Lurking in the depths of a galaxy, hidden from human eyes, lie millions of monsters. They could swallow you up in an instant, sealing you off from the outside world and devouring you atom by atom. This sounds like your typical Hollywood monster movie, but with millions of black holes hidden throughout the galaxy, its more real than you might think. Supermassive black holes, the largest ones that reside at the centers of galaxies, are much easier to see. They are devouring gas and dust rapidly, resulting in bright emission across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially in x-rays. For many galaxies,...
In Canis Major, nearly 12,000 light years from Earth, lies an emission nebula that always makes me think of a particular comic book character. NGC 2359 is 30 light years across, and is colloquially known as Thor’s Helmet. The complex structure of Thor’s helmet consists of bubbles and filaments, and is due to a series of bursts from the massive star HD 56925. This star is a rare Wolf-Rayet star, which consistently expels its outer layers of gas at high velocities, and is characterized by its very high temperature. The blue bubble in the above image is a result of...
After yesterday’s post about some data that has caused us to rethink a theory, I wanted to follow it up today with an even bigger bit of data that could substantially change an even bigger theory. Dark energy was discovered as a large-scale repulsive force in the universe that is responsible for the acceleration of its expansion. It was discovered by looking at type 1a supernovae in distant galaxies. since the supernovae all explode with the same mass limit, they appear to all have the same intrinsic luminosity. If we know how bright they actually are, we can compare them...
The science of Astronomy goes far beyond what humans can see with our eyes. The visible part of the spectrum has taught us so much, but when we look at all photons across the spectrum of light, we find exponentially more powerful methods for discovering the mysteries of the universe. Radio waves, yes the same ones that bring you music in your car, are found throughout the universe in very interesting environments. Radio waves often trace the most powerful objects in the universe, such as super-massive black holes, quasars, and other types of active galactic nuclei. Humans see visible light...
A few years ago, in a desert in Morocco, a very special meteorite was found. A rock unlike anything ever found on Earth, called NWA 7034, or colloquially ‘black beauty.’ Chemical analysis in 2011 found that it originated on Mars, but it was even unlike any other Martian meteorite discovered. The scientific community was extremely excited to determine its properties through a spectroscopic analysis, and today we have some answers that are as amazing as we expected. A new paper detailing spectroscopic results of the meteorite reveal that its composition is the same as the composition of the dark Martian...
The best ever image of a Cometary Globule has been released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama desert in Chile. It looks a lot like a nebula right? In actuality a cometary globule is a very specific type of nebula. It’s very faint, and it’s formation is a matter of debate among the astronomical community. A cometary globule is small, containing the mass of a few suns worth of material. Compare this to a typical nebula, which has enough material to form thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stars. The...
NASA had announced a press conference for yesterday afternoon to reveal amazing findings that would ‘change how we look at galaxies.’ And they did just that, sort of. Findings from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) reveal that there is a huge surplus of Infrared light present in the vast darkness that exists between Galaxies. Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but is emitted by most room temperature objects. It fills the EM spectrum at wavelengths longer than visible light (See yesterday’s post for the EM spectrum). This surplus of light is greater than what we would expect from galaxies...
