Category Archives: Science

What is this? The Milky Way evaporating from the surface of a lake? No. What are you, insane? To wit:

The pool of vivid blue water, about 10 meters across, is known as Silex Spring and is located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. Steam rises off the spring, heated by a magma chamber deep underneath known as the Yellowstone hotspot. The steam blurs the image of Jupiter, making it seem unusually large. Unrelated and far in the distance, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy rises high overhead, a band lit by billions of stars. The featured picture is a 3-image panorama taken last August. 

(Image: Lori Jacobs)

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Behold: the very first images of the sun taken by the new Inouye Solar Telescope at the 3050m summit of Haleakalā in Hawaii. Three times more detailed than any previous image of the sun, each of the cells you see is around the size of Texas.

It’s hot work, ogling that fiery ball:

Focusing 13 kilowatts of solar power generates enormous amounts of heat — heat that must be contained or removed. A specialized cooling system provides crucial heat protection for the telescope and its optics. More than seven miles of piping distribute coolant throughout the observatory, partially chilled by ice created on site during the night.

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Behold: IC 410, aka, the Tadpole Nebula, about 12,000 light-years away in the northern constellation of Auriga. It’s a busy place, what with all the star formation. To wit:

The cloud of glowing gas is over 100 light-years across, sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from embedded open star cluster NGC 1893. Formed in the interstellar cloud a mere 4 million years ago, bright newly formed cluster stars are seen all around the star-forming nebula. Notable near the image center are two relatively dense streamers of material trailing away from the nebula’s central regions. Potentially sites of ongoing star formation in IC 410, these cosmic tadpole shapes are about 10 light-years long. The featured image was taken in infrared light by NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite.

(Image: WISE, IRSA, NASA; Processing & Copyright: Francesco Antonucci)

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Behold: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Comet CG) – as photographed in 2015 by ESA’s robotic Rosetta spacecraft, which orbited the thing from 2014 to 2016. The image shows the emerging jets which create the comet’s characteristic tail and will eventually lead to its destruction. To wit:

The picture shows plumes of gas and dust escaping numerous places from Comet CG‘s nucleus as it neared the Sun and heated up. The comet has two prominent lobes, the larger one spanning about 4 kilometers, and a smaller 2.5-kilometer lobe connected by a narrow neck. Analyses indicate that evaporation must be taking place well inside the comet’s surface to create the jets of dust and ice that we see emitted through the surface. Comet CG (also known as Comet 67P) loses in jets about a meter of radius during each of its 6.44-year orbits around the Sun, a rate at which will completely destroy the comet in only thousands of years. In 2016, Rosetta‘s mission ended with a controlled impact onto Comet CG’s surface.

(Image:  ESA, Rosetta, NAVCAM)

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German educational design studio Kurzgesagt weighs up the prevailing science on both frothy-mouthed sides of the milk debate. To wit:

Over the last decade milk has become a bit controversial. Some people say it’s a necessary and nutritious food, vital for healthy bones, but others say it can cause cancer and lead to an early death.

Previously: Stellar Thrusters To Max

Behold: UGC 2885, also known as Rubin’s Galaxy, about 232 million light-years from us. Those bright spiky stars are actually in the foreground, toward the northern constellation Perseus, well within our own Milky Way galaxy. Rubin’s galaxy – over 200 million light years further away – is vast. To wit:

Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way’s diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around 1 trillion stars. That’s about 10 times as many stars as the Milky Way. Part of a current investigation to understand how galaxies can grow to such enormous sizes, UGC 2885 was also part of astronomer Vera Rubin’s pioneering study of the rotation of spiral galaxies. Her work was the first to convincingly demonstrate the dominating presence of dark matter in our universe.

(Image: NASA, ESA, B. Holwerda, University of Louisville)

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Behold: globular star cluster NGC 6752, 13,000 light-years away toward the southern constellation Pavo (the Peacock), roaming the halo of the Milky Way. To wit:

Over 10 billion years old, NGC 6752 follows clusters Omega Centauri and 47 Tucanae as the third brightest globular in planet Earth’s night sky. It holds over 100 thousand stars in a sphere about 100 light-years in diameter. Telescopic explorations of the NGC 6752 have found that a remarkable fraction of the stars near the cluster’s core, are multiple star systems. They also reveal the presence of blue straggle stars, stars which appear to be too young and massive to exist in a cluster whose stars are all expected to be at least twice as old as the Sun. The blue stragglers are thought to be formed by star mergers and collisions in the dense stellar environment at the cluster’s core. This sharp color composite also features the cluster’s ancient red giant stars in yellowish hues. (Note: The bright, spiky blue star at 11 o’clock from the cluster center is a foreground star along the line-of-sight to NGC 6752).

(Image: Jose Joaquin Perez)

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Behold: the Hyades or Caldwell 41 – the closest star cluster to our own sun. To wit:

The Hyades open cluster is bright enough to have been remarked on even thousands of years ago, yet is not as bright or compact as the nearby Pleiades (M45) star cluster. Pictured here is a particularly deep image of the Hyades which has brings out vivid star colours and faint coincidental nebulas. The brightest star in the field is yellow Aldebaran, the eye of the bull toward the constellation of Taurus. Aldebaran, at 65 light-years away, is now known to be unrelated to the Hyades cluster, which lies 153 light-years away. The central Hyades stars are spread out over about 15 light-years. Formed about 625 million years ago, the Hyades likely shares a common origin with the Beehive cluster (M44), a naked-eye open star cluster toward the constellation of Cancer, based on M44‘s motion through space and remarkably similar age.

(Image: Jose Mtanous)

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Behold: spiral galaxy NGC 247, 11 million light years from us toward the southern constellation Cetus, smaller than the Milky Way and strangely redolent of something even smaller. To wit:

The pronounced void on one side of the galaxy’s disk recalls for some its popular name, the Needle’s Eye galaxy. Many background galaxies are visible in this sharp galaxy portrait, including the remarkable string of four galaxies just below and left of NGC 247 known as Burbidge’s Chain. Burbidge’s Chain galaxies are about 300 million light-years distant. NGC 247 itself is part of the Sculptor Group of galaxies along with the shiny spiral NGC 253.

(Image: Acquisition – Eric Benson, Processing – Dietmar Hager)

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There are more known volcanoes on Venus that there are on Earth but, until now, it’s not been clear which ones, if any, are active. To wit:

Evidence bolstering very recent volcanism on Venus has recently been uncovered, though, right here on Earth. Lab results showed that images of surface lava would become dim in the infrared in only months in the dense Venusian atmosphere, a dimming not seen in ESA’s Venus Express images. Venus Express entered orbit around Venus in 2006 and remained in contact with Earth until 2014. Therefore, the infrared glow (shown in false-color red) recorded by Venus Express for Idunn Mons and featured here on a NASA Magellan image indicates that this volcano erupted very recently — and is still active today. Understanding the volcanics of Venus might lead to insight about the volcanics on Earth, as well as elsewhere in our Solar System.

(Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech, ESA, Venus Express: VIRTIS, USRA, LPI)

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