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The Butterfly Nebula, designated IC 1318, is shown here in high resolution, in the constellation of the swan. Intricate patterns in the bright gas and dark dust are caused by complex interactions between interstellar winds, radiation pressures, magnetic fields, and gravity. This view captures the nebula’s characteristic emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms mapped to red, green, and blue hues. This portion of the Butterfly Nebula spans about 100 light years and lies about 4000 light years away.
Image Credit & Copyright: Alan Pham
Touchdown!!
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has safely landed on our red neighbour. These are the first pictures that it sent back to Earth, moments after making contact! They were taken with the Perseverance’s Hazard cameras. In the next few days it will send more images that are higher quality.
With the main mission objective of astrobiology, Perseverance hopes to help answer the age old question- has there ever been life on Mars?
What do you think? Are we alone in the universe? Send me a message and let me know what you think!
Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech
Happy Valentine’s Day!! ❤️❣️
Another year means another instalment of space/science themed Valentine’s cards to share with your significant other, family, friends, pets, or for yourself (because we love self love and self appreciation ✨)
Have a good day everyone & stay safe! Love you all!!
⭐️☄️
Light from the Moon illuminates these mountains known as The Lions. They are north of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Above the mountains, to the left of Deneb alpha star of the constellation Cygnus, are emission regions NGC 7000 and IC 5070. Also known as The North America Nebula and The Pelican Nebula, these star forming regions are about 1,500 light-years from Vancouver and shine with the red glow of atomic hydrogen gas.
The deep nightscape is a composite of consecutive exposures made with a modified digital camera and telephoto lens. Foreground exposures were made with camera fixed to a tripod, background exposures were made tracking the sky. The result preserves sharp natural detail and reveals a range of brightness and color that your eye can’t quite see on its own. Composite Image Credit & Copyright: Liron Gertsman
These jets shooting out from Centaurus A are over a million light years long! They’re made of streaming plasma and are expelled by the giant black hole in the center of this spiral galaxy. Exactly how the central black hole does this remains unknown. Once out of the galaxy, the jets create large radio bubbles that will likely glow for millions of years. X-ray light is depicted in the image in blue, while microwave light is colored orange.
Image Credit: ESO/WFI (visible); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A. Weiss et al. (microwave); NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Kraft et al. (X-ray)
In the center of the Tarantula Nebula lies a huge star cluster, called R136. It contains some of the largest, hottest, and most massive stars known. Gas and dust clouds in the nebula, have been sculpted into elongated shapes by powerful winds and ultraviolet radiation from these hot cluster stars. It lies within a neighboring galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud and is located a mere 170,000 light-years away.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, & F. Paresce (INAF-IASF), R. O'Connell (U. Virginia) et al.
Happy new year! I hope everyone has a happy and healthy 2021 ✨
In this starry panorama streching across deep southern skies the South Celestial Pole is between the 2 bright galaxies and southern celestial gems. Across the top of the frame are the stars and nebulae along the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy. Gamma Crucis, a yellowish giant star heads the Southern Cross near the top center. Eta Carinae and the reddish glow of the Great Carina Nebula shine along the galactic plane near the right edge. At the bottom are the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, external galaxies in their own right and satellites of the mighty Milky Way.
Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horalek, Josef Kujal
The familiar stars of the constellation Orion the Hunter are caught sideways above the trees in this colorful night skyscape. Not a star at all but still visible to eye, the Great Nebula of Orion shines brightly below the Hunter’s belt stars, revealing its faint pinkish glow. Betelgeuse, the giant yellow star at Orion’s shoulder, has the color of warm and cozy terrestrial lighting, but so does another familiar stellar giant, Aldebaran!
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and happy holidays!!
Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block
The Great Conjunction!! Jupiter and Saturn are visible toward the right, just above a tree! They are in the diffuse glow of zodiacal light.
Image Credit & Copyright: Francisco Sojuel
What’s creating these long glowing streaks in the sky? No one is sure! They’re known as Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancements (STEVEs). Strong, luminous light-purple sky ribbons that may resemble regular auroras, but recent research reveals significant differences. A STEVE’s great length and unusual colors, when measured precisely, indicate that it may be related to a subauroral ion drift (SAID), a supersonic river of hot atmospheric ions thought previously to be invisible. The featured wide-angle composite image shows a STEVE in a dark sky above Childs Lake, Manitoba, Canada, crossing in front of the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Image Credit: NASA, Krista Trinder
What’s happening at the center of the star forming Trifid Nebula? Three prominent dust lanes that give the Trifid its name all come together and dark dust filaments are visible threaded throughout the nebula. The single massive star visible near the center gives the Trifid a lot of its glow. Cataloged as M20, its only about 300,000 years old, making it among the youngest emission nebulas known, and lies about 9,000 light years away toward the constellation of Sagittarius. The region pictured here spans about 10 light years.
Image Credit: Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), Hubble Space Telescope, Martin Pugh; Processing: Robert Gendler
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!
This spooky interstellar scene lies within the dusty expanse of reflection nebula IC 2118 in the constellation Orion, the Hunter. IC 2118 is about 800 light-years from our neighborhood, close to the bright bluish star, Rigel, at Orion’s foot. It is often identified as the Witch Head nebula for its appearance in a wider field of view. Rigel is the source of illumination for IC 2118, and it is just beyond this frame at the upper left. Image Credit & Copyright: Casey Good/Steve Timmons
The open star cluster NGC 7380 is still embedded in its natal cloud of interstellar gas and dust commonly known as the Wizard Nebula. Seen on the left, it lies some 8,000 light-years away, toward the constellation Cepheus. Recorded with narrowband filters, the visible wavelength light from the nebula’s hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur atoms is transformed into green, blue, and red colors in the final digital masterpiece. Image Credit & Copyright: Andrew Klinger
Also known as vdB 142, the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula is over 20 light-years long and in the constellation Cepheus. This detailed close-up view was recorded through narrow band filters that transmit the light from ionized hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the region. The resulting composite highlights the bright swept-back ridges that outline pockets of cool interstellar dust and gas. Such embedded, dark, tendril-shaped clouds contain the raw material for star formation and hide protostars within.
Image Credit & Copyright: Chad Leader
Where are all these meteors coming from? In terms of direction on the sky, the straight answer is the constellation of Perseus- which is why the meteor shower that peaks tomorrow night is known as the Perseids. In other terms though, the Perseids meteors come from Comet Swift-Tuttle. The comet follows a well-defined orbit around our Sun, and the part of the orbit that approaches Earth passes in front of the Perseus constellation. Therefore, when Earth crosses this orbit, the radiant point of falling debris appears in Perseus.
Featured here, a composite image taken over eight nights and containing over 400 meteors from 2018 August’s Perseids meteor shower shows many bright meteors that streaked over Kolonica Observatory in Slovakia. This year’s Perseids holds promise to be one of the best meteor showers of the year. Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horálek
The tails of Comet NEOWISE!! Comet’s usually have 2 tails that always point away from the Sun.
Here, NEOWISE’s blue ion tail on the left points directly away from the Sun and is pushed out by the flowing and charged solar wind. Structure in the ion tail comes from different rates of expelled blue-glowing ions from the comet’s nucleus, as well as the always changing structure of our Sun’s wind.
The other tail, the dust tail, is pushed out by sunlight, but curves towards its orbital path as heavier dust particles are better able to resist this light pressure. Comet NEOWISE’s (Comet C/2020 F3) impressive dust-tail striations are not fully understood, as yet, but likely related to rotating streams of sun-reflecting grit liberated by melting ice on its 5-kilometer wide nucleus. Image Credit & Copyright: Zixuan Lin (Beijing Normal U.)
This galaxy, known as NGC 5907, seems to be an elongated line of stars and dark dust. But, the galaxy is actually categorized as a spiral galaxy just like our own Milky Way. In this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, we don’t see the beautiful spiral arms because we are viewing it edge-on, like looking at the rim of a plate. It is for this reason that NGC 5907 is also known as the Knife Edge galaxy. It is about 50 million light-years from Earth and can be found in the northern constellation of Draco. Although not visible in this image, ghostly streams of stars on big arching loops extend into space, circling around the galaxy. It is believed that those are remnants of a small dwarf galaxy that was torn apart by the Knife Edge galaxy and merged with it over 4 billion years ago.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. de Jong; Acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla)
Our Weird and Wonderful Galaxy of Black Holes
Black holes are hard to find. Like, really hard to find. They are objects with such strong gravity that light can’t escape them, so we have to rely on clues from their surroundings to find them.
When a star weighing more than 20 times the Sun runs out of fuel, it collapses into a black hole. Scientists estimate that there are tens of millions of these black holes dotted around the Milky Way, but so far we’ve only identified a few dozen. Most of those are found with a star, each circling around the other. Another name for this kind of pair is a binary system.That’s because under the right circumstances material from the star can interact with the black hole, revealing its presence.
The visualization above shows several of these binary systems found in our Milky Way and its neighboring galaxy. with their relative sizes and orbits to scale. The video even shows each system tilted the way we see it here from our vantage point on Earth. Of course, as our scientists gather more data about these black holes, our understanding of them may change.
If the star and black hole orbit close enough, the black hole can pull material off of its stellar companion! As the material swirls toward the black hole, it forms a flat ring called an accretion disk. The disk gets very hot and can flare, causing bright bursts of light.
V404 Cygni, depicted above, is a binary system where a star slightly smaller than the Sun orbits a black hole 10 times its mass in just 6.5 days. The black hole distorts the shape of the star and pulls material from its surface. In 2015, V404 Cygni came out of a 25-year slumber, erupting in X-rays that were initially detected by our Swift satellite. In fact, V404 Cygni erupts every couple of decades, perhaps driven by a build-up of material in the outer parts of the accretion disk that eventually rush in.
In other cases, the black hole’s companion is a giant star with a strong stellar wind. This is like our Sun’s solar wind, but even more powerful. As material rushes out from the companion star, some of it is captured by the black hole’s gravity, forming an accretion disk.
A famous example of a black hole powered by the wind of its companion is Cygnus X-1. In fact, it was the first object to be widely accepted as a black hole! Recent observations estimate that the black hole’s mass could be as much as 20 times that of our Sun. And its stellar companion is no slouch, either. It weighs in at about 40 times the Sun.
We know our galaxy is peppered with black holes of many sizes with an array of stellar partners, but we’ve only found a small fraction of them so far. Scientists will keep studying the skies to add to our black hole menagerie.
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