Posts tagged astrophotography
I look up — many people feel small because they’re small and the Universe is big — but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity.
That’s really what you want in life, you want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel like a participant in the goings on of activities and events around you.
That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive…
- Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson [ x ]
(Source: quantumeagle, via astudyinspock)
Showoff! by Fragile Oasis on Flickr.
Via Flickr:
Our home planet, making a spectacle of itself. Photographed by a human living and working on the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
(Source: spacettf, via distant-traveller)
Filaments in the Cygnus Loop
Subtle and delicate in appearance, these are filaments of shocked interstellar gas — part of the expanding blast wave from a violent stellar explosion. Recorded in November 1997 with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope, the picture is a closeup of a supernova remnant known as the Cygnus Loop. The nearly edge-on view shows a small portion of the immense shock front moving toward the top of the frame at about 170 kilometers per second while glowing in light emitted by atoms of excited Hydrogen gas. Situated at over 1,440 light-years away, the Cygnus Loop is thought to have been expanding for 5 - 10 thousand years.
Image credit: William P. Blair and Ravi Sankrit (Johns Hopkins University), NASA
(Source: distant-traveller)
Phantom Galaxy M74
An image of the region of sky around M74, the “Phantom Galaxy”, from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The field-of-view is approximately 2.8 x 2.8 degrees.
Credit: NASA/ ESA/ Digitized Sky Survey 2/ Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)
The Iris Nebula
Like delicate cosmic petals, these clouds of interstellar dust and gas have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile star fields of the constellation Cepheus. Sometimes called the Iris Nebula and dutifully cataloged as NGC 7023, this is not the only nebula in the sky to evoke the imagery of flowers. Still, this beautiful digital image shows off the Iris Nebula’s range of colors and symmetries in impressive detail. Within the Iris, dusty nebular material surrounds a massive, hot, young star in its formative years. Central filaments of cosmic dust glow with a reddish photo luminescence as some dust grains effectively convert the star’s invisible ultraviolet radiation to visible red light. Yet the dominant color of the nebula is blue, characteristic of dust grains reflecting starlight. Dark, obscuring clouds of dust and cold molecular gas are also present and can lead the eye to see other convoluted and fantastic shapes.
Image credit: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT), Hawaiian Starlight, CFHT
(via distant-traveller)
Herschel and Keck take census of the invisible universe
By combining the observing powers of ESA’s Herschel space observatory and the ground-based Keck telescopes, astronomers have characterised hundreds of previously unseen starburst galaxies, revealing extraordinary high star-formation rates across the history of the Universe.
Starburst galaxies give birth to hundreds of solar masses’ worth of stars each year in short-lived but intense events. By comparison, our own Milky Way Galaxy on average produces the equivalent of only one Sun-like star per year.
Starburst galaxies generate so much starlight that they should outshine our Galaxy hundreds to thousands of times over, but the enormous quantities of gas fuelling them also contain vast amounts of dust as a result of the frantic star formation.
The dust absorbs much of the visible light, meaning that many of them look quite insignificant in that part of the spectrum. However, the dust is warmed by the surrounding hot stars and re-emits the energy at far-infrared wavelengths.
Using ESA’s infrared Herschel space observatory, astronomers measured the temperature and brightness of thousands of dusty galaxies. From these, their star-formation rate could be then calculated.
To provide context to the observations and understand how star formation has changed over the Universe’s 13.7 billion year history, the distances to the galaxies were also needed.
With Herschel signposting the way, astronomers used spectrometers on the twin 10-metre W.M. Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i, and obtained the redshifts of 767 of the starburst galaxies.
Redshifts provide astronomers with a measure of how long the light from each galaxy has travelled across the Universe, which, in turn, indicates when in cosmic history the light from each galaxy was emitted.
For most of the galaxies it was found that the light has been travelling towards us for 10 billion years or less. About 5% of the galaxies are at even greater redshifts: their light was emitted when the Universe was only 1–3 billion years old.
How such large numbers of starburst galaxies formed during the first few billions of years of the Universe’s existence poses a vital problem for galaxy formation and evolution studies.
One leading theory proposes that a collision between two young galaxies could have sparked an intense short-lived phase of star formation. Another theory speculates that, when the Universe was young, individual galaxies had much more gas available to them to feed from, enabling higher rates of star formation without the need of collisions.
“Before Herschel, the largest similar survey of distant starbursts involved only 73 galaxies – we’ve improved on that by over a factor of ten in this combined survey with Keck to determine the characteristics of this important galaxy population,” adds Göran Pilbratt, ESA’s Herschel project scientist.
Image credit: ESA–C. Carreau/C. Casey (University of Hawai’i); COSMOS field: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/HerMES Key Programme; Hubble images: NASA, ESA
This is a false-color composite image of Valles Marineris, Planet Mars’ very own Grand Canyon, captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) aboard ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. Stretching across the Martian highlands for 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometers) in length, 124 miles wide and up to 6.8 miles deep, Valles Marineris is considered one of the largest known canyon systems in the solar system.
