After having recently posted an interesting picture of the results of star formation in a nearby galaxy, here’s another example, but far closer: an incredibly detailed image of the heart of the Omega Nebula, where stars are being born from huge clouds of gas and dust:

[Click to ennebulenate, or grab an even bigger version.]

This image was taken using the 8.2 meter Antu telescope, one of four making up the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. What you’re seeing here is the central region of a much larger complex of gas and dust located about 6500 light years away toward the center of our galaxy. The whole thing is about 20 light years across, and perhaps as many as 1000 stars are in the process of being born or were recently formed there.

The red color is due to the presence of warm hydrogen gas, the basic building material of stars. It’s being lit up and is glowing due to very young, massive and hot stars — the alpha dogs, if you will — flooding the nebula with ultraviolet light. The dark material is actually dust, which is opaque in visible light, so it blocks the glow from material behind it.

That dust really caught my eye: some of it is not shapeless and random, but has been sculpted into very long, very thin wisps and tendrils. Most of these are parallel, which is a big clue to what causes them. They are most likely being shaped this way by shock waves; supersonic material blasted out from those same young, hot stars. These powerful stellar winds of subatomic material race out and slam into the surrounding material, compressing it. Waves from various stars can also collide, creating very thin streamers like this. Some are so narrow they’re barely resolved in the picture at all.

(more…)

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…)

At the end of May, 2010, the European Space Agency’s orbiting Herschel telescope was pointed toward a dark cloud in space over 2500 light years away. What it saw may solve a bit of a scientific mystery… and is also truly beautiful:

[Click to ennebulanate.]

This object is called IC5146, and consists of the Cocoon nebula on the left, and two long streamers of gas extending to the right. Herschel is very sensitive to cold dust in the very far infrared; in this image blue shows gas and dust emitting at a wavelength of 70 microns (the reddest color the human eye can see is roughly 0.7 microns), green is 250 microns, and red 500 microns — that’s over 700 times the longest wavelength light the eye can detect.

The Cocoon nebula is a well-known gas cloud being lit up by a massive, hot star in its center. In the visible light image inset here — grab the stunning high-res version to compare to the Herschel shot — the dust is dark, since it absorbs the kind of light we see. Also, stars are pretty faint at these extreme infrared wavelengths, so they don’t interfere with the observations of the gas and dust. That’s why observatories like Herschel are so important: they allow us to investigate objects that might be invisible to other telescopes.

As you can see in the Herschel image, the entire region is interlaced with long, thin filaments of dust. This dust is cold: much of it is only about 15° Celsius above absolute zero, or -430°F! What’s so very interesting is that the filaments, no matter what length they are (and as seen in other parts of the sky by Herschel as well), seem to have about the same width of roughly 0.3 light years across. That argues very strongly that these filaments are formed from turbulence in the dust, probably caused by exploding stars roiling up the matter between stars. That width is just about what you’d expect as shock waves from exploding stars slam into each other, interact, and become turbulent.

(more…)

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.
(more…)

When a human is a baby, it has a mass of a few kilos and eats milk.

When a star is a baby, it has a mass of an octillion tons and eats sandwiches a trillion kilometers across.

Don’t believe me? Well good, because I’m being a little metaphorical. But still, this newly released Hubble image backs me up:

Isn’t that gorgeous? You can get a bigger version, or a huge 3873 x 3943 pixel image. But what is it?

It’s a view of M43, a part of the vast Orion nebula complex, separated a bit from the more famous Orion Nebula. Like its big brother, stars are forming here… and I can show you how I know.
(more…)

[This is a gallery of gorgeous images, my favorites, from the orbiting infrared observatory called the Spitzer Space Telescope. Click the thumbnail picture to get a bigger picture and more information, click the big pictures to go to my original blog posts about the pictures, and scroll through the gallery using the left and right arrows.]

---

A few years back, astronomers discovered that some distant galaxies were blasting out vast amounts of infrared light, but were very faint in visible light, the kind we see. They termed these objects ULIRGs ("you-lurgs"), for Ultra Luminous Infrared Galaxies. The idea is that these galaxies are forming lots of stars, but there was so much dust choking the region that all the visible light was blocked. However, infrared light can pierce through the dust, so telescopes that detect IR can see them. Due to the physics of the situation, astronomers also figured there must be two populations of these galaxies; the ones they had found, and another that was (very) slightly warmer.

Well, they finally found some from that second group:

I know, they don’t look like much, do they? But you have to realize what you’re seeing here: those circled blobs of light are entire galaxies, with billions of stars, and they’re a staggering 11 billion light years away.

That’s really, really far. The Universe is only 13.7 billion years old, so we’re seeing these galaxies as they were just a few billion years after the entire Universe came into being. Not only that, but the amount of infrared light these galaxies are emitting is truly terrifying: in the infrared alone, they are blasting out a solid trillion times the Sun’s entire energy output.

A trillion! 1,000,000,000,000! That’s a whole lot of energy. And it comes from a whole lot of newborn stars, because these galaxies are cranking out stars at a rate 700 times that of our own Milky Way galaxy! The view inside those galaxies must be breathtaking; imagine being surrounded by the Orion Nebula everywhere you look. Wow.

What cracks me up about this too, is how they found them. The European Space Agency is using the orbiting Herschel Infrared Observatory to take a survey of galaxies in the IR. It’s finding a lot of them; in the picture above every dot you see is an infrared source, most likely a galaxy. And that’s a small section of the sky; on the right is an image of a bigger part of the survey. You need to click it and see it full-res to get a sense of how many freaking galaxies there are out there!

As far as astronomical discoveries go, this is another in a long series of steps needed to understand the Universe. I know that in your daily life this may not affect you much; you have other things on your mind, daily stresses and such. But you know what? While I go about my everyday business, in my mind I’m occupied by all the mundane and gross worries of life just like you are, just like everyone else is. But somewhere back there, in some part of my brain, there is knowledge that sits there… and every now and again, it makes itself known.

We can see galaxies a hundred billion trillion kilometers away! We know that stars are being born there, stars like the Sun, and they’re being born every day! If you were there, the sky would be a riot of red and green gas strewn in sheets and ribbons and shock waves and festooned with brilliant jewel-like stars everywhere you looked!

Those wonders are out there, and they’re real. That makes my life better, just knowing that.

Image credit: ESA/SPIRE/HerMES

- Herschel opens its eye
- Herschel eyes the infrared Southern Cross
- Chaos! Turbulence! Blowouts! Herschel!
- Record-breaking galaxy found at the edge of the Universe