Space images thread

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NGC 4394 is the archetypal barred spiral galaxy situated ~ 55 million ly from us. The galaxy lies in the constellation of Coma Berenices, and is considered to be a member of the Virgo Cluster.

Gravitational interaction with a nearby neighbor has caused gas to flow into the galaxy's central region, providing a new reservoir of material to fuel the black hole or to make new stars.

 

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Irregular galaxy NGC 55. The galaxy is ~ 7.5 million ly away and 70000 ly across.

 

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The center of our Galaxy, as seen in the radio​

As we zoom into the very core of the Galactic Center, our field of view shrinks to a mere 5 arcseconds (one thousandth of a degree). At radio wavelengths, the brightest feature of this region is the point-like radio source Sagittarius A*. This source is a compact object, and ~1 AU in size. Astronomers have seen pulsation of Sgr A* in the near-infrared, which they attribute to this radio source flaring.

Zoom Into the Center of Our Galaxy
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New video by Hubble watch or download 720p

 

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The RGB image of Abell 665 merging galaxy cluster. Red color shows optical radiation, green shows radio and blue shows X-ray emission.

The shock to the north of this cluster is second in strength only to the Bullet Cluster shock. Shocks provide unique opportunities to study high-energy phenomena in the intra-cluster medium - the hot plasma between galaxies.

The shock is traveling with an astonishing speed of 2700 km/s, ~ 3 times the local speed of sound in the cluster. By comparison, NASA's Juno spacecraft in 2013 became the fastest man-made object when it was slingshot around Earth toward Jupiter at a relatively pedantic 40 km/s.

 

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Galaxy NGC 128 is viewed with its disc in an edge-on orientation in this SDSS false-color image. A peanut shell-shaped bulge can be seen around the thin disc. Its inner peanut shell is 5 times smaller.

A zoom-in with the Hubble Space Telescope into the core of NGC 2549 reveals the inner peanut shell-shaped structure in this galaxy. Its outer peanut shell is 3 times bigger.

 

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M101: The Pinwheel Galaxy

This image was made from observations by all four infrared detectors aboard WISE. Blue and cyan (blue-green) represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is primarily light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is primarily light from warm dust.

 

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A cluster of newborn bright young stars in a rosebud-shaped (and rose-colored) nebulosity known as NGC 7129.

The star cluster and its associated nebula are located at a distance of 3300 ly in the constellation Cepheus.
A recent census of the cluster reveals the presence of 130 young stars. The stars formed from a massive cloud of gas and dust that contains enough raw materials to create a thousand Sun-like stars. In a process that astronomers still poorly understand, fragments of this molecular cloud became so cold and dense that they collapsed into stars.

Astronomers believe that our own Sun may have formed billions of years ago in a cluster similar to NGC 7129. Once the radiation from new cluster stars destroys the surrounding placental material, the stars begin to slowly drift apart.

 

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Face-on spiral Seyfert galaxy NGC 6814.

As NGC 6814 is a very active galaxy, many regions of ionized gas are studded along its spiral arms. In these large clouds of gas, a burst of star formation has recently taken place, forging the brilliant blue stars that are visible scattered throughout the galaxy.

 

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This region is a site of active star formation, with new massive stars being born within the glowing clouds of gas and dust, as revealed by the Spitzer infrared telescope (red and green). XMM-Newton telescope shows that extended X-ray emission (blue) traces the stellar cradles. This X-ray emission is explained by the interaction between accelerated particles and magnetic fields present in ON 2.

 

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When the star that created this supernova remnant exploded in 1572, it was so bright that it was visible during the day. And though he wasn't the first or only person to observe this stellar spectacle, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe wrote a book about his extensive observations of the event, gaining the honor of it being named after him.

Tycho's supernova remnant was created by the explosion of a white dwarf star, making it part of the so-called Type Ia class of supernovae used to track the expansion of the Universe. The expansion from the explosion is still continuing ~ 450 years later, as seen from Earth's vantage point roughly 10000 ly away.

Since much of the material being flung out from the shattered star has been heated by shock waves - similar to sonic booms from supersonic planes - passing through it, the remnant glows strongly in X-ray light.

For the first time, a movie has been made of the evolution of Tycho's supernova remnant. This sequence includes X-ray observations from Chandra spaced out over a decade and a half.

The speed of the blast wave in the right and lower right directions is about twice as large as that in the left and the upper left directions. This range in speed of the blast wave's outward motion is caused by differences in the density of gas surrounding the supernova remnant. This causes an offset in position of the explosion site from the geometric center, determined by locating the center of the circular remnant. The size of the offset is ~ 10% of the remnant's current radius, towards the upper left of the geometric center. The maximum speed of the blast wave is ~ 12 million miles per hour.

The significant offset from the center of the explosion to the remnant's geometric center is a relatively recent phenomenon. For the first few hundred years of the remnant, the explosion's shock was so powerful that the density of gas it was running into did not affect its motion. The density discrepancy from the left side to the right has increased as the shock moved outwards, causing the offset in position between the explosion center and the geometric center to grow with time. So, if future X-ray astronomers, say 1000 years from now, do the same observation, they should find a much larger offset.

 

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The maximum speed of the blast wave is ~ 12 million miles per hour.

holy crap

 

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Vela ring galaxy is a bright core surrounded by a baby blue halo. Ring galaxies are created when larger galaxies are punctured by a smaller galactic aggressor, which, passing through the heart of its more sizeable victim, triggers a shock wave that spreads outwards. This pushes gas to the galaxy's periphery, where it begins to collapse and form new stars. Vela ring galaxy is unusual in that it actually exhibits at least two rings, suggesting that the collision was not a recent one.

 

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Image shows globular clusters encircling an edge-on lenticular galaxy NGC 5308, like bees buzzing around a hive. NGC 5308 is located < 100 million ly away in the constellation of Ursa Major.

 

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Birthplace of the suns: The integral-shaped filament, the two star clusters above the filament, and cloud L1641 in the south can be seen on these images of the Orion A star formation region. The picture on the left shows a density map compiled with data from the Herschel space telescope, the one on the right an infrared image taken by the WISE space telescope. The photo in the center is a combination of both images.

The observed positions of the star clusters suggest that the integral-shaped filament originally extended much further towards the north than it does today. Over millions of years, one star cluster after another seems to have formed, starting from the north. And each finished star cluster has scattered the gas-dust mixture surrounding it as time has passed.

This is why we now see three star clusters in and around the filament: the oldest cluster is furthest away from the northern tip of the filament; the second one is closer and is still surrounded by filament remnants; the third one, in the center of the integral-shaped filament, is just in the process of growing.

The interaction of magnetic fields and gravity allows certain types of instabilities, some of which are familiar from plasma physics, and which could lead to the formation of one star cluster after another. This hypothesis is based on observational data for the integral-shaped filament. It is not a mature model for a new mode of star formation, however. Theoreticians have first to carry out appropriate simulations and astronomers have to make further observations.

Only when this preparatory work is complete will it be clear whether the molecular cloud in Orion represents a special case. Or whether the birth of star clusters in a medley of magnetically trapped filaments is the usual route to forming whole clusters of new stars in space within a short period.

 

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LHA 120-N55 (aka N55) is an emission nebula situated inside a superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud .

The intense light from the powerful, blue-white stars is stripping nearby hydrogen atoms in N55 of their electrons, causing the gas to glow in a characteristic pinkish colour in visible light. Astronomers recognise this telltale signature of glowing hydrogen gas throughout galaxies as a hallmark of fresh star birth.

While things seem quiet in the star-forming region of N55 for now, major changes lie ahead. Several million years hence, some of the massive and brilliant stars will go supernova, scattering N55's contents.

 

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Astronomers have been able to detect carbon monoxide (CO) in the disc of debris around an F-type star named HD 181327. The star is a member of the Beta Pictoris moving group, located ~ 170 ly from us. The CO gas is found to be co-located with the dust grains in the ring of debris and to have been produced recently.

Source

MACS J1149.5+2223 is a galaxy cluster located ~ 5 billion ly away. Galaxy clusters have a tremendous impact on their surroundings, with their immense gravity warping and amplifying the light from more distant objects.

Source

 

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Situated 8000 ly away in the constellation Vulpecula (Little Fox) the region in the image is known as Vulpecula OB1. It is a stellar association in which a batch of truly giant OB stars is being born. The vast quantities of ultraviolet and other radiation emitted by these stars is compressing the surrounding cloud, causing nearby regions of dust and gas to begin the collapse into more new stars.

Source

 

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• Evidence that some early supermassive black holes formed directly from the collapse of a gas cloud has been found.

• These results could represent a major step in the understanding of how the Universe's first giant black holes formed.

• Two candidate black hole "seeds" have been identified, possibly at < 1 billion years after the Big Bang.

• Astronomers combined data from Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer to make this discovery.

 

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Astronomers have uncovered evidence for a vast collection of young galaxies 12 billion ly away in the constellation of Bootes. The newly discovered “proto-cluster” of galaxies, observed when the Universe was only 1.7 billion years old (12% of its present age), is one of the most massive structures known at that distance.

Green circles identify the confirmed cluster members. Density contours (white lines) emphasize the concentration of member galaxies toward the center of the image. The cluster galaxies are typically very faint, about 10 million times fainter than the faintest stars visible to the naked eye on a dark night.

The inset images highlight two example members that glow in the Ly-α line of atomic hydrogen.

The protocluster is massive, with its core weighing as much as a quadrillion suns. The protocluster is likely to evolve, over 12 billion years, into a system much like the nearby Coma cluster of galaxies, shown in the image below.

 

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ALMA image of the dust disk around HL Tauri

 

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10.5-billion-year-old globular cluster NGC 6496 is home to high-metallicity stars. The cluster resides at ~ 35 000 ly away in the southern constellation of Scorpius.

 

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The golden veil of light cloaks a young stellar object IRAS 14568-6304.

Stars are born deep in dense clouds of dust and gas. This particular cloud is known as the Circinus molecular cloud complex. It's 2280 ly away and stretches across 180 ly of space. If our eyes could register the faint infrared glow of the gas in the cloud, it would stretch across our sky > 70 times the size of the full Moon. It contains enough gas to make 250 000 stars like the Sun.

 

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Mercury and ISS transit the Sun

 

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9 dwarf galaxies in orbit around the Milky Way. Perhaps they were once part of a gigantic group of galaxies that – along with the Magellanic Clouds – are falling into our Milky Way galaxy.

 

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The drizzle of stars scattered across this image forms an irregular isolated galaxy known as UGC 4879.

This galaxy's isolation means that it hasn't interacted with any surrounding galaxies, making it an ideal laboratory for studying star formation uncomplicated by interactions with other galaxies. Studies of UGC 4879 have revealed a significant amount of star formation in the first 4-billion-years after the Big Bang, followed by a strange 9-billion-year lull in star formation, ended 1-billion-years ago by a more recent reignition. The reason for this behavior remains mysterious.


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Astronomers have spotted Canarias Einstein ring — an image of a far-off galaxy lensed by gravity — in the vicinity of the Sculptor dwarf galaxy.