When you think of a nebula forming stars, it’s hard to imagine how large it is. Most nebulae form hundreds or even thousands of stars before being blown away by the young stellar winds. Pockets of a nebula collapse into dense regions that will eventually become stars with surrounding planetary systems. There are places in the galaxy we can look and actually see it happening. Pictured above, the beautiful ‘running chicken’ nebula, as strangely named as it is, is in the later stages of it’s star forming life. Many bright young stars have formed and their intense radiation is now...
We just saw it. Another record breaker. This incredible explosion of a massive dying star is the brightest supernova ever observed. You may think you get how big this explosion was, but it was brighter than collective brightness of all the 400 Billion stars in the Milky Way. You may be asking why you can’t see it in the sky. Well even though it is incredibly bright, it is 3.8 Billion light years away in a distant galaxy, so the discovery needed a huge telescope. It may have been powered by a rare star called a magnetar, a star with such an...
Cryovolcano is a cool word, literally and figuratively. You hear about it a lot when talking about solar system moons like Enceladus, and it’s one of those words that would make a heck of a great Hollywood disaster movie title, like ‘Sharknado’ or ‘Armageddon.’ I do not, however, endorse either of those movies, they were both terrible. At any rate, a real cryovolcano seems like an interesting thing. It’s a volcano in the sense that it looks a little like a mountain and spews out material when the pressure builds from beneath the surface, but it’s not your traditional Earth-like volcano...
A newly installed instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) has just taken it’s first images, what we call ‘first light’ in the astronomy world. The instrument, called GRAVITY, uses four different 8m telescopes to perform what we call ‘Baseline Interferometry.’ It is expected that tis is the instrument that will allow humanity to take the first ever direct picture of a black hole. Interferometry is a technique that uses multiple small telescopes all collecting light at a specific wavelength. These telescopes form a line that we call the baseline. The combination of these telescopes and...
We know that galaxies like our Milky Way are far more massive than we can see. The dark matter in the Milky Way makes up 90% of it’s total mass. Another way of saying this is the Mass to Light ratio, comparing the total mass inferred by the rotation speed of the galaxy to the total mass of stars in the galaxy. This ratio, M/L, for the Milky Way, is about 10. But for a galaxy cluster, the M/L ratio is more like 100. Galaxy clusters are not just dense collections of stars and massive galaxies, they are also immense...
Black holes are the most extreme phenomena known in the universe. They are the absolute limit of what gravity and space-time can be twisted into. It’s no surprise that some of the most massive and advanced telescopes in the world are tasked with studying their properties and how they interact with their environment. But maybe there’s a way for you and I to see what a black hole can do, and all we need is a moderate 8 inch telescope and our eyes! Even though black holes generally give off tons of radiation, we need to observe them in the...
In the early universe, there was a huge amount of swirling matter and light that didn’t really have much structure. Compared to today’s much more regular dotting of galaxy clusters and superclusters, the early universe was all over the place. But as will all things, there had to be a first. a first star, a first galaxy, and even a first galaxy cluster. The massive cluster of galaxies known as IDCS J1426.5+3508 is the most distant massive galaxy cluster ever discovered, and it has some interesting properties that point to how it formed and evolved so quickly. One such property is...
As we rang in the new year, we were treated to a special astronomical appearance of Comet C/2013 US10 Catalina, close to the bright star Arcturus in the image below. Also visible near the top is the faint Comet P/19 Borrelly, and between the two comets is a bright meteor that swept through the scene. It’s remarkable to notice the clearly visible tales of Catalina, the blue ion tail sweeping directly away from the Sun due to solar wind pressure, and the dusty white tail marking the path of the comet. The dust is too heavy to be swept away...
After talking about high resolution mapping of Ceres last week, it occurred to me that we have mapped so many distant worlds in our solar system. We have seen moons of Jupiter and Saturn up close, completely mapped Mars, and started mapping Pluto, pushing our boundaries of exploration. But what about our Moon? Sure the Earth-facing side has been seen in high definition. Anyone with a small telescope and a camera can take a great photo of the Moon. But what about the other side of the Moon, the so called dark side? It turns out that the Lunar Reconnaissance...
This is it, my 365th post of 2015. I didn’t post every day, but I produced one post for each and every day. Some days I was on vacation, with family, having adventures, sick, tired, working, or any of a hundred other reasons for not posting. But regardless of the reason, I took the day, got up the next day, and worked extra hard to keep up with it. This is the first time I have ever completed a New Year’s Resolution, and it was certainly an ambitious one. Maybe my writing has improved, and maybe it hasn’t, but 2015...
