Extraterrestrial Fireworks

In the nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, a massive star has exploded as a supernova, and begun to dissipate its interior into a spectacular display of colorful filaments.

The supernova remnant (SNR), known as “E0102” for short, is the greenish-blue shell of debris just below the center of the Hubble image. Its name is derived from its cataloged placement (or coordinates) in the celestial sphere. More formally known as 1E0102.2-7219, it is located almost 50 light-years (15 parsecs) away from of the edge of the massive star-forming region, N 76, also known as Henize 1956 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This delicate structure glowing a multitude of lavenders and peach hues, resides in the upper right of the image.

The composition and thus, the coloring, of the diffuse remnant in comparison to its star-forming neighbor is due to the presence of very large quantities of oxygen compared to hydrogen. E0102 is a member of the oxygen-rich class of SNRs showing strong oxygen and other more metal-like abundances in its optical and X-ray spectra, and an absence of hydrogen and helium. N 76 in contrast is made up primarily of glowing hydrogen emission.

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Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)

A Hidden Population of Exotic Neutron Stars

A magnetar called SGR 0418+5729 (SGR 0418 for short) has been shown to have the lowest surface magnetic field ever found for this type of neutron star.

This graphic shows an exotic object in our galaxy called SGR 0418+5729 (SGR 0418 for short). As described in our press release, SGR 0418 is a magnetar, a type of neutron star that has a relatively slow spin rate and generates occasional large blasts of X-rays.

The only plausible source for the energy emitted in these outbursts is the magnetic energy stored in the star. Most magnetars have extremely high magnetic fields on their surface that are ten to a thousand times stronger than for the average neutron star. New data shows that SGR 0418 doesn’t fit that pattern. It has a surface magnetic field similar to that of mainstream neutron stars.

In the image above, data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows SGR 0418 as a pink source in the middle. Optical data from the William Herschel telescope in La Palma and infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are shown in red, green and blue.

Below,  an artist’s impression showing a close-up view of SGR 0418. This illustration highlights the weak surface magnetic field of the magnetar, and the relatively strong, wound-up magnetic field lurking in the hotter interior of the star. The X-ray emission seen with Chandra comes from a small hot spot, not shown in the illustration. At the end of the outburst this spot has a radius of only about 160 meters, compared with a radius for the whole star of about 12 km.

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Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/CSIC-IEEC/N.Rea et al; Optical: Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, La Palma/WHT; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Hubble reveals the Ring Nebula’s true shape

In this composite image, visible-light observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are combined with infrared data from the ground-based Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona to assemble a dramatic view of the well-known Ring Nebula.

The Ring Nebula’s distinctive shape makes it a popular illustration for astronomy books. But new observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of the glowing gas shroud around an old, dying, sun-like star reveal a new twist.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, C.R. Robert O’Dell (Vanderbilt University), G.J. Ferland (University of Kentucky), W.J. Henney and M. Peimbert (National Autonomous University of Mexico)

This “lightbulb” Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) shows the three classical parts of a CME: leading edge, void, and core. In coronagraph images, direct sunlight is blocked by an occulter, revealing the surrounding faint corona. The approximate size of the Sun is represented by the white circle. Taken on February 27, 2000 by the LASCO C3 coronagraph.

Credit: SOHO (ESA & NASA)

(Source: nascom.nasa.gov)

The Very Large Telescope Snaps a Stellar Nursery and Celebrates Fifteen Years of Operations

This intriguing new view of a spectacular stellar nursery IC 2944 is being released to celebrate a milestone: 15 years of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. This image also shows a group of thick clouds of dust known as the Thackeray globules silhouetted against the pale pink glowing gas of the nebula. These globules are under fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation from nearby hot young stars. They are both being eroded away and also fragmenting, rather like lumps of butter dropped onto a hot frying pan. It is likely that Thackeray’s globules will be destroyed before they can collapse and form new stars.

Credit: ESO

An Expanding Bubble in Space

A star 40 times more massive than our sun is blowing a giant bubble of material into space. In this colorful picture, the Hubble Telescope captured a glimpse of the expanding bubble, dubbed the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The beefy star [lower center] is embedded in the bright blue bubble. The stellar powerhouse is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space. The dense gas surrounding the star is shaping the castoff material into a bubble. The bubble’s surface is not smooth like a soap bubble’s. Its rippled appearance is due to encounters with gases of different thickness. The nebula is 6 light-years wide and is expanding at 4 million miles per hour (7 million kilometers per hour). The nebula is 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.

Image Credit: NASA, Donald Walter (South Carolina State University), Paul Scowen and Brian Moore (Arizona State University)

Cassini’s Private Eclipse

For this movie, Cassini pointed its cameras toward Dione to witness its distant sibling moon Rhea briefly pass behind in a series of 32 individual frames taken over 17 minutes. Four individual frames from the eclipse are shown at bottom.

Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) is larger than Dione (1,123 kilometers, 698 miles across), but also is farther away as seen here – thus, the two moons appear to be roughly the same angular size.

The view shows principally the anti-Saturn side of Dione, and the Saturn-facing side of far-off Rhea.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Mimas Occults Janus

Icy, impact-riddled Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across) slips briefly in front of the moon Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) in this movie from Cassini.

The movie was created from 37 original images taken over the course of 20 minutes as the spacecraft’s narrow angle camera remained pointed toward Janus. Although Mimas moves a greater distance across the field of view, Janus also moved perceptibly during this time. The images were aligned to keep Janus close to the center of the scene. Additional frames were inserted between the 37 Cassini images in order to smooth the appearance of Mimas’ movement – a scheme called interpolation. Close-up images from the few minutes surrounding the occultation are arranged into a strip along the bottom of the GIF.

The terrain on Mimas seen here is about 80 degrees to the west of that visible in a previously released movie, which showed the little moon appearing to cross Saturn’s ring plane from Cassini’s vantage point. In that previous movie, the rim of the large impact crater Herschel (130 kilometers, 80 miles wide) was visible as a flattening of the moon’s eastern limb. In the new movie, Herschel is almost at dead center.

Contrast on Janus was mildly enhanced to aid the visibility of its surface. The right side of Mimas appears bright because the moon was partly overexposed in this image sequence.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Deep Space Station 35 Being Installed

An animation, captured from a live webcam, of the Deep Space Station (DSS) 35 antenna being installed  in Canberra, Australia. Located at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, the 125 tonne parabolic dish was lifted into position on top of the antenna base structure for our newest antenna, Deep Space Station 35. Several webcams caught the action.

The Canberra DSN on Youtube

NASA / Assembled by Bill Dunford

A Burning Candle In Zero-Gravity

Barnard Stares at NGC 2170 

A gaze across a cosmic skyscape, this telescopic mosaic reveals the continuous beauty of things that are. The evocative scene spans some 6 degrees or 12 Full Moons in planet Earth’s sky. Above, folds of red, glowing gas are a small part of an immense, 300 light-year wide arc. Known as Barnard’s loop, the structure is too faint to be seen with the eye, shaped by long gone supernova explosions and the winds from massive stars, and still traced by the light of hydrogen atoms. Barnard’s loop lies about 1,500 light-years away roughly centered on the Great Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery along the edge of Orion’s molecular clouds. But beyond lie other fertile star fields in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Below, the long-exposure composite finds NGC 2170, a dusty complex of nebulae near a neighboring molecular cloud some 2,400 light-years distant.

Image Credit & Copyright: John Davis

Orion’s Hidden Fiery Ribbon

This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. The orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. It was observed by the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile.

In this image, the submillimetre-wavelength glow of the dust clouds is overlaid on a view of the region in the more familiar visible light, from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The large bright cloud in the upper right of the image is the well-known Orion Nebula, also called Messier 42.

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Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

Skylab: America’s First Home in Space Launched 40 Years Ago Today

With all the futuristic talk today about missions to Mars, lunar bases and asteroid mining, it’s easy to forget that man has already been living off of the planet on and off for decades. Forty years ago today, Skylab — America’s first outpost in space — was launched. The three-man orbiting laboratory was designed to conduct scientific experiments in space, such as studies of the effects of weightlessness on man and other living organisms, and observations of the sun.

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T Tauri and Hind’s Variable Nebula

The orange star centered in this remarkable telescopic skyview is T Tauri, prototype of the class of T Tauri variable stars. Nearby it is a dusty yellow cosmic cloud historically known as Hind’s Variable Nebula (NGC 1555/1554). Over 400 light-years away, at the edge of a molecular cloud, both star and nebula are seen to vary significantly in brightness but not necessarily at the same time, adding to the mystery of the intriguing region. T Tauri stars are now generally recognized as young (less than a few million years old), sun-like stars still in the early stages of formation. To further complicate the picture, infrared observations indicate that T Tauri itself is part of a multiple system and suggest that the associated Hind’s Nebula may also contain a very young stellar object. The dramatic color image spans about 4 light-years at the estimated distance of T Tauri.

Credit & Copyright: Don Goldman