An interesting model of our solar system’s path as it travels through space in the Milky Way.
Certainly a departure from usual models that show the Sun as a static object, which it certainly isn’t
I had no idea this was happening. Where are we going?
The moon orbits us. We orbit the sun. The sun orbits the milky way. The milky way orbits whatever the fuck it wants (ok it has an orbit around a certain galaxy cluster but I guess it’s not a closed orbit).
look how pretty we are
Massive galaxy cluster RXJ 1347-1145, observed with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope. It demonstrates the effect of strong gravitational lensing with many giant arcs.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/AIfA, Tim Schrabback, Thomas Erben (PI)
Moon Dust from Apollo 11
You just never know what you’ll find in storage…
“When Apollo 11 returned from its historic flight in 1969, the moon rocks and lunar soil collected by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin eventually found their way to some 150 laboratories worldwide. One of those was the Space Sciences Laboratory in Latimer Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. After experiments were conducted and papers published, those samples should have been sent back to NASA. Instead they wound up in storage, where they sat collecting dust until they were discovered more than four decades later.”
New Photo Reveals ‘Ghostly’ Green Nebula in Deep Space
An amazing new photo from a telescope in Chile has captured the most detailed view yet of a green glowing blob 3,300 light-years away from Earth.
Image: This photo shows the glowing green planetary nebula IC 1295 surrounding a dim and dying star. It is located about 3300 light-years away from Earth. Credit: ESO
The new image, released today (April 10) by the European Southern Observatory, shows the planetary nebula IC 1295 like it has never been seen before. This picture, which ESO scientists dubbed “ghostly,” marks the first time the nebula has been imaged such unprecedented detail.
“It has the unusual feature of being surrounded by multiple shells that make it resemble a microorganism seen under a microscope, with many layers corresponding to the membranes of a cell,” officials from the European Southern Observatory wrote in a statement.
Birth of a Black Hole
A new kind of cosmic flash may reveal something never seen before: the birth of a black hole.
When a massive star exhausts its fuel, it collapses under its own gravity and produces a black hole, an object so dense that not even light can escape its gravitational grip. According to a new analysis by an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), just before the black hole forms, the dying star may generate a distinct burst of light that will allow astronomers to witness the birth of a new black hole for the first time.
Mysterious hot spots observed in a cool red supergiant
Astronomers have released a new image of the outer atmosphere of Betelgeuse – one of the nearest red supergiants to Earth – revealing the detailed structure of the matter being thrown off the star.
The new image, taken by the e-MERLIN radio telescope array operated from the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, also shows regions of surprisingly hot gas in the star’s outer atmosphere and a cooler arc of gas weighing almost as much as the Earth.
March 20, 2013: Voyager-1 probe leaves the solar system after more than 35 years in space. Farewell Voyager-1. Thank you for your contributions to knowledge and understanding. Good luck, and God speed!
Cost of the Mars Curiosity Rover - $800 million
Cost of a team to operate the Mars Rover - $1 billion
Total Cost of the Mars Science Laboratory mission - $2.5 billion
Accidentally drawing a penis on the surface of another planet - Priceless
*questions why part of the photo was cut out*
Hubble at 23: Horsehead Nebula in a New Light
The Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit for 23 years and, to celebrate this milestone, the space telescope has revisited the famous Horsehead Nebula in the constellation of Orion.
It really has been a crappy week, so here’s some Hubble therapy to end the week a little less crappy. Hubble reminds us that the human spirit for exploration and discovery far outweigh our drive to maim and kill.
A supernova ribbon, the one-millennium-old remnants from the death of a star.
What created this unusual space ribbon? Most assuredly, one of the most violent explosions ever witnessed by ancient humans. Back in the year 1006 AD, light reached Earth from a stellar explosion in the constellation of the Wolf (Lupus), creating a “guest star” in the sky that appeared brighter than Venus and lasted for over two years. The supernova, now cataloged at SN 1006, occurred about 7,000 light years away and has left a large remnant that continues to expand and fade today. Pictured above is a small part of that expanding supernova remnant dominated by a thin and outwardly moving shock front that heats and ionizes surrounding ambient gas. SN 1006 now has a diameter of nearly 60 light years. Within the past year, an even more powerful explosion occurred far across the universe that was visible to modern humans, without any optical aid, for a few seconds.
(via APOD: 2008 September 15 - SN 1006: A Supernova Ribbon from Hubble)
