Hubble Snow Angel

I literally said “whoa” when I saw this:

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Carina Nebula

Another great space photograph. From the site:

Several well known astronomical objects in and near the Carina Nebula can be seen in this wide field image: to the bottom left of the image is one of the most impressive binary stars in the Universe, Eta Carinae, with the famous Keyhole Nebula just adjacent to the star. The collection of very bright, young stars above and to the right of Eta Carinae is the open star cluster Trumpler 14. A second open star cluster, Collinder 228 is also seen in the image, just below Eta Carinae. North is up and East is to the left.

Galaxies of Hubble

Well, of the Universe. But as seen through the eye of Hubble.

I know I’ve posted this in the past, but it’s just such a great photograph.

Tarantula Nebula

Celestial Bauble

Hubble has another great capture. This one is being called a celestial bauble. And just in time for Christmas. What a crazy coincidence, I know. (SpaceDaily thought it prudent to dumb down the article title a bit.)

Celestial Bauble

This is called SNR 0509, which means it’s a supernova remnant. It’s located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, which looks a little something like this.

Large Magellanic Cloud

(None of this is here for or because of human existence, by the way.)

The eye candy

It has recently occurred to me that I’ve been neglecting the Hubble eye candy posts. Well, I’m technically still doing that because this image (“Ring Nebula”) was taken with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. But it’s still eye candy.

Milky Way kicks out star for eternity

One of the fastest moving stars ever discovered is on its way out of the Milky Way, but Hubble can still see it.

Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected a rare hypervelocity star that was spat out of the centre of our galaxy and is travelling three times as fast as the Sun.

Scientists believe that it was created when three stars travelling together passed too close to the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way around a hundred million years ago.

One of the stars was captured while the other two were flung out of the galaxy and merged to form a super-hot blue star travelling at around 1.6 million miles per hour.

Creationist interpretation: a deceitful designer placed the star at a high velocity in just such a way that we would be tricked into thinking something plausible had happened instead.

Anyway.

Here are a couple images. The first is a NASA graphic while the second is the actual image.

Hubble captures fireworks

How a theist can look at all the fantastic images Hubble has offered humanity and somehow not feel insignificant in the Universe is one of the greatest feats of arrogance there is.

This gorgeous star cluster doesn’t need a holiday to set off fireworks. Officially called NGC 3603, the small community of young stars is located about 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina.

Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds from the cluster’s stars shoved away the cloud of gas and dust in which the stars formed, giving the Hubble Space Telescope’s new Wide Field Camera 3 a clear view. Hubble captured this image in August 2009 and December 2009, just a few months after the new camera was installed, in both visible and infrared light. The image shows a sharper view of the stars than an earlier image taken with Hubble’s NICMOS infrared camera in 2007, and traces sources of sulfur, hydrogen and iron.

Most of the stars in the cluster were born around the same time, but age differently depending on their masses. Clusters like NGC 3603 give astronomers a lab to study stars’ life cycles in detail, as well as a window into the origin of massive star formation in the distant universe. NGC 3603’s stars are among the most massive known. After they burn through their fuel, these stars will end their lives in spectacular supernova explosions.

Via Wired.

Hubble images offer better benchmark for stellar evolution

Hubble images have helped to detect minute movements in relatively new stars previously expected to have settled down by now.

The discovery, reported in June 2 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, may cause astronomers to rethink how clusters form and evolve. The new measurements will help astronomers to develop benchmarks of cluster evolution and better estimate the masses of other star clusters. Many such measurements are based on the stars having reached a more settled state known as virial equilibrium. If the stars haven’t reached this state, the mass of the cluster will be overestimated.

Crab Nebula

When I choose Hubble images to put on FTSOS, I specifically try to avoid the Crab Nebula image. It’s just so common, so frequent. It’s almost a stereotype in a way, at least to me. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve slipped up actually posted it in the past. But I was just rethinking it. Stereotype, cliche, overused, too common, too frequent: none of that matter. It’s a frickin’ cool image. That’s all the justification I need.