[I suppose this post has a PG-13 rating. Not for language or nudity, but for what may be a (humorously) disturbing image for some folks. Be ye fairly warned, says I.]
So the European Southern Observatory took the Very Large Telescope, pointed it at NGC 1929 — a cluster of stars 180,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud — and got this amazing picture:
I was all set to talk about how this huge bubble — over 300 light years across! — is being blown into the gas surrounding the cluster by the combined mighty winds of the stars inside it, young massive stars that live short, violent lives that end in short, violent deaths, and how this will compress the gas further and induce even more star formation, but how in the meantime they’re flooding the gas with powerful ultraviolet radiation that’s lighting up the gas precisely like a neon sign, and how amazingly detailed this image is despite the cluster and gas being in another galaxy at a distance of nearly 2 quintillion kilometers…
Cosmic coincidences always make me smile. The sky is pretty big, so finding two totally unrelated objects close together doesn’t happen often. But it does happen, like in this delightful image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3244 and the star TYC 7713 527-1:
This reminds me of another cosmic photobomb involving a star and a galaxy, but in this one the contrast isn’t quite so severe. The two objects seen here are unrelated; TYC 7713 is in our galaxy, while NGC 3244 is something like 100 million light years away. Maddeningly, I can’t find the distance to the star, so I can’t give you an exact ratio (I know it’s reddish, and a magnitude of about 10.2, but that could mean it’s an orange/red dwarf 100 light years away or a red giant 10,000 light years distant). Still, it’s way way closer to us than the galaxy. A millionth the distance? Maybe.
The galaxy is pretty nice; a nearly perfectly face-on spiral. I noticed it’s a bit lopsided, with one arm poking out a bit. Those clumps along the arm are regions of active star formation, and the dust lanes are clear too. Not bad for a galaxy a mere 2 arcminutes across in size — compare that to the Moon, which is 15 times larger in the sky! In real size, it’s not terribly big as galaxies go: about 25,000 light years across, only a quarter of the size of our galaxy.
In the press release linked above, it says this image was taken "with the help of" Václav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, who was visiting the Very Large Telescope at the time. I wonder what his involvement was — it’s fun to think of the country’s leader using a joystick to swoosh and zoom the ‘scope. Still, it’s very nice indeed to see a major Head of State paying attention to science. Especially when it’s astronomy, and involved such a lovely image.
[UPDATE: Just FYI, I changed the links below to a new version of the video with better audio.]
My love of time lapse night sky shots is on record (see Related Posts below), and I was all set to point you to this simply stunning video that’s been making the web rounds the past couple of days, showing the sky circling above the Very Large Telescope observatory in Chile…
… but then I found out that Youtube user bulletpeople took that video and manipulated it a little. He changed the point of view a teensy bit, just a scosh, so that instead of the sky moving around us in a geocentric fashion, the Earth rotates under the sky:
[Set the resolution to 720p and make it full screen for the best effect.]
How cool is that? I won’t say this frame of reference is more real than our usual everyday geocentric one*, because no frame is more real than any other. But it does give you a little bit of cosmic perspective, doesn’t it?
Don’t ever forget: we live on a tilted spinning ball revolving around a star that’s orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy that’s on the outskirts of the Virgo galaxy cluster that’s part of the Local Supercluster that’s in an expanding Universe that not only gets bigger every second but gets bigger faster every second.
That’s a lot to handle, I know… but it’s real, and it’s true, and it’s awesome.
What a breathtaking panorama! It’s dominated by the Milky Way Galaxy, hanging low near the horizon. We live inside the disk of our galaxy, so we see it from the inside out. It makes a thick line across the sky, the central hub bulging out in the middle. Dust chokes the interstellar view, creating dark lanes that block the light from stars behind them.
On the left you can see the two companion dwarf galaxies to our own: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They apparently hang side-by-side in the sky, but are separated by over 40,000 light years… and are removed from us by distances of 160,000 and 200,000 light years, respectively.
And on the right is our eye on the sky, Unit Telescope 1 of the VLT — and that’s only one of four of the giant 8 meter telescopes in operation. I like the imagery here: the telescope at one end, distant galaxies on the other, and bridging them like a cosmic rainbow is our home galaxy itself.
You may make your own metaphor here, but the one I choose is obvious. You might even say this post is entitled to it.
[Edited to add: After writing this, but before posting it, I found that APOD had a very similar picture to this one. Funny coincidence!]
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:
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…)
Although well over 500 planets orbiting other stars are known to exist — and we know of many, many more awaiting confirmation — direct images of the planets are very rare. That’s because stars are billions of times brighter than planets, and the planets tend to huddle so closely to their star that their feeble light gets overwhelmed.
But it’s possible, and we have several images of such exoplanets. One of them is Beta Pictoris b, a super-Jupiter orbiting the star Beta Pic (as we in the know call it) about as far out as Saturn orbits the Sun. Its existence was confirmed in 2009, but it was also seen in earlier images in 2003 and 2008. The motion of the planet from one side of the star was obvious, and now observations from March 2010 again show it has moved as it orbits the star:
Pretty cool! These infrared images from the Very Large Telescope all have the starlight removed to show the faint planet (the faint rings and other blobs are optical effects and can be ignored). The upper left picture is from 2003; the upper right from 2009 with the planet’s position in 2003 labeled; and the bottom is the new image from 2010 with both previous positions marked. The orbit of Saturn (tilted to the same inclination as Beta Pic b) is shown for comparison. You can see the planet moved a wee bit between 2009 and 2010, just as predicted.
Besides helping nail down the planet’s orbit, the new observations allow astronomers to find that the mass of the planet is between 7 and 11 times that of Jupiter, and the temperature probably between 1100 and 1700°C (2000 to 3100° F). The star is more massive and hotter than the Sun, which is one reason why the planet can be so hot even that far out. (more…)
Galaxies come in a lot of flavors. And even in the major categories (spiral, elliptical) there are sub-flavors… like barred spirals, which are truly cool and weird and awesome. Behold!
Yowza. Click to engalacticate.
That’s NGC 1365, a barred spiral about 60 million light years away in the Fornax cluster, as seen by the HAWK-1 camera on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. HAWK-1 is sensitive to infrared light, from just outside our human eye’s range to wavelengths about four times longer than we can see. Those wavelengths are pretty good (though not perfect) at penetrating dust clouds in galaxies, which block visible light. So mostly what you see in images like this one is light from stars, along with gas clouds. Where you see dark lanes is where the dust is so thick it blocks even the infrared light, too.
The two major spiral arms are obvious enough, as well as some smaller ones (called spurs) too. These are not physical spirals; stars near the center of the galaxy revolve faster around the center than ones farther out, and so if the arms were "real" they’d quickly (well, over a few hundred million years) wind up into a tight little curl. But we see spiral arms in galaxies of all ages, so we know they’re not transient, and must be stable features.
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
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