Monicks: Unleashed

Category: Science

  • The Earth and Moon from Mars | This is so beautiful!

    via i.dailymail.co.uk

    Stunning image of what our planet looks like from the Red Planet.

    This stunning picture is the first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that shows our home as a planetary disc, with the Moon in the distance

    Captured by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as the spacecraft orbited the Red Planet, both the Earth and the Moon appear as crescents, engulfed in the vast darkness of space.

    Our planet is captured in a ‘half-Earth’ phase, while the image also shows the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon.
    Because the Earth and the Moon are closer to the Sun than Mars, they exhibit phases, just as the Moon, Venus, and Mercury do when viewed from Earth.
    When the image was captured in 2007, Earth was 88million miles from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 88 miles per pixel.
    Nasa could only picture the Earth and moon at full disk illumination when they are on the opposite side of the Sun from Mars. However, then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.
    On the Earth image you can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features.
    This image required a processing, with the Moon image brightened so it would show up next to Earth.

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  • Picture of the Day – Herschel Finds a Hole in Space

    via spacefellowship.com

    NGC 1999 is the green tinged cloud towards the top of the image. The dark spot to the right was thought to be a cloud of dense dust and gas until Herschel looked at it. It is in fact a hole that has been blown in the side of NGC 1999 by the jets and winds of gas from the young stellar objects in this region of space. Credits: ESA/HOPS Consortium

    ESA’s Herschel infrared space telescope has made an unexpected discovery: a hole in space. The hole has provided astronomers with a surprising glimpse into the end of the star-forming process.

    Stars are born in dense clouds of dust and gas that can now be studied in unprecedented detail with Herschel. Although jets and winds of gas have been seen coming from young stars in the past, it has always been a mystery exactly how a star uses these to blow away its surroundings and emerge from its birth cloud. Now, for the first time, Herschel may be seeing an unexpected step in this process.

    A cloud of bright reflective gas known to astronomers as NGC 1999 sits next to a black patch of sky. For most of the 20th century, such black patches have been known to be dense clouds of dust and gas that block light from passing through.

    When Herschel looked in its direction to study nearby young stars, the cloud continued to look black. But wait! That should not be the case. Herschel’s infrared eyes are designed to see into such clouds. Either the cloud was immensely dense or something was wrong.

    Investigating further using ground-based telescopes, astronomers found the same story however they looked: this patch looks black not because it is a dense pocket of gas but because it is truly empty. Something has blown a hole right through the cloud. “No-one has ever seen a hole like this,” says Tom Megeath, of the University of Toledo, USA. “It’s as surprising as knowing you have worms tunneling under your lawn, but finding one morning that they have created a huge, yawning pit.”

    The astronomers think that the hole must have been opened when the narrow jets of gas from some of the young stars in the region punctured the sheet of dust and gas that forms NGC 1999. The powerful radiation from a nearby mature star may also have helped to clear the hole. Whatever the precise chain of events, it could be an important glimpse into the way newborn stars disperse their birth clouds.

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  • Astronomy Picture of the Day – Stellar Nursery in the Rosette Nebula

    via spacefellowship.com

    This image from the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory shows the cloud associated with the Rosette Nebula, a stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the Monoceros, or Unicorn, constellation. Herschel collects the infrared light given out by dust.

    The bright smudges are dusty cocoons containing massive embryonic stars, which will grow up to 10 times the mass of our sun. The small spots near the center of the image are lower mass stellar embryos. The Rosette Nebula itself, and its massive cluster of stars, is located to the right of the picture.

    This image is a three-color composite showing infrared wavelengths of 70 microns (blue), 160 microns (green), and 250 microns (red). It was made with observations from Herschel’s Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer and the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver instruments.

    Herschel is an ESA cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with participation by NASA.

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