About 700 light years away sits the expanding death cry of a star: the Helix Nebula, a four-light-year wide gas cloud blasted out when a star that was once like the Sun gave up its life.
A new image of it in colors just outside what the human eye can see shows just how much it does look like a screaming star:
This image is in the near-infrared, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), a 4.1 meter telescope in Chile. Equipped with a whopping 67 megapixel camera it can take pictures of large areas of the sky. The Helix nebula fits that bill: it’s close enough to us that it’s nearly the size of the full Moon in the sky.
This image is pretty nifty. It accentuates cooler gas than what we see in visible light. What’s colored red in the picture is actually infrared light coming from molecular hydrogen, and shows the sharp ring-like edge of the nebula. What you’re seeing here is not so much a ring as it is the walls of a barrel-like structure, and we happen to be seeing it nearly right down the tube (see Related posts below for all the info you could want on this amazing object).
It also accentuates the long, long streamers pointing directly away from the center. Those are comet-like tails coming from denser clumps of material boiling away as the fierce ultraviolet light of the central star floods out, their material flowing radially outward. This is seen in other nebulae as well.
And while it’s beautiful and scientifically very useful (I would’ve killed for data this nice when I was researching these nebulae in grad school), it’s also something of an existential reminder: someday, our own Sun will look a bit like this. Probably not quite this bright and well-defined; our local star doesn’t quite have the power needed to light up its surroundings this way. But for all intent and purpose, you’re seeing a snapshot of our solar system in seven or eight billion years.
Just in case you needed a little perspective this morning.
Image credit: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson. Acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit
This video is only 20 seconds long, but wow. Simply, wow.
[Note: I've noticed sometimes the video won't load and you get a black space. Try hitting refresh, or just click the link in the next sentence.]
This was created using a series of still images from the International Space Station on December 29, 2011, over the course of about 20 minutes. The ISS was orbiting over Africa at the time, as it passed from the center of the continent to Madagascar and then over the ocean. The flashes of light are from storms on our planet’s surface.
In the sky, though, the Milky Way steals the scene as it rises over the eastern horizon. Toward the end of the video, what I thought for a moment was a reflection of the Milky Way on the glass of the ISS turns out to actually be Comet Lovejoy, which was still visible at the time. You can also see the thin green arc of airglow over the Earth before the rising Sun ends the video.
If it weren’t copyrighted, I would’ve added Enya’s "Storms in Africa" track to this. It seems appropriate.
… and if there’s a metaphor here for overcoming adversity — whatever that may mean to you — well then, feel free to ruminate over it.
If there is any definition of "ironic", it must be a smiley face seen in a cancerous cell:
Australian researchers at the Westmead Millennium Institute for Medical Research were investigating how the protein beta-catenin invades a cell’s nucleus and causes it to become cancerous, when they spotted the protein apparently mocking them. You can see this a bit more clearly in the video they made:
The circle is the cell’s nucleus as the protein moves in, and the dark spots are where the protein is blocked. The smiley face doesn’t surprise me; we’re hardwired to see faces and familiar shapes everywhere we look (click the tag marked "pareidolia" — the psych term for this — under this post to see lots of examples). Heck, I spotted one in a supernova once…
And I certainly hope this research yields insight into how to fight cancer. I’d love to see that smirk wiped off that nucleus’s face.
Not that any time lapse video of the Very Large Telescope complex at Paranal in Chile would be normal, but this one by Farid Char caught something pretty unusual: what appears to be a Chinese rocket boosting a satellite to orbit!
Did you catch it? From 14 – 18 seconds in, you can see it as a bright object moving against the setting stars to the west. If you pause the video, you can see what look like two plumes of gas coming from the object (though I wonder; a cone-shaped plume might look like this too seen from the side due to limb-brightening). Given the time, it was most likely the Chinese satellite FengYun 2-F moving into its transfer orbit (or possibly just venting some fuel), and it will slowly boost itself to a final geosynchronous orbit over the next few weeks.
These time lapse videos are always pretty cool, but they’re even better when they get a surprise like this!
[Just a note: if you're not a fan of nature documentaries because they sometimes show nature being natural -- specifically, predators eating prey -- then you might want to skip this post.]
This morning I was at my computer, just settling down with my coffee and a ton of emails to get through, when the dogs started barking upstairs. It wasn’t their usual "Alert! Alert! The neighbors are outside!" or "Wake up! A truck drove by!" bark — it was urgent and non-stop. Wondering what it could be, I got up, walked over to the back door, and HOLY CRAP THERE’S A HAWK EATING ANOTHER BIRD THREE METERS FROM MY DOOR!
I grabbed the dogs, threw them in the bedroom, hastily told my wife what was happening, ran back to my office to grab the camera, and took about a hundred shots.
[Click to accipiterenate.]
I have some software that helps identify birds, and it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to figure out what kind of hawk is what. My best guess is that this is a Sharp-shinned hawk, judging from the tail coloration and the plumage. The software says they can have blue-gray upper parts, but all the pictures I see look like this fierce raptor, with red-brown striped feathers. It’s definitely not a Red-tailed hawk. [UPDATE: in the comments a lot of folks seem to be converging on it being a Cooper's hawk. I looked at some photos, and it does match.]
The bird it was eating was also hard to identify from a distance (especially given the circumstances). At first I thought it was a gull; we get them around here at dumps and reservoirs. However, once the hawk left and I got the privilege of cleaning up (yuck; there were feathers everywhere) I could see it was a common white pigeon.
Here are a couple of more shots, which I’ll put after the jump just in case some folks are squeamish. They aren’t horribly gruesome, but might disturb more empathetic readers.
This shot of a bloom in the southern Atlantic Ocean was taken by the ESA’s Envirosat, which — duh — is designed to observe our environment. In this case, scientists keep a keen eye on phytoplankton blooms: while this bloom is breathtaking and gorgeous, many can be hazardous. Besides producing toxins that can harm sea life, they can also consume more oxygen in the water than usual, which is obviously tough on any life in the area. The color of the bloom can be found quickly using satellite imagery like this, and the algae species determined. Also, phytoplankton are sensitive to some climate changes, so observing them can act as a "canary in the coal mine" for climate change.
Sometimes, the best view of the Earth around us is from above. And sometimes that view is amazing, but a reminder that our ecosystem is a dynamic balance… and it’s best that we understand all the forces that can upset that equilibrium.
Phil Plait, the creator of Bad Astronomy, is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. He's written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and 12 bazillion blog articles. He is a skeptic and fights the abuse of science, but his true love is praising the wonders of real science.
The original BA site (with the Moon Hoax debunking, movie reviews, and all that) can be found here.
Contact me: The Bad Astronomer "at" gmail "dot" com
"If things worked the way I wanted them to, any reporter about to do another 'sensational' story on deadly meteors would consult this volume, and bang! common sense would find its way into the news. How strange would that world be?" -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters
"Reading this book is like getting punched in the face by Carl Sagan. Frightening, but oddly exhilarating." -- Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising
Did you catch it? From 14 – 18 seconds in, you can see it as a bright object moving against the setting stars to the west. If you pause the video, you can see what look like two plumes of gas coming from the object (though I wonder; a cone-shaped plume might look like this too seen from the side due to 
