effect. This created a shuddered, natural sound rather than a flat, computerized noise.
The final result is a melody that will be used in the intro of Echo Movement’s song “Love and the Human Outreach,” which will be released in September. continue reading
Georgia Tech Melody: http://www.gatech.edu/inc/hgFile.php?fname=4-melody.wav
