450 million light years away are two interacting galaxies. Both spirals, they are caught in each other’s gravitational claws. Already distorted and bound, eventually, to merge into one larger galaxy in a few million years, the view we have of them from Earth is both amazing and lovely… and hey: they’re punctuating their own predicament!

[Click to exclamatenate.]

Looking a lot like an exclamation point, the two galaxies together are called Arp 302 (or VV 340). This image is a combination of pictures from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (purple) and Hubble (red, green, and blue). The bottom galaxy is a face-on spiral, while the upper one is seen more edge-on, giving the pair their typographical appearance.

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The Carina nebula is a sprawling, monstrous complex of gas located a mere 7500 light years from Earth. Hundreds of light years across, it’s massive enough to create thousands of stars like the Sun. Tens of thousands.

And churn out stars it does. Embedded in the nebula are several clusters of newborn stars, and many of these stars are so massive they’re nearly at the limit of how big a star can be without tearing itself apart. Stars that big explode as supernovae, and a new mosaic by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory indicate they’ve been popping off in the nebula for quite some time:

[Click to enchandrasekharlimitenate.]

This image is pretty amazing: it’s a mosaic of 22 separate images by Chandra, covering 1.4 square degrees (seven times the area of the full Moon on the sky), and represents an exposure time of 1.2 million seconds! Since it shows X-rays coming from astronomical objects, it’s false color: red is from lower energy X-rays, green is medium energy, and blue from the highest energy photons.

The diffuse glow is from two sources: the stellar winds from those massive stars slamming into surrounding ambient gas at high speed, and from the shock waves generated when supernovae explode. Both are extremely high-energy events, and produce copious amounts of X-rays. That long, horizontal arc is probably the edge of a bubble, a shell of gas piled up from the winds of stars and supernovae like snow piled up in front of a snowplow.

That’s evidence right there that Carina has been cranking out supernovae over the past few million years. Interestingly, it’s what’s missing that provides more proof. (more…)

Astronomers have just announced something that took me by surprise: the dwarf irregular galaxy named Henize 2-10 has a fairly beefy supermassive black hole in it! Here’s a picture of the galaxy:

[Click to unendwarfenate.]

The image is a composite of images from Hubble (red, green, and blue), radio images from the Very Large Array in New Mexico (yellow), and X-rays from the Chandra Observatory (purple). The cross marks the location of the black hole.

Henize 2-10 is pretty dinky, only about 3000 light years across — the Milky Way is 100,000 for comparison. It’s about 30 million light years away, which is kinda sorta close by, at least close enough to get a decent look at it. Now, we know that big galaxies like ours have these monster black holes in their very centers; the Milky Way’s is about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. Many galaxies have much larger ones, like Andromeda which harbors one 35 times as massive as ours.

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One of my favorite types of objects in space are the thin, ethereal shells of gas stars create when they die. So I was thrilled^* to see this new image of one taken in exquisite detail by the Hubble Space Telescope:

[Click to supernovenate.]

I studied weird soap bubbles like this for quite some time for both my post-graduate degrees, and they still fascinate me. This one, called SNR 0509, is actually a very interesting example. There are lots of ring-shaped objects in the sky — the Helix nebula (seen below) may be the most canonical — but usually the ring itself is thick, the width of the band being a large fraction of the object diameter itself. Why does SNR 0509 have such a thin ring?
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Astronomers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory may have found evidence for a young black hole: it was born in a titanic explosion just 31 years ago.

Black holes form when massive stars explode. The core of the star collapses, and if it’s massive enough (more than about 3 times the mass of the Sun), the gravity of the core can crush it down into a black hole.

Enter Supernova 1979c, a star that exploded in the nearby galaxy M100. About 50 million light years away, M100 is a lovely face-on spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices. SN1979c was discovered in — duh — 1979, and has been heavily studied for years since it was so bright, making it easy to see.

SN1979c was an interesting event, even for something as mind-numbingly violent as a supernova. The star that exploded was right on the edge of being massive enough to create a black hole; the total mass of the star was about 20 times the mass of the Sun, with a core of just about 3 solar masses. The question is, was the star big enough to create a black hole, or would the core collapse to form an incredibly dense neutron star?

Chandra observations may have answered this question. (more…)

What happens when a star with a planetary system (or perhaps a close stellar companion) gets old, expands into a red giant, and engulfs its neighborhood?

This:

"This", in this case, is the star BP Piscium (or just BP Psc), a star a bit less than twice the mass of the Sun located about 1000 light years away. The picture is actually a composite of both an optical image from the Lick Observatory (in white and green) and X-rays using the orbiting Chandra Observatory (purple).

The jets of matter streaming away are usually seen around young stars. When a star forms, there is a thick disk of material surrounding it. Due to processes not fully understood yet (though we know it has to do with the disk, the star’s spin, and the star’s magnetic field), matter and energy can be focused into those two beams, and they can blast away from the star’s poles at high velocity, stretching for several light years.

But there’s a monkey in the wrench here: BP Psc isn’t a young star.
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Some 60 million light years from Earth is the monster galaxy M87. It’s a massive elliptical galaxy, one of the largest such in the nearby Universe… if you count 600 quintillion kilometers away as "nearby".

And when it comes to the Universe, I do.

It sits in the center of the Virgo cluster, a collection of roughly 1500 galaxies all bound to each other by gravity. At the heart of M87 is one of the biggest black holes ever seen: something like 6 billion times the mass of the Sun (the Milky Way has one as well, but it’s a paltry 4 million solar masses). It’s called a supermassive black hole, and it’s active. That means it’s a sloppy eater: as matter falls in to the hole, it piles up outside and forms a giant disk, which gets hot… millions of degrees hot. The tremendous heat and other titanic forces join up to blast away a huge amount of the otherwise incoming material. It’s not a nice, neat process, and when a black hole on that scale lets out a belch, it’s felt for hundreds of trillions of kilometers… as you can see in this image:

[Click to supermassivize.]

This is a composite of two images, one taken in radio wavelengths by the Very Large Array (in red) and the other in X-rays by the orbiting Chandra Observatory (in blue). The X-rays are being emitted by gas blasting away from the black hole, heated up by the disk and the magnetic fields affiliated with the hole itself. The radio waves are from gas that previously existed outside and farther away from the black hole, which is being slammed into, stirred up, and swept away by the outflowing gas.

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