There are quite a few mysteries in astronomy; things we don’t understand. The vast majority of them are smallish in scope, things that can probably be solved with a little more work, more observations. These are more like questions than outright mysteries; things we just don’t have the answers to quite yet.

But then there are some that really are mysteries: unexpected oddities that, for now, defy explanation. One of these reared its head again recently, when observations by the ground-based Subaru and Keck observatories were combined with those from the space-based telescopes Hubble and Spitzer. It doesn’t look like much of a mystery — just a red smudge — but it pushes the boundaries of what we think the very Universe itself can do.

[Click to enbigbangenate.]

First, holy cow, what an image! Incredibly, nearly every single object in that picture is an entire galaxy, a vast collection of billions of stars. They’re also very distant; I doubt any of the bigger ones are closer than several billion light years away.

And lurking off to the side, where you’d hardly notice it, is that little red guy. Named GN-108036, it’s at the soul-crushing distance of 12.9 billion light years away. That means that the light we see here left that galaxy when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old.

As you might imagine, it may look faint, but at that distance it’s remarkable we can see it at all. But we do, because it’s amazingly luminous, perhaps the most intrinsically bright galaxy seen at that distance ever found. Of course, we don’t see too many galaxies farther away than this! And that’s part of the mystery.

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So you saw my gallery yesterday of gorgeous pictures from 2011, right? And then you read my post this morning where I whine about how Chandra releases an awesomely cool picture the day after I put up my gallery?

Right. So of course Hubble releases an image today that is so insanely amazing I hardly know where to start with it.

So I’ll start by showing it to you. Behold, Sharpless 2-106:

Are. You. Freaking. Kidding. Me? [Click to ennbulenate, and yes, you really want to.]

This devastatingly beautiful image shows the birth pangs of a massive star. Called IRS 4 (for Infrared Source 4; it was first seen in IR images), it’s the really bright star just below center where the two blue lobes come together. It’s a bruiser, an O-type star with at least 15 times the Sun’s mass — 30 octillion tons! — and is a staggering 10,000 times as bright. It’s still in the process of forming, but it’s nearly there.

Located about 2000 light years away, IRS 4 is surrounded by an enormous cloud of gas and dust that may have a mass as high as 25,000 times the mass of the Sun. When the star first ignited, fusing hydrogen into helium in its core, the vast amount of energy it started pouring out lit up the cloud in the immediate vicinity around it. Most of the cloud is still dark and cannot be seen here, but everything within a few light years of the star is being illuminated, if not ionized, by the fierce ultraviolet light from the star.

Generally, very young stars are still surrounded by the thick disk of material from which they formed. That’s true of IRS 4; the dark line on the left of the star is actually the shadow of that disk on the gas and dust around it.

At this point, things get weird.

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I will never, ever get tired of insanely gorgeous images of globular clusters.

Holy. Haleakala. [Click to embiggen, or get the ridiculously huge 3900 x 4000 pixel version.]

That is Hubble’s view of M 53, a cluster of several hundred thousand stars crammed into ball about 60,000 light years away — well outside the Milky Way itself, but bound to it, orbiting our galaxy. It’s probably 12 billion years old, but it looks like some of the stars in it have opted for a little cosmetic surgery…

In our galaxy, stars are so far apart that collisions between two of them almost never happen. But in globular clusters stars are so closely packed that many of them have apparently literally collided with each other, merging into objects called blue stragglers. Globulars are old, so having blue, massive stars is weird; they have short lifespans, and should’ve all blown up as supernovae or at least turned into red giants billions of years ago.

When these objects were first discovered in globulars they were really surprising, and while we still don’t understand everything about them, it’s a fair bet they result from two stars having a very, very close encounter. If two older, low mass red stars pass close to each other at low speed, their gravity can cause them to become bound to each other (it helps if a third star is involved; it can steal away energy from the other two, making it easier for them to become stuck together). Over time, they can spiral together and merge, forming a single, more massive, hotter object: a blue straggler. They’re seen in many globular clusters, and tend to be more common where stars are thickest, as you’d expect.

Over 200 of them have been found in M 53 alone, and at first glance, if you didn’t know better, you’d think they were far younger than the ancient stars around them. In a way, I suppose, they are.

But don’t judge. If you were a 12 billion year old star, you might want a facelift, too.

Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

I’ve posted lots of pictures of globular clusters in the past, but this new one is something special. And not just because it’s stunningly beautiful… which it is:

[Click to spheroidenate, or grab the massively embiggened 3850x3850 pixel version.]

This is Hubble’s view of NGC 7006, a relatively faint cluster of a hundred or so thousand stars located in the constellation of Delphinus, the dolphin. It appears relatively faint and small as globulars go, but as it turns out it’s a very, very interesting object indeed.

Why? Distance.

NGC 7006 is one of the most remote globular clusters orbiting the Milky Way; it’s currently 135,000 light years away – 1.35 quintillion (1,350,000,000,000,000,000) kilometers distant. For comparison, the Milky Way itself is about 100,000 light years across. Not only that, but NGC 7006 is still heading out, increasing that distance, and it’s not exactly taking its time: it’s moving away at an astonishing 380 km/sec (250 miles/sec)! Measurements of its position taken over a 40 year time span also give an indication of the shape of its orbit. The most far-flung part of its path — called apogalacticon, a word you gotta love — is a stunning 330,000 light years distant!

That is a long, long way off. (more…)

[I want to start off this article with the conclusion, because the post is somewhat long and I want to avoid at least some of the slings and arrows that will inevitably turn up in the comments. Bottom line: I don't want to see JWST canceled, but neither do I want it to hurt other NASA missions. However, the reality of the situation is that unless Congress fully and independently funds JWST, it is very likely it will siphon funds from other missions and could do a lot of damage to them. Both the people supporting and attacking JWST make excellent points, but they also assume that extra money will not be found to fund it. I cannot say if that's a good assumption or not, but if it turns out to be true, JWST and NASA are in for an extremely distressing future.]

The James Webb Space Telescope, successor to Hubble, may be reaching the most critical juncture in its life: a vote by a U. S. Senate subcommittee on whether to fund it or not. The House version of the funding bill has the budget for JWST zeroed out. In other words, the House wants to kill it. The Senate has to vote on their version of the budget, and then the two chambers must reconcile the two versions. If the Senate votes to defund JWST, it’s essentially dead. The first version of that process may begin today.

What’s at stake

Here’s the thing: I don’t know how I feel about this.

On the one hand, JWST promises huge, huge science. Every time we’ve built a bigger telescope with new capabilities, we’ve learned things we didn’t even know we didn’t know. Hubble did that in spades, and JWST’s mirror will be far larger — and it will be the most sensitive telescope in the infrared ever built, allowing us to see deeper and more clearly in that wavelength range than ever before. It has and will provide new advances in technology and engineering, and will be a workhorse for science, used by hundreds of researchers for years to come. It will, quite literally, be the Hubble of its age.

On the other hand, cost overruns and mismanagement have been really bad (at the blog Starts With A Bang!, Ethan Siegel argues that this is both NASA’s fault and that of Congress, and I’m inclined to agree). A month or two ago I would’ve argued that this, though, was all behind us, and the cost to launch JWST would be small compared to canceling it. In fact, I did argue exactly this. However, things have changed. As I pointed out recently, an independent committee put together by Senator Barbara Mikluski found that the actual cost to launch JWST and run it for five years adds several billion dollars to the NASA estimate. Again, Ethan Siegel’s post describes this is all-too-painful detail, and the L. A. Times has an OpEd on this as well.

The impact of funding JWST

And there’s the heart of the issue. (more…)

The James Webb Space Telescope is planned to be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It will have a 6.5 meter (21 foot) mirror (Hubble’s is 2.4 meters, or 8 feet), and will look at the Universe in the near- to mid-infrared, where cooler objects like planets, dust clouds, and ancient galaxies glow brightly.

Its fate also hangs by a thread.

Originally planned to cost under a billion dollars and already be launched by now — NASA has currently spent about $3.5B on the mission with a launch date no sooner than 2018 — delays and cost overruns have hit the project hard, prompting the US House of Representatives to axe the budget for JWST, essentially killing the entire project in their proposed 2012 Federal budget. I wrote about this when the news broke, basically saying this was a dumb idea. The JWST cost overruns have been widely claimed to be from administrative mismanagement. Even if true, as Julianne Dalcanton at Cosmic Variance has eloquently argued, those errors are behind us. The components of the telescope are mostly built, being tested now, and it would make more sense to spend the money it’ll take to assemble and launch the ‘scope than to cancel the project and throw away the investment already made.

Now two bits of news have come up which confuse the issue.

One is that, according to Aviation Week, a cost analysis ordered by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) shows that the current price tag of the telescope will actually be $8.7 billion, an increase of more than $3B over an earlier NASA estimate.

Ouch. Bluntly put, that’s a huge blow to any campaign to save the telescope, and will make convincing this current Congress to fund the mission once again much, much harder.

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