I’m such a sucker for emission nebulae, the sites of intense star formation. Part of that is because I spent years researching other types of gaseous clouds, but also because they’re just so darn pretty, like this shot of NGC 371:

[Click to ennebulanate, or get the 2000 x 2000 pixel version).]

NGC 371 is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to our Milky Way. That puts it at a distance of about 200,000 light years, or 2 quintillion (2,000,000,000,000,000,000) kilometers.
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I know I’ve been posting a lot of astropr0n lately, but there’s just been so much cool stuff the past few days (and there’s more to come)! The European Space Agency just threw their hat into the ring with this crazy cool image of a young star blowing its stack:

[Click it to ennebulanate, or grab yourself some megasized 2100 x 2100 pixel action.]

I love this image! It shows the havoc caused by young stars as they spew out material at speed upwards of a million kilometers per hour. What you’re seeing is actually a small part of a star-forming region surrounding the star R Corona Australis, a nearby 550 light years away. It’s a densely packed cloud of thick dust and gas, completely hiding the stars inside and behind it. It’s not terribly big, only a couple of light years across — compare that to the Orion Nebula, which is 20 light years across (and that’s only the visible portion; it’s part of a dark cloud that’s much larger). Or the Tarantula nebula, which I posted about yesterday, which is a thousand light years across!

Even though it’s small, it’s the birthplace of many stars. Two such stars reveal their presence here; not by their light, but by blowing out long streamers of matter called jets. (more…)

I do so love time-lapse animations, and this one is particularly nice: it shows four of the ALMA microwave antennas in Chile as they scan the night sky, while the starry vault rotates around them. [Make sure you set the resolution to 720 and make this full screen; it's really nice.]

The video starts at moonset, and ends with an amazing view of the the vast central bulge and disk of the Milky Way looming over the ‘scopes.You can see the famous Coal Sack dark dust cloud as a circular "hole" in the Milky Way, with Crux, the Southern Cross, right next to it. Just above and to the right (at the lower tip of the elongated dark patch in the Milky Way) is the bright star Alpha Centauri, with Beta Centauri just below it. The European Southern Observatory has posted a similar video showing a different part of the sky, too. These videos are from last summer, but there’s a timeless, enthralling quality to them.

I found this through the tortuous route of a tweet from my friend Lila Mae, then to io9 (who got it from reddit), and then to the ESO. Phew!

Credit: ESO/José Francisco Salgado

Hmph. I’m no genius, and I know there’s lots of astronomy-related things I don’t know that much about. But what surprises me is that there still are complete surprises for me… like a type of galaxy I’ve never heard of!

So here’s NGC 3621, as seen by the 2.2 meter MPG/ESO telescope in La Silla, Chile:

[Click to galactinate to the 3500 x 3100 pixel version.]

Pretty cool, right? This is a near true-color image, using three filters that come close to mimicking the eye’s blue, yellow-green, and red sensitivity, as well as a filter that selects the light from warm hydrogen gas (shown as pinkish-red). As usual, that last bit shows where stars are actively being born.

At 22 million light years away, NGC 3621 looks like your usual big spiral galaxy: flat disk, arms sweeping out majestically, central bulge… hey, hold on there a second. Where’s the central bulge?
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[Yes, that title is correct. Bear with me.]

I’ve seen the Orion Nebula approximately… well, how many times? Let’s see… um, carry the two… yeah, a gazillion times. You have too, probably, since to the unaided eye it appears as a star in the dagger hanging below Orion’s famous belt^*. I’ve also seen it with binoculars and through telescopes ranging in size from dimestore junkers to a one-meter on a mountaintop. And yet, every new picture of it reveals something interesting… like this spectacular shot does:

Yowza. Click to ennebulanate, or get the orionormous 4000 x 3800 version. Or you can treat yourself to the 142 Mb 9000 x 8600 pixel version!

First, some stats: this picture is a combination of five separate images from the red to the ultraviolet (that last colored violet, actually), including a filter that sees just the glow from warm hydrogen (colored red in this image). The telescope used was a 2.2 meter in Chile. The nebula is pretty big — the full Moon would just fit inside this image — so the detail on this is truly stunning.

The nebula is a vast cloud of gas, both atomic and molecular, and dust located about 1350 light years away. It’s one of the largest star forming factories in the Milky Way, and what you see here is well over 20 light years across.

For years I figured it was just a diffuse glowing thing in space, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. (more…)

Regular readers know the phenomenal work of Stéphane Guisard: he takes astrophotos showing stunning, deep views of the sky (see Related Posts at the bottom of this entry). And he’s done it once again: using a fish-eye (very wide angle) lens, he captured stunning video of the entire sky from Chile. You can see the whole thing on that link, or he’s uploaded the video to YouTube:

[I strongly urge you to set the resolution to its highest (1080p) and make this full-screen. Seriously.]

OK, this needs a wee bit o’ explaining…

First of all this was taken on December 5, 2010, at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. You can see the telescopes nearby. On Stéphane’s page (and on YouTube), you can see the usual view where the sky appears as a circle, and the horizon wraps around. But what he did here is to "unwrap" the sky so it appears rectangular. It starts in the east on the left, goes through south, then west in the middle, then through north and back to east on the right. So you can see stars rising on the extreme right and left sides of the frame, moving toward the middle, and then down to the west. It takes a little getting used to!

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Last year, astronomers discovered a remarkable planet orbiting another star: it has a mass and radius that puts it in the "super-Earth" category — meaning it’s more like the Earth than a giant Jupiter-like planet. Today, it has been announced that astronomers have been able to analyze the atmosphere of the planet (the very first time this has ever been accomplished for a super-Earth), and what they found is astonishing: the air of the planet is either shrouded in thick haze, or it’s loaded with water vapor… in other words, steam!

[Click to embiggen the artist illustrations of the planet and star.]

This is very cool news. Um, hot. Whatever.

Here’s the deal: GJ 1214 is a dinky red dwarf star 42 light years away. It’s only about 1/5th the size of the Sun, and shines with only 1/300th of the Sun’s brightness. A project called MEarth studies such nearby red dwarfs, looking for dips in their starlight that indicate the presence of a planet: when the planet passes in front of the star (called a transit), it blocks the light a little bit.
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