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heso

heso 2785

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stsci-h-p1821a-m-1699x2000.png

This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, celebrates the Earth-orbiting observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary stellar tapestry of birth and destruction. At the center of this image is a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun that is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust.

This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away, visible in binoculars as merely a smudge of light with a bright core.

The giant star, called Herschel 36, is bursting out of its natal cocoon of material, unleashing blistering radiation and torrential stellar winds, which are streams of subatomic particles, that push dust away in curtain-like sheets. This action resembles the Sun bursting through the clouds at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm.

Herschel 36’s violent activity has blasted holes in the bubble-shaped cloud, allowing astronomers to study this action-packed stellar breeding ground. The hefty star is 32 times more massive than our Sun and its temperature is 40,000 degrees kelvin; it is nearly nine times our Sun’s diameter. Herschel 36 is still very active because it is young by a star’s standards, only 1 million years old. Based on its mass, it will live for another 5 million years. In comparison, our smaller Sun is 5 billion years old and will live another 5 billion years.

The image shows a region of the nebula measuring about 4 light-years across.

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HOOK'EMHOOAH

HOOK'EMHOOAH 1610

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The visuals we receive from our current array of satellites are awe truly inspiring; however, they are but a sliver of the entirety of all there is to behold when compared to what we cannot see or even comprehend and what we have yet to discover in the vast expanse of the cosmos. We are lucky to live in an age where technology affords us an opportunity to discover the oldest questions of our species and ask new questions. We have front row tickets to a frontier our ancestors never could've dreamed possible. In the coming years and decades, our scientists will develop new and better ways of detecting that which our natural senses can not further expanding our ability to augment ourselves beyond what evolution has afforded us. Now is the time to lean further into the fold in pursuit of the answer; the ultimate answer - to life, the universe, and everything.

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Doc Holliday

Doc Holliday 199

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I was watching a documentary on the formation of our solar system last night, title unknown at the moment.  I gleaned a couple of new tidbits.   Jupiter caused all sorts of chaos in the early stages of formation, was on a crash course with the Sun, until Saturn popped up and stabilized it's rotation around the sun. 

The second, more interesting piece, is again the topic of the mystery planet that created the chaos that helped form our planet by sending ice and rock asteroids crashing into the near sun orbits.  They eventually caused many of the impact craters on the moon, mars, and earth.   The hypothesis was that this planet was impacted by Jupiter's gravitational pull so much so that 10 billion years ago it was sent out into deep space at 1 kilometer/second never to be seen again and with no way to track it down. 

I think it could be feasible and at this point without extraordinary evidence have to say I doubt it. 

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miguelito

miguelito 11250

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https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t50.2886-16/161208013_769996400291364_4659234622889616471_n.mp4?_nc_ht=scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=100&_nc_ohc=FudO65n-2NsAX_GlJ-S&ccb=7-4&oe=6063E3B8&oh=cd4ea8a933c7b2347288e0eb534092fb&_nc_sid=74f7ba

 

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CMe21-TDRLr/

 

^Both links are the same thing, looks like neither will embed, though.

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bolverk

bolverk 29644

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An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way
A new radio-wave image of the center of our galaxy reveals all the forms of frenzy that a hundred million or so stars can get up to.

merlin_200918067_b51c4e5a-333d-4f98-afd8-4a640f65e23a-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp

Electrical storms light up the center of the Milky Way galaxy. A new radio image reveals supernova remnants, threads of energy and other features both new and known.

Jan. 31, 2022
Noise and chaos reign at the heart of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, or so it appears in an astonishing image captured recently by astronomers in South Africa.

The image, taken by the MeerKAT radio telescope, an array of 64 antennas spread across five miles of desert in northern South Africa, reveals a storm of activity in the central region of the Milky Way, with threads of radio emission laced and kinked through space among bubbles of energy. At the very center Sagittarius A*, a well-studied supermassive black hole, emits its own exuberant buzz.

We are accustomed to seeing galaxies, from afar, as soft, glowing eggs of light or as majestic, bejeweled whirlpools. Rarely do we glimpse the roiling beneath the clouds — all the forms of frenzy that a hundred million or so stars can get up to.

The image was captured and analyzed by a team of astronomers led by Ian Heywood of Oxford University and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory. They published their results last week in the Astrophysical Journal.

MeerKAT is a precursor to the Square Kilometre Array, an immense set of antennas planned for construction in South Africa and Australia in the coming decade. When completed, it will be the most powerful radio telescope on Earth for the foreseeable future.

To visible-light telescopes, large sections of the Milky Way sky are rendered black by intervening clouds of cosmic dust. But radio waves pass right through, enabling MeerKAT to get up-close and personal.

“The best telescopes expand our horizons in unexpected ways,” Fernando Camilo, chief scientist at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory and one of many co-authors of the new paper, said in a news release.

A close-up from a new image of the Milky Way.

A close-up from a new image of the Milky Way.

Another close-up shows a cloud known as G359.1-0.5, the glowing remains of a supernova explosion. To its left, the Mouse, a runaway pulsar possibly formed and ejected by the supernova. To its right, a radio-wave-emitting filament known as the Snake.

Another close-up shows a cloud known as G359.1-0.5, the glowing remains of a supernova explosion. To its left, the Mouse, a runaway pulsar possibly formed and ejected by the supernova. To its right, a radio-wave-emitting filament known as the Snake.

Twenty separate observations, generating 70 terabytes of data and requiring three years of processing, were needed to produce the image. The result is a panorama 1,000 light-years wide and 600 light-years high of the central regions of the Milky Way. (The entire galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter, and its center is 25,000 light-years from Earth.)

The Milky Way’s disc, where most of the stars and exoplanets reside, appears in the image as a ragged horizontal streak. A dense blob of energy in the middle of the streak marks the spot where lurks a black hole four million times as massive as our sun. The surrounding region is filled with mysterious glowing filaments as much as 100 light-years long.

Astronomers have surmised that such filaments, first recognized 35 years ago, are formed by magnetized tubes of gas and high-energy particles. But scientists still don’t understand how these arose. The new paper, the study’s authors claim, assembled enough new examples of such features to study their properties and varieties as a group for the first time.

Emanating vertically above and below the galactic disc are a matched pair of gigantic radio bubbles, probably the remains of a series of supernova explosions that occurred several million years ago. In the background, the radio image is speckled with the bright dots of supermassive black holes in faraway galaxies.

“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this image in the process of working on it, and I never get tired of it,” Dr. Heywood said.

Dr. Camilo concurred that the galaxy’s innards resembled an electrical storm. “Electrical activity is of course very much crucial to our living animal hearts,” he added. “I suppose you could say that without electrical activity the center/heart of the galaxy, if not dead, would look very, very different.”

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miguelito

miguelito 11250

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Solar eclipse from Mars, featuring Phobos:

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CcoH5p_M-Yt/

 

"Our Perseverance Mars rover captured this sped-up video of an eclipse featuring Phobos, one of Mars' two moons. It’s the most zoomed-in, highest-frame-rate observation of a Phobos solar eclipse ever taken from the Martian surface."

 

Pretty cool video at the link, which I can't figure out how to embed.

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miguelito

miguelito 11250

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Direct link to video, sometimes Instagram is a bitch. 

https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t50.2886-16/278959159_1411990905903701_7856706011676029588_n.mp4?_nc_ht=scontent-hou1-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=105&_nc_ohc=lX6NBCR9aqwAX_fyJjo&edm=AABBvjUBAAAA&ccb=7-4&oe=6263CFA8&oh=00_AT8f7GXwQ9yeL-wmGhZ9BCgHFDFQ6ZvzCAJe_4nNHEem-w&_nc_sid=83d603

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