Silicate Crystal Formation in the Disk of an Erupting Star
This artist’s concept illustrates how silicate crystals like those found in comets can be created by an outburst from a growing star. The image shows a young sun-like star encircled by its planet-forming disk of gas and dust. The silicate that makes up most of the dust would have begun as non-crystallized, amorphous particles.
Streams of material are seen spiraling from the disk onto the star increasing its mass and causing the star to brighten and heat up dramatically. The outburst causes temperatures to rise in the star’s surrounding disk.
The Cool Clouds of Carina
Observations made with the APEX telescope in submillimetre-wavelength light at a wavelength of 870 µm reveal the cold dusty clouds from which stars form in the Carina Nebula. This site of violent star formation, which plays host to some of the highest-mass stars in our galaxy, is an ideal arena in which to study the interactions between these young stars and their parent molecular clouds.
The APEX observations, made with its LABOCA camera, are shown here in orange tones, combined with a visible light image from the Curtis Schmidt telescope at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. The result is a dramatic, wide-field picture that provides a spectacular view of Carina’s star formation sites. The nebula contains stars equivalent to over 25 000 Suns, and the total mass of gas and dust clouds is that of about 140 000 Suns.
Credit: ESO/APEX/T. Preibisch et al. (Submillimetre); N. Smith, University of Minnesota/NOAO/AURA/NSF (Optical)
VLT Observations of Gamma-ray Burst Reveal Surprising Ingredients of Early Galaxies
This artist’s impression shows two galaxies in the early Universe. The brilliant explosion on the left is a gamma-ray burst. The light from the burst travels through both galaxies on its way to Earth (outside the frame to the right). Analysis of observations of the light from this gamma-ray burst made using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have shown that these two galaxies are remarkably rich in heavier chemical elements.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
Antennae Galaxies composite of ALMA and Hubble observations
The Antennae Galaxies (also known as NGC 4038 and 4039) are a pair of distorted colliding spiral galaxies about 70 million light-years away, in the constellation of Corvus (The Crow). This view combines ALMA observations, made in three different wavelength ranges during the observatory’s early testing phase, with visible-light observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The Hubble image is the sharpest view of this object ever taken and serves as the ultimate benchmark in terms of resolution. ALMA observes at much longer wavelengths which makes it much harder to obtain comparably sharp images. However, when the full ALMA array is completed its vision will be up to ten times sharper than Hubble.
Credit: B. Saxton, (NRAO/AUI/NSF), ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO). Visible light image: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope
The star cluster NGC 2100 in context
This image shows the dramatic surroundings of the star cluster NGC 2100 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The picture is dominated by the Tarantula Nebula, the most active star formation region in the Local Group of galaxies that includes the Milky Way. This picture was created from images taken in visible light by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope.
Credit: ESO
The Running Chicken Nebula
This new image from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope shows the Running Chicken Nebula, a cloud of gas and newborn stars that lies around 6500 light-years away from us in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). Officially called IC 2944, or the Lambda Centauri Nebula, its strange nickname comes from the bird-like shape of its brightest region. The star Lambda Centauri itself lies just outside the field of view.
Credit: ESO
Cosmic Exclamation Point
VV 340, also known as Arp 302, provides a textbook example of colliding galaxies seen in the early stages of their interaction. The edge-on galaxy near the top of the image is VV 340 North and the face-on galaxy at the bottom of the image is VV 340 South. Millions of years later these two spirals will merge — much like the Milky Way and Andromeda will likely do billions of years from now. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) are shown here along with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue). VV 340 is located about 450 million light years from Earth.
Credit:
Herschel paints new story of galaxy evolution
A galaxy accretes mass from rapid, narrow streams of cold gas. These filaments provide the galaxy with continuous flows of raw material to feed its star-forming at a rather leisurely pace.
This theoretical scenario for galaxy formation is based on the numerical simulations presented by Dekel et al., 2009 (Nature, 457, 451D). However, the actual process of stream accretion onto a galaxy has never been directly observed and it remains speculative.
Credits: ESA–AOES Medialab
(Source: esa.int)
Into the Depths of the Lagoon Nebula
Swirling dust clouds and bright newborn stars dominate the view in this image of the Lagoon nebula from NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope. Also known as Messier 8 and NGC 6523, astronomers estimate it to be between 4000 and 6000 light years away, lying in the general direction of the center of our galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius.
The Lagoon nebula was first noted by the astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil in 1747, and a few decades later became the 8th entry in Charles Messiers famous catalog of nebulae. It is of particular interest to stargazers as it is only one of two star-forming nebulae that can be seen with the naked eye from northern latitudes, appearing as a fuzzy grey patch.
The glowing waters of the Lagoon, as seen in visible light, are really pools of hot gas surrounding the massive, young stars found here. Spitzers infrared vision looks past the gas to show the dusty basin that it fills. Here we see the central regions of the Lagoon with green showing the glow of carbon-based dust grains, and red highlighting the thermal glow of the hottest dust.
The various columns of dust all seem to point inwards towards the central depths of the Lagoon. These structures are being sculpted by the intense glow of giant, young stars found at the nebulas core. Within these clouds of dust and gas, a new generation of stars is forming.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Reflection Nebula NGC 1999
This wide-field panorama of star formation was captured with the National Science Foundation’s Mayall 4-meter telescope on Kitt Peak. Located in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter), the image show a portion of one of Orion’s giant molecular clouds (known as “Orion A”) where new stars are forming.
The bright object in the bottom-left corner is the reflection nebula NGC 1999, which contains the young star V380 Orionis. A small, triangle shaped patch of dusty material is seen in silhouette against the reflection nebula. NGC 1999 lies at the center of a network of nebulous filaments which billow out and away like the spokes of a bicycle wheel.
Many other smaller nebulous patches in this image mark small reflection nebulae, Herbig-Haro objects, and stellar jets. The rich detail in this image reveals one of the most fascinating areas of the night sky.
Credit: STScI/NOAO/NSF/U. Alaska/NASA
(Source: noao.edu)
Daybreak at Gale Crater
This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light.
Northward is to the left. Gale is the crater with a mound inside it near the center of the image. NASA has selected Gale as the landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. The mission’s rover will be placed on the ground in a northern portion of Gale crater in August 2012.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Feeling the Strain
A galaxy being stretched out of shape has been imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Known as NGC 2146, it has been severely warped and deformed so that an immense dusty arm of glittering material now lies directly in front of the centre of the galaxy, as seen in the image.
NGC 2146 is classified as a barred spiral due to its shape, but the most distinctive feature is the dusty spiral arm that has looped in front of the galaxy’s core as seen from our perspective. The forces required to pull this structure out of its natural shape and twist it up to 45 degrees are colossal. The most likely explanation is that a neighbouring galaxy is gravitationally perturbing it and distorting the orbits of many of NGC 2146’s stars. It is probable that we are currently witnessing the end stages of a process which has been occurring for tens of millions of years.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
VLT Looks into The Eyes of the Virgin
The Eyes are about 50 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin) and are some 100 000 light-years apart. The nickname comes from the apparent similarity between the cores of this pair of galaxies — two white ovals that resemble a pair of eyes glowing in the dark when seen in a moderate-sized telescope.
But although the centres of these two galaxies look similar, their outskirts could not be more different. The galaxy in the lower right, known as NGC 4435, is compact and seems to be almost devoid of gas and dust. In contrast, in the large galaxy in the upper left (NGC 4438) a lane of obscuring dust is visible just below its nucleus, young stars can be seen left of its centre, and gas extends at least up to the edges of the image.
Credit: ESO/Gems project
Vesta Sizes Up
This composite image shows the comparative sizes of nine asteroids. Up until now, Lutetia, with a diameter of 81 miles (130 kilometers), was the largest asteroid visited by a spacecraft, which occurred during a flyby. Vesta dwarfs all other small bodies in this image.
Asteroid Vesta also is considered a protoplanet because it’s a large body that almost became a planet and has a diameter of approximately 330 miles (530 kilometers).
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JAXA/ESA
Hubble view of Supernova 1987A
This colour-composite image shows the remnant of the famous supernova 1987A as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. SN1987A resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way, and it was first observed from Earth 24 years ago. At a distance of only 160,000 light years, this backyard supernova has become a ‘local’ laboratory for close-up studies of stellar demise.
The image shows the remnant of the supernova surrounded by rings of material that were ejected before the explosion and, on a larger scale, by diffuse clouds of gas.
Copyright: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/NASA/ESA)
