Man. I’m starting to get a little irritated at all these gorgeous images coming in faster than I can post about them! I have a job, and stuff to do, and then these temptations come along.
First, devastation incarnate:
This small thumbnail I have posted here cannot possibly do justice to the magnificence of the original image. It’s by Davide De Martin, whose images have graced this blog before. He has a pan and scan version online, and you simply will not believe the utter beauty and detail of the image.
The image is of the Vela supernova remnant, the expanding gas from a supernova many thousands of years ago. The gas is chewing its way through the thick gas and dust surrounding it, creating that beautiful filamentary pattern.
I’m a little ticked at myself; Davide emailed me about this a few days ago, but I was too busy to look, and now those guys at APOD already posted it. I could have scooped them! Curses!
The second image, from Hubble, will no doubt make APOD in a day or two as well:
That’s NGC 2440, another planetary nebula (like the Helix, which I posted about yesterday). I worked on an early Hubble image (this one) of this nebula; it boasts the hottest star known. The white dwarf in the heart of NGC 2440 is at 200,000 Kelvin, which is pretty frakkin’ hot. The Sun is at about 6000 Kelvin, for comparison. Yikes. Sally Heap, who took the image with Hubble, wanted me to see if I could extract some good measurements of the star from the data, but the images were taken before Hubble’s eyesight was corrected, and the blurriness made it impossible to do much better than what had been done previously.
Not too much later, my friend Howard Bond took another image of the nebula, which was much nicer and easier to measure. That was an impressive image, but this new one is phenomenal. The details are sharper, and the field much wider. At first I thought the image was mislabeled; it didn’t look at all like the nebula I knew! But in a second look I could see that the image I was used to is just the inner portion of this much bigger one.
Science marches on! I’m glad it does. We learn more, and get prettier pictures.
February 13th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Hi, Phil, you might be interested to know that the hilarious Dinosaur Comics is campaigning, sort of, to return to the Moon.
February 13th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Is the blue circular thing in the upper-right corner of the first image some sort of watermark?
February 13th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Pardon my ignorance, but how does a star get so hot? Is it just from the compressional heating of the star’s collapse?
February 13th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I noticed it too, the same thing is around some of the blue stars in the high res version as well. It could just be a “near-by” star that washed out the image which was removed but they left that in accidently.
February 13th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
I just caught that Vela shot on APOD mere minutes ago. Just missed the boat, eh. I love that shot.
February 13th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
I think the link to “a pan and scan version online” is incorrect, it takes me to a totally different image.
February 13th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
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“Pardon my ignorance, but how does a star get so hot? Is it just from the compressional heating of the star’s collapse?”
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The white dwarf is what remains of the core of the progenitor star.The temperature of a “working” star is in the billions of kelvins. After the outer parts of the star are shed (creating the planetary nebula) the exposed core cools, quickly at first, more slowly as it ages. The surface temperature is an inverse function of its age.
February 13th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Make that “The temperature of the core of a “working†star…”
February 13th, 2007 at 4:25 pm
From the Hubble website: The image was taken Feb. 6, 2007 with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
I wonder if the image released to remind people that Hubble is far from blind even though the ACS bit the dust?
February 13th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Breathtaking. With these two and Helix earlier I need multiple desktops!
February 13th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
As far as the blue circle goes in the Vela image, I would guess that it is a ghost image of a bright star that was on one or more of the images used for the blue frames. He’s used 19 different Schmidt plate images, and one of those may have been oriented so that light from a bright star has reflected off the internal structure of the telescope and made the ghost image in that position.
February 13th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
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The temperature of a “working†star is in the billions of kelvins.
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If you mean a main sequence star Kaptain K, that would be millions, not billions.
You’d encounter billions of Kelvin in very, very large stars or supernova.
February 13th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
I really like that first image, probably because of the insanely huge amount of detail included therein. I like being a human and not something like, oh, an axolotl, because I can look at a really cool image like that and say, “Oh! This is a really cool image! Gee, that’s swell!” or something to that extent. I also like the second one, just because of the bizarro shape of the explosion. Great posts!
February 14th, 2007 at 12:35 am
Wow, look at all the bubbles.
February 14th, 2007 at 6:52 am
With reference to the second image, NGC2440, am I correct in thinking there is a reminescence of two party balloons bursting, a la, one frame of a high speed cine camera image, as we used to see in the newsreels, oh half-a-lifetime ago? The distribution of matter is quite like the balloon surface, the thicker (denser) matter still retaining the original form, with the great voids adjacent.
Or is it?
Could that void be just a “matter of degree” of voidness? There could be a much less dense interstellar space there? Or maybe actually a much more dense Dark Matter?
Fill me in.
Oh and one more thing. That junction between the two balloons would be rather compressed, like double , from the two gigantic pressure waves crashing into each other at twice the velocity of either. (I realise that actual balloons have a relatively stable pressure before they burst, unlike the supernovas which are essentially expanding from point sources.)
Well that is the way I see it.
Ivan.
February 14th, 2007 at 7:04 am
I forgot to mention the first image. Are you sure it is not a color Ultrasound image of ET’s chest?
Um, I’ll let you go now.
Ivan.
February 14th, 2007 at 11:13 am
One of those two NGC 2440 images is upside down. Which is it? My reference point is at risk here!
February 14th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Speaking of supernovae…did anyone else catch the segment entitled Galactic Gold on NPR’s All Things Considered tonight? It traces the gold from one’s wedding band back to a supernova that created it. There are even explosive sound effects when they talk about supernovae (and also a disclaimer about no sound in space). The story is up on NPR.org for those interested.
February 15th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Phil you were right, the second image is up on APOD today!
September 11th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
[...] What you are seeing here is the death of a star like the Sun. I have written about them before (here and here, with some more general info here), so go read those to get the [...]