Category: Astronomy

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The Crab Nebula

The Crab Nebula from Visible to X-Ray
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, ASI, Hubble, Chandra, IXPE
 

What powers the Crab Nebula? A city-sized magnetized neutron star spinning around 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it is the bright spot in the center of the gaseous swirl at the nebula's core. About 10 light-years across, the spectacular picture of the Crab Nebula (M1) frames a swirling central disk and complex filaments of surrounding and expanding glowing gas. The picture combines visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope in red and blue with X-ray light from the Chandra X-ray Observatory shown in white, and diffuse X-ray emission detected by Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) in diffuse purple. The central pulsar powers the Crab Nebula's emission and expansion by slightly slowing its spin rate, which drives out a wind of energetic electrons. The featured image released today, the 25th Anniversary of the launch of NASA's flagship-class X-ray Observatory: Chandra.

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Hopefully…

…we'll be building starships by the time the next total solar eclipse crosses Arizona.

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Black Holes

Beautiful.

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Wow.

Prathamesh Jaju, a 16-year-old boy from Pune, shot around 50,000 pictures and stitched them together to get the clearest and sharpest image of the moon. It took him around 40 hours to process the images and videos. Speaking to ANI, Jaju said, "I captured the image on May 3 at 1am. (via Tumblr)

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Something Not Horrible For a Change

From Mock Paper Scissors:

Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

This picture is from the James Webb Space Telescope and it depicts the birth of stars:

The first anniversary image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope displays star birth like it's never been seen before, full of detailed, impressionistic texture. The subject is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth. It is a relatively small, quiet stellar nursery, but you'd never know it from Webb's chaotic close-up. Jets bursting from young stars crisscross the image, impacting the surrounding interstellar gas and lighting up molecular hydrogen, shown in red. Some stars display the telltale shadow of a circumstellar disk, the makings of future planetary systems.

I know everything is terrible and we're all doomed, and the Republican Treachery (is that redundant?) or Stupidity (definitely redundant) will never end and we're totally eff'ed in the dark, but this picture smacked my gob, and gave me just a tingle of the original Star Trek 1960s optimism. Y'all Qaeda and their theocrat supporters all say we are fallen angels and that Gawd hates us sinners and blah-blah-blah, but I prefer to think that Sir Terry's Risen Apes theory is better.

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Life Imitates Art

Last year astronomers at NASA announced they had discovered a sextuple star system, i.e. six stars that perform an intricate dance around a common center of gravity.

I find this fascinating because this is exactly the type of system described in Isaac Asimov's classic work, Nightfall.

In 1941, Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a short story by a little-known writer named Isaac Asimov. The story was called Nightfall, and many years later it has long been recognized as a classic; its author a legend. The Gran Master of Science Fiction eventually teamed with Robert Silverberg, one of the field's top award-winning authors, to explore and expand an apocalyptic tale that is more spellbinding today than ever before—Nightfall: The Novel.

Imagine living on a planet with six suns that never experiences darkness. Imagine never having seen the stars. Then, one by one the suns start to set, gradually leading into darkness for the first time ever. Kalgash is a world on the edge of chaos, torn between the madness of religious fanaticism and the unyielding rationalism of scientists. Lurking beneath it all is a collective, instinctual fear of the darkness. For Kalgash knows only the perpetual light of day; to its inhabitants, a gathering twilight portends unspeakable horror. And only a handful of people on the planet are prepared to face the truth, their six suns are setting all at once for the first time in over two thousand years, signaling the end of civilization as it explodes in the awesome splendor of Nightfall.

Encompassing the psychology of disaster, the tenacity of the human spirit, and, ultimately, the regenerative power of hope, Nightfall is a tale rich in character and suspense that only the unique collaboration of Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg could create.

More than one attempt has been made to bring this story to the screen, each time resulting in utter failure. My take on the most recent one is here.

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Andromeda Moves In




Not that humanity will even be around to witness this, but these images show what things may look like as the inevitable collision and merger of the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies takes place.

The last two images are a bit optimistic because the Earth will have long since been consumed by the sun as it enters its red giant phase in around 5 billion years.

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In Case You've Ever Wondered…

…how the plane of our solar system is oriented to the plane of the Milky Way.

Because I have.

But then, I'm an astronomy geek. Have been since I was a wee young thing. But I'd always wondered how the solar system was oriented in regard to the galaxy itself, since it seemed improbable that everything was oriented in the same direction.

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A Moment of Zen

From daryavaseum:

This is my clearest and sharpest moon image i ever captured, i stacked (133,000) frames and 147GB worth of data to achieve this. I've been working on this project since 4 days ago. This image takes up to 22 hours of editing and stacking since the amount of data was massive, also you can see the planet mars as an apparent size compared with the moon which is composed image. Lastly, i hope you guys like it and enjoy the details.
Gear: celestron nexstar 8se
Camera: ZWO AS1120mc
Color: canon eos 1200D
Software: autostacker, astro surface, registax, photoshop.

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The James Webb telescope turns its eye close to home by capturing its first image of Neptune, revealing the ice giant planet in a whole new light. This is the clearest view of this peculiar planet's rings in more than 30 years.

The new image, taken by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), shows the crisp view of the planet's dynamic rings. The Webb images also clearly show Neptune's fainter dust bands.

Methane gas found inside Neptune is so strongly absorbing that the planet is quite dark at Webb wavelengths (0.6 to 5 microns) except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight.

Webb also captured seven of Neptune's 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb's images; it's not a star, but Neptune's most unusual moon, Triton.

Triton reflects an ~70 percent of the sunlight that hits it and orbits Neptune in a backwards orbit, leading astronomers to believe this moon was a Kuiper Belt object that was captured by Neptune. Additional Webb studies of Triton and Neptune are planned this year.

[Source]

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While Planetary Formation is Unlikely…

…around any star in a globular cluster, can you imagine what the night sky would look like on one? I mean hundreds of thousands of stars packed into a sphere 150 light years across, with upward of 100 stars jammed into an area 1 light year in diameter. (For comparison, the sun's nearest neighbor is a bit over 4 light years distant.)

See: Isaac Asimov's Nightfall.

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Putting Things Into Perspective

The outline of the continental United States superimposed over the great hexagon at Saturn's North Pole:

If you're not humbled by that, here's the entire North American continent next to Jupiter's Great Red Spot:

But Christians, please…tell me again how your god is so obsessed with where I put my penis. I'll wait.