Featured Image


Image loading
image of spiral galaxy ngc 3621

Recently Featured Images

These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago. There are several types of supernovae, but for SNR 0519 the star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star — a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life. <br /><br /> SNR 0519 is located over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Because of this, this region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects. <br /><br /> The LMC orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies, the Local Group. SNR 0519 is not alone in the LMC; the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also came across a similar bauble a few years ago in SNR B0509-67.5, a supernova of the same type as SNR 0519 with a strikingly similar appearance. <br /><br /> European Space Agency/NASA Hubble
Hubble Sees the Remains of a Star Gone Supernova
05.03.2013
Unlike other celestial objects there is no question how the Horsehead Nebula got its name. This iconic silhouette of a horse's head and neck pokes up mysteriously from what look like whitecaps of interstellar foam. The nebula has graced astronomy books ever since its discovery over a century ago. But Hubble's infrared vision shows the horse in a new light. The nebula, shadowy in optical light, appears transparent and ethereal when seen at infrared wavelengths. This pillar of tenuous hydrogen gas laced with dust is resisting being eroded away by the radiation from a nearby star. The nebula is a small part of a vast star-forming complex in the constellation Orion. The Horsehead will disintegrate in about 5 million years. <br /><br /> Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Horsehead Nebula
04.19.2013
An exploding star observed in 1604 by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler held a greater fraction of heavy elements than the sun, according to an analysis of X-ray observations from the Japan-led Suzaku satellite. The findings will help astronomers better understand the diversity of type Ia supernovae, an important class of stellar explosion used in probing the distant universe. <br /><br /> ”The composition of the star, its environment, and the mechanism of the explosion may vary considerably among type Ia supernovae,” said Sangwook Park, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington. ”By better understanding them, we can fine-tune our knowledge of the universe beyond our galaxy and improve cosmological models that depend on those measurements.” <br /><br /> The best way to explore the star's makeup is to perform a kind of post-mortem examination on the shell of hot, rapidly expanding gas produced by the explosion. By identifying specific chemical signatures in the supernova remnant, astronomers can obtain a clearer picture of the composition of the star before it blew up. <br /><br /> This composite of images from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the remnant of Kepler's supernova in low (red), intermediate (green) and high-energy (blue) X-rays. The background is an optical star field taken from the Digitized Sky Survey. The distance to the object is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 13,000 to 23,000 light-years, but recent studies favor the maximum range. This image spans 12 arcminutes or about 80 light-years at the greatest distance. <br /><br /> Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/NCSU/M.Burkey et al.; optical: DSS
Kepler Supernaova: a post-mortem
04.08.2013
NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Its wide-eyed Large Area Telescope (LAT) sweeps across the entire sky every three hours, capturing the highest-energy form of light -- gamma rays -- from sources across the universe. These range from supermassive black holes billions of light-years away to intriguing objects in our own galaxy, such as X-ray binaries, supernova remnants and pulsars. <br /><br /> Now a Fermi scientist has transformed LAT data of a famous pulsar into a mesmerizing movie that visually encapsulates the spacecraft's complex motion. <br /><br /> Pulsars are neutron stars, the crushed cores of massive suns that destroyed themselves when they ran out of fuel, collapsed and exploded. The blast simultaneously shattered the star and compressed its core into a body as small as a city yet more massive than the sun. The result is an object of incredible density, where a spoonful of matter weighs as much as a mountain on Earth. Equally incredible is a pulsar's rapid spin, with typical rotation periods ranging from once every few seconds up to hundreds of times a second. Fermi sees gamma rays from more than a hundred pulsars scattered across the sky. <br /><br /> One pulsar shines especially bright for Fermi. Called Vela, it spins 11 times a second and is the brightest persistent source of gamma rays the LAT sees. Although gamma-ray bursts and flares from distant black holes occasionally outshine the pulsar, they don't have Vela's staying power. Because pulsars emit beams of energy, scientists often compare them to lighthouses, a connection that in a broader sense works especially well for Vela, which is both a brilliant beacon and a familiar landmark in the gamma-ray sky. <br /><br /> Watch the movie at the ”Image Source” link. <br /><br /> NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration
Celestial Spirograph
02.27.2013
This composite of the giant barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 combines visible light images from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope with far-ultraviolet (1,528 angstroms) data from NASA's GALEX and 3.6-micron infrared data acquired by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. A previously unsuspected tidal dwarf galaxy candidate (blue area at left) appears only in the ultraviolet, indicating the presence of many hot young stars. IC 4970, the small disk galaxy interacting with NGC 6872, is located above the spiral's central region. The spiral is 522,000 light-years across from the tip of one outstretched arm to the tip of the other, which makes it about 5 times the size of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Images of lower resolution from the Digital Sky Survey were used to fill in marginal areas not covered by the other data. <br /><br /> Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/ESO/JPL-Caltech/DSS
Largest Known Spiral Galaxy
02.14.2013
Stars form when dense gas clouds floating about in space begin to organize themselves through the action of gravity. This process happens slowly and gracefully, then rapidly and violently, generating both heat and light as matter falls onto the stellar surface. The interplay of gravity and spin flattens the cloud, forming a disk of gas and dust around the newly-forming star. Understanding the connection between this rotational motion and the gravitational pull of the young protostar is a key constraint for our understanding of star formation. Now astronomers have been able to use a new tool to find the spin of an important young protostar named V1647 Ori. V1647 Ori first rose to prominence in January 2004 when astronomers saw a bright outburst from the star that lit up a conical patch of dust in the star's vicinity, a patch now called McNeil's Nebula. Since the eruption, astronomers have been curious about the star, and have kept many eyes on it. The image above shows the changing brightness of the star in X-rays, as monitored by the Chandra, XMM-Newton and Suzaku X-ray satellite observatories. The solid lines shows the theoretical variation from a model in which two X-ray emitting spots are located in opposite hemispheres of the protostar. These spots are thought to be high temperature regions produced as matter flows along the protostar's magnetic field and crashes onto the protostellar surface. As the protostar spins once per day, different portions of the spot can be seen, causing the X-ray brightness to rise and fall. These X-ray observations not only help measure the rotation period of a still-forming star, but they also help astronomers understand how the young star's magnetic field helps the star grow.
Hot Spot
01.16.2013
Stars form in great dark clouds of cold gas and dust. As one after another lights up, new stars mark their environment, breaking apart molecules, stripping electrons from atoms, and heating tiny dust grains until they glow. Stars eventually die, some of them exploding in the very same place they were born. The interplay of stellar birth and death is an intricate, dynamic process which leaves its mark over a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum. <br /><br /> A particularly beautiful example is the region called N51 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, seen in a composite image of optical (green and yellow), infrared (red) and X-ray (pink and blue) light. The optical data show young stars and glowing ionized gas around them; warm dust glows in the infrared, while the hottest gas at temperatures of millions of degrees produces bright X-ray emission. A giant shell on the right seen in the optical is a superbubble called N51D, blown by the winds of embedded massive stars and perhaps supernovae from a generation of very massive stars which died within the bubble. It is filled with hot gas glowing in X-rays. Another supernova remnant filled with hot, X-ray emitting gas is seen on the left of the complex. Observations like these help astronomers obtain the complete picture of how stars form and die, and how this process helps drive the evolution of galaxies.
The Birth and Death of Stars
12.31.2012
Neutron stars are born at the explosive death of a star which is more than eight times the mass of the Sun. Many if not most of these tiny, ultradense spheres rotate rapidly at birth, some spinning hundreds of times per second. Others are spun up to even higher spin rates. Neutron stars are also highly magnetized and the interaction of their magnetic fields with surrounding gas can help slow the stars, so that they slow as they age, and the rate at which they slow is a good indicator of how long ago the neutron star was formed. New observations with the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray Observatories have found an unusual, young neutron star with an extremely slow spin. This object, known as SXP 1062, is shown as the bright blue X-ray emitting object on the right side of the image above. X-ray pulsations from this object show that it turns once every 17.7 minutes - a short day for earthlings but extremely long by neutron star standards. Deep optical observations show that the neutron star is encircled by a spherical shell of gas which probably represents the remnant of the star that exploded when the SXP 1062 was born. The size of the shell and its brightness suggests that SXP 1062 is only a few tens of thousands of years old, so it's a puzzle to astronomers how such a young neutron star could be rotating so slowly. But SXP 1062 has a companion star in orbit, and perhaps interactions between the companion and the neutron star may have helped to slow SXP 1062's spin. Perhaps these binary star interactions may help explain the slow rotations of other systems as well. <br /><br /> Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ESA/XMM-Newton/L. Oskinova, W. Sun, M. Guerrero; Optical: AURA/NOAO/CTIO/R.Gruendl/Y.H.Chu
Slowly Turning
12.31.2012
                                                                                                                                                                                         
NASA Logo, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  • NASA Official:
  • Curator:
  • Last Updated: 05/21/2013