Monicks: Unleashed

Category: Astronomy

  • Astronomy Picture of the Day – Hubble Peers Inside a Celestial Geode

    In this unusual image, the Hubble Space Telescope captures a rare view of the celestial equivalent of a geode – a gas cavity carved by the stellar wind and intense ultraviolet radiation from a young hot star.

    Hubble Peers Inside a Celestial Geode. Credit: ESA/NASA, Yäel Nazé (University of Liège, Belgium) and You-Hua Chu (University of Illinois, Urbana, USA)

    via spacefellowship.com

    Real geodes are handball-sized, hollow rocks that start out as bubbles in volcanic or sedimentary rock. Only when these inconspicuous round rocks are split in half by a geologist, do we get a chance to appreciate the inside of the rock cavity that is lined with crystals. In the case of Hubble’s 35 light-year diameter “celestial geode” the transparency of its bubble-like cavity of interstellar gas and dust reveals the treasures of its interior.

     

  • Astronomy Picture of the Day | The Lure of the Rings

    Resembling a diamond-encrusted bracelet, a ring of brilliant blue star clusters wraps around the yellowish nucleus of what was once a normal spiral galaxy in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

    The Lure of the Rings. Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

    via spacefellowship.com

    The sparkling blue ring is 150,000 light-years in diameter, making it larger than our entire home galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy, cataloged as AM 0644-741, is a member of the class of so- called “ring galaxies.” It lies 300 million light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Dorado. This image was released to commemorate the 14th anniversary of Hubble’s launch on April 24, 1990 and its deployment from the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990.

    Posted via web from Monicks: Unleashed

  • Astronomy Picture of the Day | Tapestry of Star Birth in a Neighbouring Galaxy

    via spacefellowship.com

    The Hubble Space Telescope captures the iridescent tapestry of star birth in a neighbouring galaxy in this panoramic view of glowing gas, dark dust clouds, and young, hot stars. The star-forming region, catalogued as N11B lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), located only 160,000 light-years from Earth.

    With its high resolution, the Hubble Space Telescope is able to view details of star formation in the LMC as easily as ground-based telescopes are able to observe stellar formation within our own Milky Way galaxy.

    Our neighbourhood galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) lies in the Constellation of Dorado and is sprinkled with a number of regions harbouring recent and ongoing star formation. One of these star-forming region, N11B, is shown in this Hubble image. It is a subregion within a larger area of star formation called N11. N11 is the second largest star-forming region in LMC. It is only surpassed in the size and activity by “the king of stellar nurseries”, 30 Doradus, located at the opposite side of LMC.

    Posted via web from Monicks: Unleashed