Not to be confused with Canadian Gum Hubba-Bubba, Hubble has released a great birthday image for it’s 26th birthday. I’m a few days late to celebrate, but it’s still a beautiful image. Known as NGC 7653, the Bubble nebula is 8,000 light years distant in the constellation of Cassiopeia. The reason for this natural bubble shape is that the star just left of center in the image is ionizing a surrounding cloud of Hydrogen with it’s powerful stellar wind. As electrons and protons recombine at the edges of the bubble, they release an infrared photon that can be clearly seen...
Every time we see amazing photos of galaxies or planetary disks, we can see most of the detail since we see them face on. But since the orientation of spiral galaxies in the universe is random, there are a plethora of galaxies ignored by image processors since we just can’t see much of the detail. We can still learn from edge-on spiral galaxies, just not as much as we can from those that are face on. We can see some fascinating dust lanes in the image above, and a ton of detail considering the view, but we don’t know what...
At one point in history, let’s say around 1994, astronomers were fairly confident in their understanding of the formation of planetary systems. Even though at the time we hadn’t found any planets orbiting other stars, they had long been theorized, and we figured that systems would form much like our own solar system. Rocky planets in the interior, gaseous giants further out, and a huge icy debris field at the outer edges. And then along came 51 Pegasi b. Half the mass of Jupiter, it orbits its star in only 4 days, far closer than Mercury. It was considered a...
