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?

**********

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.

New Hubble Image of Giant Star Nursery

The Hubble Space Telescope folks have just released a beautiful photo of a region where new stars are forming. Called by its catalog number, N11, this region of young stars and reddish glowing gas is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellite galaxies that goes around our Milky Way. When you look at the image, bear in mind that the light we are seeing today from this galaxy left it 168,000 years ago. (In other words, the photo shows something 168,000 light years away.)

In the upper left corner, you can see the Rose Nebula, a tight round region in whose hidden center, new stars are being born right now. To give you a sense of scale, that little round gas cloud -- at the very top right -- is about 8 light years across.

In the middle of the image is the more extensive cloud of gas and young stars nicknamed the Bean Nebula (because of its shape.) Several generations of stars have been born in that cloudy region, and their adolescent energy has helped push the gas that gave birth to them into a larger and larger region.

Toward the bottom of the picture, you can see a jewel box of young bluish stars. Many are so hot they actually glow not just with blue and violet light, but with ultraviolet (what tanners call "black light.") Their energy has pushed for a while on any remaining gas from the cloud that gave them birth, so the neighborhood around them shows almost nothing of the reddish glow that signals warmer gas.

N11 is one of the largest nurseries for making stars we have ever observed. It's wonderful to have such a clear colorful image of the whole area, thanks to the remarkable instruments aboard the Hubble.

(And a personal note: the catalog number N11 is from a list of such glowing nebulae first put together in the 1950's by astronomer Karl Henize. Later in life, Henize became a Shuttle astronaut, and when it was his turn to go to space, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, where I was the Executive Director. He found that he had enough room in his personal kit to take a banner for the Society into space with him. We didn't have a banner, but when he offered, we of course made one up, real fast. He brought it back from space and presented it to me in a wonderful ceremony at the Society's headquarters (see photo below). It still has a place of pride on the walls of the Society's building in San Francisco.)