And in case you missed it, here are links to 3D red/green anaglyphs of Enceladus too. Awesome.

By now you’ve probably heard of the extremely bright fireball over Utah last Wednesday, proving once again that really cool stuff happens when I’m on travel and can’t write about it. Worse, it was seen from Denver, which means I might’ve had a shot at seeing it myself.

Sigh.

Anyway, this meteor was so bright it overexposed security cameras, turned night into day, and cast obvious shadows on the ground. This video shows several different views of it:

Whoa.

The coolest thing about these videos is, to me, the way the shadows of objects move rapidly around as the meteor flashes across the sky. I describe this very thing in the opening vignette of the asteroid impact chapter of my book Death from the Skies! The video is pretty much exactly as I imagined it would be. Yikes.

Of course, not everyone thinks this was just a chunk of rock burning up harmlessly in our atmosphere. Because, after all, why assume it was a natural event that occurs quite often, when you can add layers of nonsense and conspiracy to it? Fark alerted me to the idea that this was actually a nuclear missile shot down over the US, despite the video, pictures, and eyewitness accounts completely contradicting the idea that this was anything other than a meteor. But for some people, facts won’t get in the way of a good story!

Anyway, while spectacular, the Earth is probably subjected to meteors like this several times a year. As I have said before, now that we have security cameras and phones with video, we’ll be seeing more and more of videos like this, which is a good thing: it’ll make people more aware of the sky. I’m all for that!

That raw image (which means it has not been processed to remove instrument/detector artifacts like bad pixels and such) was taken when Cassini was a mere 2000 km (1200 miles) above the moon’s surface. The features are beautiful and plentiful… and it looks like a great place to ski. Bonus: the low gravity would make the experience last longer!

Cassini got an overview of the geysers, too, when it was still more than 500,000 km away:

Remember, these are raw images; that bright "star" just above Enceladus is probably a cosmic ray hit on the detector and not an actual astronomical object.

Over at The Planetary Society blog Emily is, of course, having kittens over the pictures, and has made some stereoscopic pairs of them (though I’ll wait for the red/green anaglyphs; crossing my eyes at my monitor makes my tummy queasy). [Edited to add: in the comments below, BABloggee Alex links to anaglyphs he created. Very cool!]

Stay tuned, because as these images are processed things will only get cooler.

But that’s the way things are now, and lots of people are putting this tech to good use. Like, for example, Sirius Stargazing, a new YouTube channel with info on how to observe various astronomical objects. It’s just starting out but off to a good start. Here’s one video on the Pleiades. And who’s the dork in the tie introducing it?

If you have a YouTube account and are interested in observing the skies, then consider subscribing to Sirius Stargazing. They may just give you ideas.

Yeah, it’s Saturn, not the Milky Way, but still. That is made of awesome. I want to go to that coffee shop!

Via Reddit.

My fellow Hive Overmind blogger and astronomer Sean Carroll writes that it’s possible Fermi has done just this. The data are not conclusive, but very provocative nonetheless. He has the details.

But I can’t resist adding that on The Big Bang Theory a few weeks ago, Raj and Sheldon were investigating building a detector to look for this very type of dark matter. I wrote David Saltzberg, the science advisor (whom I met on the set last month when I was visiting LA; more on him and that at a later date) and told him this, and he noted that I was right. Well, how about that! It had to happen sometime. Now, to publish…

Awesome. And you really need to embiggen this one to get a sense of the incredible beauty and resolution of the picture. Try the 4000 x 2000 pixel one on for size!

NGC 4710 is an edge-on spiral galaxy located about 60 million light years away in the Virgo Cluster. That puts it in the next town over, cosmically speaking, so it’s a rich target for something like Hubble Space Telescope. This image, newly released (but taken in 2006 before the last servicing mission), reveals spectacular details in the sideways galaxy. Views like this really accentuate the huge sprawling dust complexes littering spiral galaxies.

But it isn’t the dust astronomers are interested in here. Spirals have three main parts: a more-or-less spherical bulge in the center, the disk (which has the spiral arms), and a giant halo of stars surrounding them both. We understand a lot about spirals, but lots of big questions remain, including how and when the bulge forms. A galaxy is born out of a vast, collapsing cloud of gas. It’s possible that the bulge forms straight away, with the infalling gas of the protogalaxy making stars which build up in the galactic center. It’s also possible that the bulge forms later, well after the galaxy itself takes shape, as stars in the inner part of the galactic disk interact gravitationally and fall to the center, building up the bulge.

It turns out there might be a way to distinguish these formation mechanisms, even billions of years after the fact. Globular clusters are small (well, a couple of dozen light years across or so) balls of hundreds of thousands of stars. They orbit bigger galaxies; the Milky Way has well over 100 orbiting it. We know that many globulars formed at the same time as their parent galaxies; the stars in the clusters can be incredibly old. This means that perhaps the formation of the galaxy and its attendant clusters are connected.

In fact, it’s thought that the same process that creates the bulge in the "forms at the same time as the galaxy itself" scenario also creates globular clusters, but the other process (stars from the disk falling inward) does not create globulars.

That’s where NGC 4710 comes in. Being edge-on, we can see the bulge clearly, so it can be studied. But it also presents a good view of its globulars, so scientists can look at pictures like this one and simply count up the number of globular clusters near the galaxy and then figure out if the number is consistent with one of the two formation mechanisms.

In this case, NGC 4710 sports very few globulars, indicating the bulge formed after the galaxy itself. But NGC 4710 is only one of many galaxies being studied this way. Will they all show the same sluggish beginnings to their central bulges?

Time will tell. But I hope that as more of these galaxies are studied more images as lovely as this one become available.

Image credit: NASA & ESA