Category Archives: stars, nebula, galaxies

Heavenly eating habits

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It’s Ascension Day, so a post about this might be beneficial to know a bit more about eating habits above. Or drinking habits, for that matter.

Like wine in a glass, vast clouds of hot gas are sloshing back and forth in Abell 2052, a galaxy cluster located about 480 million light years from Earth. X-ray data (blue) from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the hot gas in this dynamic system, and optical data (gold) from the Very Large Telescope shows the galaxies. The hot, X-ray bright gas has an average temperature of about 30 million degrees.

A huge spiral structure in the hot gas – spanning almost a million light years – is seen around the outside of the image, surrounding a giant elliptical galaxy at the center. This spiral was created when a small cluster of galaxies smashed into a larger one that surrounds the central elliptical galaxy. … (Chandra)

Bright nebula dwarf

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There used to be a time that we even couldn’t discern single stars in M31. Not anymore.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has made detailed observations of the dwarf galaxy NGC 2366. While it lacks the elegant spiral arms of many larger galaxies, NGC 2366 is home to a bright, star-forming nebula and is close enough for astronomers to discern its individual stars.

The starry mist streaking across this image obtained by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is the central part of the dwarf galaxy known as NGC 2366. The most obvious feature in this galaxy is a large nebula visible in the upper-right part of the image, an object listed just a few entries prior in the New General Catalogue as NGC 2363. … (Hubble)

 

Becoming spaghetti

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A star wanders too close to a black hole. And before you know it, you are one long piece of spaghetti. Enjoy your meal.

Astronomers have gathered the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close.

Supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions times more than the Sun, lurk in the centers of most galaxies. These hefty monsters lay quietly until an unsuspecting victim, such as a star, wanders close enough to get ripped apart by their powerful gravitational clutches.

Astronomers have spotted these stellar homicides before, but this is the first time they can identify the victim. Using a slew of ground- and space-based telescopes, a team of astronomers led by Suvi Gezari of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., has identified the victim as a star rich in helium gas. The star resides in a galaxy 2.7 billion light-years away. .. (Hubble)

In its final throes

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Not only resistance can be in its final throes. Stars can be as well.

Images from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) reveal an old star in the throes of a fiery outburst, spraying the cosmos with dust. The findings offer a rare, real-time look at the process by which stars like our sun seed the universe with building blocks for other stars, planets and even life.

The star, catalogued as WISE J180956.27-330500.2, was discovered in images taken during the WISE survey in 2010, the most detailed infrared survey to date of the entire celestial sky. It stood out from other objects because it glowed brightly with infrared light. When compared to images taken more than 20 years ago, astronomers found the star was 100 times brighter.

“We were not searching specifically for this phenomenon, but because WISE scanned the whole sky, we can find such unique objects,” said Poshak Gandhi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), lead author of a new paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. … (WISE)

A dangerous nebula

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No, they’re not dangerous, they’re beautiful creatures. Spiders are cool and great and small at the same time. So is their celestial sister:

To celebrate its 22nd anniversary in orbit, the Hubble Space Telescope has released a dramatic new image of the star-forming region 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula because its glowing filaments resemble spider legs. A new image from all three of NASA’s Great Observatories – Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer – has also been created to mark the event. … (HUBBLE)

Jewels of the sky

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A jewel box, one of the many in our skies:

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over 250,000 individual stars shining in it.
Messier 9, pictured here, is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical swarm of stars that lies around 25,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of the Milky Way, so close that the gravitational forces from the galactic center pull it slightly out of shape. … (NASA)

A Cool Kid

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Stars can be cool. In more than one sense:

Astronomers using the world’s largest radio telescope, at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, have discovered flaring radio emission from an ultra-cool star, not much warmer than the planet Jupiter, shattering the previous record for the lowest stellar temperature at which radio waves were detected.
The team from Penn State University’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds has been using the giant 305-m (1000-ft) telescope to look for radio signals from a class of objects known as brown dwarfs. These are small, cold stars that bridge the gap between Jupiter-like giant planets and normal, more massive, hydrogen-fusing stars. They hit the jackpot with a star named J1047+21, a brown dwarf 33.6 light years away in the constellation Leo, in a result that could boost the odds of discovering life elsewhere in the universe. … (USRA)