Space images thread

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NGC 6339 barred spiral galaxy at the left. Above NGC 6339 the edge on galaxy PGC 60007 can be found. The giant elliptical galaxy at the right half of the image is NGC 6343.

 

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Galaxy M94 lies in the small northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs, ~ 16 million ly away. Within the bright ring around M94 new stars are forming at a high rate.

The cause of this peculiarly shaped star-forming region is likely a pressure wave going outwards from the galactic center, compressing the gas and dust in the outer region. The compression of material means the gas starts to collapse into denser clouds. Inside these dense clouds, gravity pulls the gas and dust together until temperature and pressure are high enough for stars to be born.

The open cluster M29

 

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Dwarf galaxy NGC 4214 may be small, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in content. It's packed with everything an astronomer could ask for, from hot, young star-forming regions to old clusters with red supergiants. Located ~ 10 million ly away in the constellation of Canes Venatici, the galaxy contains a large amount of gas, some of which can be seen glowing red in the image, providing abundant material for star formation. The area with the most hydrogen gas, and consequently, the youngest clusters of stars (~2 million years old), lies in the upper part of this image.

A nearby adolescent star named HD 100453 lies >350 ly away in the constellation of Centaurus, and is engulfed by a swirling disc of gas and dust.
Two faint spiral arms can be seen extending from the disc, possibly formed due to the influence of as-yet-unseen planets lurking within.

 

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This view shows part of the very active star-forming region around the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small neighbor of the Milky Way. At the exact center lies the brilliant but isolated star VFTS 682. This brilliant solitary superstar is about 150 times the mass of the Sun.

This view shows part of the Tarantula Nebula. At the center lies the brilliant star VFTS 102. It's around 25 times the mass of the Sun and about one hundred thousand times brighter. It's rotating at > 2 million km/h [> 300 times faster than the Sun] and very close to the point at which it would be torn apart due to centrifugal forces. VFTS 102 is the fastest rotating star known to date.

This image shows VFTS 352 - the hottest and most massive double star system to date where the two components are in contact and sharing ~ 30% of their material. The centers of the stars are separated by just 12 million km. In fact, the stars are so close that their surfaces overlap and a bridge has formed between them. It has a combined mass of ~ 57 times that of the Sun with surface temperatures > 40 000 C.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Spitzer pics?

 

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Nope. VLT.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

Makes them even better then.....ta

 

[dorsetknob]

Starburst galaxy Messier 94
looks like a girly nights out Pavement pizza covered in glitter
what were they drinking ??? Starbursts

 

[Drone]

Yeah it's amazing to have a telescope array in a deadly desert. What we do to understand how the Universe works lol.

These spectacular panoramic views show parts of the Carina Nebula (left), the Eagle Nebula (center) and IC 2944 (right).

The pictures were created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

 

[CAPSLOCKSTUCK]

The best bit is......it just gets better and bigger.

Currently, the largest, ground-based telescope is the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) found in La Palma on the Canary Islands. The aperture of this reflecting telescope reaches a total 10.4 metres (34 feet) in diameter and is currently one of the most advanced in the world. It can be used to explore remote planetary systems, galaxies, nebulas and black holes.

Although GTC is currently the largest, plans for even larger optical telescopes are currently underway. This includes the aptly named European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) planned for the early 2020s. The E-ELT will measure close to 40 metres (131 feet) in diameter and hopes to help us study our universe in more detail than ever before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Telescope


I love this stuff

 

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Starburst galaxy Messier 94
looks like a girly nights out Pavement pizza covered in glitter
what were they drinking ??? Starbursts

Lol that glitter is young stars. NGC 1512 has them too. Even more sexy than M94.

 

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IC348/NGC1333 Region

Great swaths of dust disguise this direction in our galaxy. This great molecular cloud harbors the formation of new solar systems. However, fascination with the field lies not with what is seen, but instead by the intimated hints of activity. Subtle glows of pink and blue do little to cast warmth on a field that shows the structure of the cold interstellar medium.

 

[Drone]

Friday goodness

Small section of the Milky Way mosaic shows the star system Eta Carinae

white dwarf star WD 1145+017 (blue object in the center)

The yellow blob at the center is PGC 43234, a small galaxy in which astronomers witnessed stellar debris being blown away after a supermassive black hole destroyed a star. With PGC 43234 located 290 million ly away from us, it was the closest tidal disruption event to be discovered in the past decade. Studying it with X-ray telescopes, the astronomers could measure, for the first time, the physical properties of a newly formed accretion disc around a black hole.

 

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An elongated cloud of high-energy particles flowing behind the rapidly rotating pulsar, B1957+20 (white point-like source). The pulsar, a.k.a. the "Black Widow" pulsar, is moving through the galaxy at a speed of almost a million km/h. A bow shock wave due to this motion is visible to optical telescopes, shown in this image as the greenish crescent shape. The pressure behind the bow shock creates a second shock wave that sweeps the cloud of high-energy particles back from the pulsar to form the cocoon. Black Widow is 5000 ly away from us and is billion year old. Black Widow is emitting intense high-energy radiation that appears to be destroying a companion star through evaporation. It is one of a class of extremely rapid rotating neutron stars called millisecond pulsars.

The pulsar, named PSR J0357+3205, is located ~ 1600 ly from us. Its very long tail is > 4 ly across. The pulsar is ~ half a million years old, which makes it roughly middle-aged for this type of object.

 

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Panning Through the Milky Way

A pulse of light emanating from the protostellar object LRLL 54361. Most if not all of this light results from scattering off circumstellar dust in the protostellar envelope. An apparent edge-on disk, visible at the center of the object and three separate structures are interpreted as outflow cavities.

The extent and shape of the scattered light changes substantially over a 25.34-day period. This is caused by the propagation of the light pulse through the nebula. Astronomers propose that the flashes are due to material in a circumstellar disk suddenly being dumped onto the growing stars and unleashing a blast of radiation each time the stars get close to each other in their orbit.

 

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NGC 253 is the nearest spiral galaxy with a nuclear starburst. The central region is veiled by large amounts of dust. Considering that NGC 253 has a mass of more than 7 x 10^11 times the mass of our Sun, the IRC [infrared core] is an unexpectedly lightweight core, but which might be growing rapidly as it co-evolves with the violent star-formation process taking place in the galaxy's nuclear region.

The star system is named DI Cha, and while only two stars are apparent, it is actually a quadruple system containing two sets of binary stars.
As this is a relatively young star system it is surrounded by dust. The young stars are moulding the dust into a wispy wrap.

 

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Cygnus OB2 is a star cluster in the Milky Way that contains many hot, massive young stars. Deep observations of Cygnus OB2 have found many stars emitting X-rays.

 

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Visible light view of the central part of the Virgo Cluster. The brightest object is the giant elliptical galaxy M87 (left of center). The image spans approximately 1.2 degrees, or about 2.4 times the apparent diameter of a full moon.

X-ray and optical images of M86 shows gas being swept out of the galaxy to form a long tail > 200000 ly in length. Located in the Virgo galaxy cluster, this enormous elliptical galaxy is moving at ~ 3 million mph through diffuse hot gas that pervades the cluster. The supersonic motion of M86 produces pressure that is stripping gas from the galaxy and forming the spectacular tail.

M86 has been pulled into the Virgo galaxy cluster and accelerated to a high speed by the enormous combined gravity of dark matter, hot gas, and hundreds of galaxies that comprise the cluster. The infall of the galaxy into the cluster is an example of the process by which galaxy groups and galaxy clusters form over the course of billions of years.

The galaxy is no longer an "island universe" with an independent existence. It has been captured and its gas is being swept away to mix with the gas of the cluster, leaving an essentially gas-free galaxy orbiting the center of the cluster along with hundreds of other galaxies.

M86 is an unusual galaxy in that it is one of a small number of galaxies that are moving toward Earth, rather than receding with the general expansion of the Universe. This expansion is carrying the Virgo cluster away from us at a speed of ~ 2 million mph, but M86 is falling into the Virgo cluster from the far side of the cluster, giving it a net velocity of ~ one million mph toward Earth.

 

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X-ray image of the elliptical galaxy NGC 4636 shows spectacular symmetric arms of hot gas extending 25000 ly into a huge cloud of multimillion-degree-Celsius gas that envelopes the galaxy. At a temperature of 10 million degrees, the arms are 30% hotter than the surrounding gas cloud. A galaxy-sized shock wave is racing outward from the center of the galaxy at 700 km/s.

In NGC 4438, the larger galaxy in the lower part of the image, filaments of hot gas have been pulled to the right of the galaxy. The hot gas in the smaller galaxy, NGC 4435 (upper right), is concentrated around its central region. The two galaxies bumped into each other in the relatively recent past, ~ 100 million years ago.
During the encounter between NGC4438 & 4435, gravitational tidal forces tugged at the gas and stars on the outer parts of the galaxies. NGC 4438 was damaged in the collision, but the hot gas will probably fall back into the disk of the galaxy in a few hundred million years. NGC 4435, being less massive than NGC 4438, proved to be less crash worthy and appears to have lost most of its hot gas to intergalactic space.

 

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96 open clusters hidden by the dust in the Milky Way

globular cluster VVV CL001

So many young gas-made hearts pumping in the Galaxy. What the fuck am I doing here? And I say ... *sigh* what can I say.

 

[Drone]

I love Carina

Carina Nebula is a star-forming region in the Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way that is 7500 ly from Earth and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has detected > 14000 stars in the region.

Chandra's X-ray vision provides strong evidence that massive stars have self-destructed in this nearby star-forming region. Firstly, there is an observed deficit of bright X-ray sources in the area known as Trumpler 15, suggesting that some of the massive stars in this cluster were already destroyed in supernova explosions. Trumpler 15 is located in the northern part of the image and is one of ten star clusters in the Carina complex.

The detection of six possible neutron stars, the dense cores often left behind after stars explode in supernovae, provides additional evidence that supernova activity is increasing up in Carina. Previous observations had only detected one neutron star in Carina.

 

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Winnecke 4 is a double star in the constellation of Ursa Major

M12 aka NGC 6218 is a globular cluster in the constellation of Ophiuchus.

M14 aka NGC 6402 is a slightly elliptically shaped stellar swarm, ~ 100 ly across and ~ 30000 ly away.

 

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Peculiar galaxy NGC 660, located ~ 45 million ly away from us.

NGC 660 is classified as a "polar ring galaxy," meaning that it has a belt of gas and stars around its center that it ripped from a near neighbor during a clash about one billion years ago.

Its central bulge is strangely off-kilter and, perhaps more intriguingly, it is thought to harbor exceptionally large amounts of dark matter. In addition, in late 2012 astronomers observed a massive outburst emanating from NGC 660 that was around ten times as bright as a supernova explosion. This burst was thought to be caused by a massive jet shooting out of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

 

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NGC 869/884 Double cluster (aka Caldwell 14)

NGC 869 and NGC 884 are ~ 7500 ly from us. They're approaching Earth at a speed of ~ 39 km/s. There are more than 300 blue-white super-giant stars in each of the clusters.

 

[Drone]

This is a lenticular type S0 galaxy known as Mrk 820. A closer look at the appearance of Mrk 820 reveals hints of a spiral structure embedded in a circular halo of stars. Most of the smears and specks in this image are distant galaxies, but the prominent bright object at the bottom left is a foreground star called TYC 4386-787-1.