A Beautiful Image with a Nice Ring To It

Here is a dramatic image of a dying star, courtesy of amateur astronomer and master photographer Robert Gendler. Called the "Ring Nebula," this cloud of of expelled material surrounds a star somewhat like our Sun, but further along in its life cycle.

Usually, regular telescopes only show the inner glowing part that you see in bluish green in the center. But Dr. Gendler has combined the visible-light image with fainter, cooler infra-red information to show how the star has expelled material not just once, but many times. You can see shell after shell surrounding the star. Like a dying man in those old Victorian novels, who coughs and coughs for months before death releases him, this star has been "coughing up" its outermost layers, as it adjusts to the final internal collapse. After the expanding shells have moved away, what will be left is a dense, hot "star corpse" astronomers call a white dwarf.

The image pixels come from the Hubble, Subaru, and Large Binocular Telescopes. By all means click on the picture and look at the larger version.

The Ring Nebula (a favorite astronomical object for newlyweds) is about 2000 lightyears away in the constellation of Lyra. It is perhaps the best known example of a "planetary nebula." (The name comes from their fuzzy appearance in early telescope; the expanding shell of gas has NOTHING to do with planets.) Astronomers also call it M57 (the 57th entry in Charles Messier's catalog of fuzzy objects in the sky.) If you search for M57 on the web you can learn a lot more about it; or just enjoy the weirdly wonderful picture.

Robert Gendler's other astronomy images can be found at: http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/  

To see a larger version of the amazing Hubble Space Telescope image of this object (which is at the center of our picture), go to: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2013/13/image/b/format/large_web/ 

An Eerie Astronomical Photo

Click on the photo to make it bigger ^

Here is a gorgeous image taken by master astro-photographer Travis Rector (of the University of Alaska), showing a region of cosmic raw material (glowing gas and dark dust.) This is like one of those inkblot tests that psychologists are fond of -- what shape you see in the picture may be highly individual.

What we are actually looking at is a small part of a larger region where star birth is going on right now. Known by its catalog number of IC1396, this "emission nebula" is set to glow by the brilliant light of new stars that have already been born in this region and are shining with adolescent energy.

IC1396 is a cloud of loose gas and dark dust (the dust really isn't that different from what you find under your desk when you are too busy thinking cosmic thoughts to clean up regularly.) The dust is shaped into long filaments, when the light of energetic stars pushes the less dense parts of the dust away from the stars (in this case, in the down direction on this photo.) Only the thickest regions of dust remain after a while, making long, dark tendrils like we see here.

IC 1396 is about 3000 light years away in the constellation of Cepheus. You can see the entire nebula (much larger than the small part seen in our photo) here:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120805.html

So what did the dark shape remind YOU of?

A Gorgeous New Hubble Image and News from Kepler

Scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope have just released a magnificent new image of one my favorite astronomical objects -- the Horsehead Nebula, a great cloud of "cosmic dirt" in the constellation of Orion. What makes this image a little different from usual is that we are not seeing the tower of dust with visible light, but with heat-rays (what scientists call the "infra-red.") 

It is in such clouds of dust and gas that new stars and planets are being regularly born. Because dust can block regular light, infrared images like this allow us to peer deeper into these regions of star birth. This particular image is about 2.5 light years across (where each light year is about 6 thousand billion miles) -- so we are seeing a good-sized pillar of cosmic "raw material" here. (Yet the Horsehead is just a part of a much larger complex of gas and dust called the Orion Molecular Cloud, which is roughly 1500 light years away from us.)

You can see two recently born stars at the top ridge of dust in the Horsehead in this image, confirming that star birth is happening in this dusty clump. Note that the colors we see on this picture are not real (since these are rays our eyes are not sensitive to.) The colors were picked by Hubble scientists to give a sense of the dustiness of the Horsehead.

You can contrast this infrared picture with a visible-light Hubble image taken with the Hubble in 2000-2001:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2001/12/image/a/

and with an image of a larger region around it taken with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on the ground at:http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_89.html

Aren't they gorgeous images?

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In other news you may have read that the Kepler mission, photographing 150,000 stars regularly in its search for planets orbiting other stars, has found three more planets that are just a little larger than Earth and orbiting in the "habitable zone" of their stars -- where water could be warm enough to be liquid. 

For the full story, see: http://www.kepler.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=243

That page gives you access to the quick info, the paintings of what the planets might like, animation, etc. To get the story in a more organized way, scroll down toward the bottom and click on the link to the full NASA news release.

The gist of the discovery is that we are finding more and more planets that are roughly earth-like -- perhaps a bit bigger, not always around the same kind of star as our Sun -- but Earth-like in their temperatures and other conditions. The Kepler team said that the current discovery is just an appetizer. Many more such planets may be among the 2740 candidate planets Kepler found that they are still examining and not yet ready to confirm.