Tag: Astronomy

Hypersonic superheated rainbow outflows from a dying star – NGC 6302 from Hubble

This image was featured as NASA’s astronomy picture of the day on 11/21/2022: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap221121.html The spectacular planetary nebula NGC 6302 lies roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. More popularly known as the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula, this celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But what resemble dainty wings are actually roiling regions of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to […]

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Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300 from Hubble

The Hubble telescope captured a display of starlight, glowing gas, and silhouetted dark clouds of interstellar dust in this 4-foot-by-8-foot image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300. NGC 1300 is considered to be prototypical of barred spiral galaxies. Barred spirals differ from normal spiral galaxies in that the arms of the galaxy do not spiral all the way into the center, but are connected to the two ends of a straight bar of stars containing the nucleus at its center. At Hubble’s resolution, a myriad of […]

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Outflows and shockwaves in the the crab nebula – Hubble’s view over the course of 1260 days!

Normally, space is portrayed as static. With objects thousands of light years across, and tens of thousands of parsecs away, what change could we possibly see from earth? Yet in this video of the crab nebula, we see a dynamic object expanding, rife with shockwaves and speeding outflows. Over the course of 1260 days (3.5 years), we can see the gas in the nebula expand at a blistering pace by about 163,296,000,000 kilometers, or about 0.017 light years. So what’s causing these outflows? At the center of […]

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Hubble’s view of the dusty spiral galaxy M66

The big and beautiful spiral galaxy messier 66 is perhaps one of the most dusty and exciting galaxies to explore. With the recent PHANGS-HST proposal, this galaxy was observed in the ultraviolet, visable, and near-infrared wavelegnths in a way that makes this island universe much easier to understand. First, shining brightly in the infrared are the young star clusters, shown in the image below as blue. Then, in the visible light spectrum, the dust lanes cascading over the stars come into sharp relief. Finally, in the infrared, […]

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A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies – ARP 143 from Hubble

A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-birthing frenzy, as captured in a new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The interacting galaxy duo is collectively called Arp 143. The pair contains the glittery, distorted, star-forming spiral galaxy NGC 2445 at right, along with its less flashy companion, NGC 2444 at left. Astronomers suggest that the galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped star-formation firestorm in NGC 2445, where thousands of stars are bursting to life on the right-hand side of […]

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NGC 2276 from Hubble

The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left. In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy’s normal fried-egg appearance. […]

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Hickson Compact Group 40 from Hubble

NASA is celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called The Hickson Compact Group 40. This menagerie includes three spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular (lens-like) galaxy. Somehow, these different galaxies crossed paths in their evolution to create an exceptionally crowded and eclectic galaxy sampler. Caught in a leisurely gravitational dance, the whole group is so crowded that it could fit within a region of space that is less than twice the diameter […]

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A luminous M101 with outer spiral arms

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier’s famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse’s large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. M101 shares this modern telescopic field of view with more distant background galaxies, foreground stars within the Milky Way, and a companion dwarf galaxy NGC […]

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The dim and detailed jellyfish: A 112-hour collaboration from three continents!

The jellyfish nebula is a notoriously dim object in the night sky. As a result, most images of this nebula are highly denoised, leading to a loss of detail. But by combining nearly 1000 exposures and 6740 minutes of exposure from collaborators across three continents for a total integration time of 112.4 hours, we were able to reveal structures and detail previously not displayed by previous images.  In this image, channels are mapped in the classic Hubble palette, where ionized sulfur is represented by red, ionized hydrogen […]

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Nebulosity in the Auriga Region

This image showcases much of the nebulosity in the Auriga region in its natural colors. On the left is the flaming star nebula, an emission-reflection nebulae ionized by the star at its core. The blue parts are reflection, and the red parts are emission. At top center lies the tadpole nebula, a strong emission nebula. On the left are the spider and fly nebulae, two complex regions, of dark nebula, dust, emission nebulae, and reflection nebulae. Below theses two nebula is an open star cluster. Scroll down […]

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