Tag Archives: infrared

Behold: the glorious Orion nebula and what it might be like to fly through it. To wit:

The exciting dynamic visualisation of the Orion Nebula is based on real astronomical data and adept movie rendering techniques. Up close and personal with a famous stellar nursery normally seen from 1,500 light-years away, the digitally modelled representation based is based on infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The perspective moves along a valley over a light-year wide, in the wall of the region’s giant molecular cloud. Orion’s valley ends in a cavity carved by the energetic winds and radiation of the massive central stars of the Trapezium star cluster. The entire Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.

(Video: NASA, Spitzer Space Telescope, Universe of Learning; Visualisation: F. Summers (STScI) et al.; Music & License: Serenade for Strings (A. Dvořák), Advent Chamber Orch.)

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Behold: the mighty gas giant Jupiter getting its Hallowe’en pumpkin on: captured in infrared by astronomers at the Gemini North Observatory in Hawaii. To wit:

Gemini was able to produce such a clear image using a technique called lucky imaging, by taking many images and combining only the clearest ones that, by chance, were taken when Earth’s atmosphere was the most calm. Jupiter’s jack-o’-lantern-like appearance is caused by the planet’s different layers of clouds. Infrared light can pass through clouds better than visible light, allowing us to see deeper, hotter layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere, while the thickest clouds appear dark. These pictures, together with ones from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Juno spacecraft, can tell us a lot about weather patterns on Jupiter, like where its massive, planet-sized storms form.

(Image: International Gemini Observatory, NOIRLab, NSF, AURA; M. H. Wong (UC Berkeley) & Team; Acknowledgment: Mahdi Zamani; Text: Alex R. Howe (NASA/USRA, Reader’s History of SciFi Podcast)

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An image of the magnetic field at the centre of the Milky Way taken using a specialised HAWC+ camera by NASA’s 747 mounted observatory SOFIA. To wit:

HAWC+ maps magnetism by observing polarized infrared light emitted by elongated dust grains rotating in alignment with the local magnetic field.

Now at our Milky Way’s center is a supermassive black hole with a hobby of absorbing gas from stars it has recently destroyed. Our galaxy’s black hole, though, is relatively quiet compared to the absorption rate of the central black holes in active galaxies.

The featured image gives a clue as to why — a surrounding magnetic field may either channel gas into the black hole — which lights up its exterior, or forces gas into an accretion-disk holding pattern, causing it to be less active — at least temporarily.

Inspection of the featured image — appearing perhaps like a surreal mashup of impasto art and gravitational astrophysics — brings out this telling clue by detailing the magnetic field in and around a dusty ring surrounding Sagittarius A*, the black hole in our Milky Way’s center.

(Image: NASA, SOFIA, Hubble)

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(From top: ’Lonely Tree’ by David Hall; ‘Red Velvet’ by Helen Bradshaw; ‘Invisible Paris’ by Pierre-Louis Ferrer; ‘Utah’ by Luciano Demasi; ‘Tectonic’ by Matthew Stuart Piper; ’Hong Kong: The Golden City’ by Tran Minh Dung; ‘Zabriskie’ by Beamie Young and ’The Watchman’ by Blake Rudis.)

Winners of an inaugural Infrared Photography contest organised by online store and e-learning site Kolari Vision which invited submissions thus:

What changes when we switch to infrared, and which things remain constant? What beauty lies in the light that our eyes can’t see?

See all the winners here.

mymodernmet