OFFICIAL space & astronomy thread

[FSUViking 184]

Some awesome Hubble & Keppler shots of the universe. Simply...amazing.

 

The great grand-daddy of them all is the vast, sprawling Tarantula Nebula. Located 170,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud — a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way — it is churning out stars at a mind-numbing rate. Astronomers pointed Hubble into its heart (it’s far too big to be seen all at once by Hubble) and got quite an eye full: This area is a mess. The gas and dust are obvious enough, as are the great number of stars littering that volume of space. Quite a few of the stars you see there are newborns. But note the tendrils and filaments of gas to the left of center, and to a lesser extent to the upper right. Those are the shock-wave compressed sheets of gas from a supernova, a star that exploded right in the center of all that. A massive star must have formed here, lived out its short life, and detonated. The debris expanded at thousands of kilometers per second, slamming into and compressing the gas. It wouldn’t surprise me if this expanding debris helped collapse more gas at its outer edges, helping more stars get born.

 

It’s the circle of life, or I guess, in this case, it’s the spherical shell of life.

 

To say this region is vast is seriously underestimating it. Astronomers are actually arguing not that it’s forming stars, but that it may be forming a nascent globular cluster, a collection of hundreds of thousands or even million of stars!

[FSUViking 184]

 

The spiral arm segments of the Sunflower galaxy, 37 million light years away, also known as Messier 63, show up in this gorgeous image taken in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Infrared light is sensitive to the dust lanes in spiral galaxies, which appear dark in visible-light images. Spitzer's view reveals complex structures that trace the galaxy's spiral arm pattern.

The dust, glowing red in this image, can be traced all the way down into the galaxy's nucleus, forming a ring around the densest region of stars at its center. The dusty patches are where news stars are being born.

 

The short diagonal line seen on the lower right side of the galaxy's disk is actually a much more distant galaxy, oriented with its edge facing toward us.

[FSUViking 184]

 

n this new image from the Hubble Space Telescope, you'll see a spectacular gamma ray burst and supernova as a bright point in the irregular galaxy located approximately 820 million light years from the Earth. An international team of researchers made the discovery using NASA's Swift satellite.

 

By analyzing the light spectra and measuring the so-called redshift the researchers could calculate the distance to the supernova, which was located in a galaxy 820 million light years from the Earth. It sounds extremely far away, but for astronomers it is a relatively near galaxy and that is a true delight.

[FSUViking 184]

 

43 million light years away from Earth, NGC 4151, named by astronomers, Eye of Sauron, after the all-seeing symbol of evil in The Lord Of The Rings, is one of the nearest galaxies to Earth to contain an actively-growing black hole. Powerful X-rays generated by the super-massive black hole produced the bright blue 'pupil' of the eye at the galaxy center. The red halo around the 'pupil' is made up of hydrogen atoms.

NGC 4151 is one of the nearest galaxies to Earth to contain an actively-growing black hole. It offers astronomers one of the best chances to study the interaction between a super-massive black hole and the surrounding gas of its host galaxy.

 

The new image was released last night by the American space agency NASA's Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Edited March 16, 2011 by FSUViking

[FSUViking 184]

 

Centered on North Star Polaris, this image covers part of a complex of diffuse dust clouds soaring high above the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. The combined light of the Milky Way stars are reflected by the dusty, galactic cirrus, the reflected starlight having the same blue tint of reflection nebulae. But this deep color image also records a faint reddish luminescence thought to be caused by complex organic molecules known as PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), common constituents of interstellar dust.

[RazorStar 4,025]

fucking space man... how does it work?

 

There is nothing quite so impressive.

[FSUViking 184]

 

If you have the time to sit through this gif, it's truly fuckin mind blowing. Our entire solar system would fit INSIDE some of these stars. Wow. :blink:

[FSUViking 184]

Awww, dammit! Fuck you, Internets. Cock blocking my link like that.

[Duck Fallas 209]

fucking space man... how does it work?

 

There is nothing quite so impressive.

Duct Tape and WD-40.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Space truly is amazing and humbling to think about.

[BucD+ 648]

Space truly is amazing and humbling to think about.

 

Indeed. I love it.

 

I'm sure you guys have seen he show on the Science Channel, "How the Universe Works." Show is great.

[FSUViking 184]

A portion of the Lagoon nebula imaged by the Gemini South telescope with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph. Credit: Julia I. Arias

and Rodolfo H. Barbá Departamento de Física, Universidad de La Serena (Chile), and ICATE-CONICET (Argentina).

 

The Lagoon nebula is located in the towards the constellation Sagittarius in the southern Milky Way. Viewed through large amateur telescopes, it appears as a pale ghostly glow with a touch of pink. In this image, the astronomers used special filters to reveal characteristics of the gas clouds. The reds, blues and greens represent each of three data sets results in a very strong color differentiation. And so, this isn’t what the Lagoon Nebula would actually look like were we to travel there and take a look with our own eyes. Two narrow-band optical filters sensitive to hydrogen (red) and ionized sulfur (green) emission, and another that transmits far red light (blue). And so, for example, light from the far-red end of the spectrum, beyond what the eye can see, appears blue in this image.

 

Arias and Barbá obtained the imaging data to explore the evolutionary relationship between the newborn stars and what are known as Herbig-Haro (HH) objects. HH objects form when young stars eject large amounts of fast-moving gas as they grow. This gas plows into the surrounding nebula, producing bright shock fronts that glow as the gas is heated by friction and surrounding gas is excited by the high-energy radiation of nearby hot stars. The researchers found a dozen of these HH objects in the image, spanning sizes that range from a few thousand astronomical units (about a trillion kilometers) to 1.4 parsecs (4.6 light-years), i.e. a little greater than the distance from the Sun to its nearest neighbor Proxima Centauri.

[blotsfan 2,112]

Maybe you people who know more about astronomy can answer this.

When you see a picture of a galaxy, its a big bright center surrounded by the swirling areas, which I know are stars. Just wondering, what is that center? Is it one big star, or more dense stars or what?

[RANGA+ 1,210]

Maybe you people who know more about astronomy can answer this.

When you see a picture of a galaxy, its a big bright center surrounded by the swirling areas, which I know are stars. Just wondering, what is that center? Is it one big star, or more dense stars or what?

 

Scientists believe that at the center of every galaxy is a super-massive black hole, along with a mass of highly condensed stars.

[FSUViking 184]

Image of the Day: "Exploding Black Holes -- More Energy in a Second than the Sun in a Billion Years"

 

 

Where we are in the galaxy

 

 

n artist’s impression of Gliese 581d, an exoplanet about 20.3 light-years away from Earth, in the constellation Libra.

 

Update on Gliese 581d’s Habitability

by Jon Voisey on May 6, 2011

 

Gliese 581d may be habitable. This super-Earth found itself just on the edge of the Goldilocks zone which could make liquid water present on the surface under the right atmospheric conditions. However, the team’s work was based on one dimensional simulations of a column of hypothetical atmospheres on the day side of the planet. To have a better understanding of what Gliese 581d might be like, a three dimensional simulation was in order. Fortunately, a new study from the same team has investigated the possibility with just such an investigation.

 

The new investigation was called for because Gliese 581d is suspected to be tidally locked, much like Mercury is in our own solar system. If so, this would create a permanent night side on the planet. On this side, the temperatures would be significantly lower and gasses such as CO2 and H2O may find themselves in a region where they could no longer remain gaseous, freezing into ice crystals on the surface. Since that surface would never see the light of day, they could not be heated and released back into the atmosphere, thereby depleting the planet of greenhouse gasses necessary to warm the planet, causing what astronomers call an “atmospheric collapse.â€

 

To conduct their simulation the team assumed that the climate was dominated by the greenhouse effects of CO2 and H2O since this is true for all rocky planets with significant atmospheres in our solar system. As with their previous study, they performed several iterations, each with varying atmospheric pressures and compositions. For atmospheres less than 10 bars, the simulations suggested that the atmosphere would collapse, either on the dark side of the planet, or near the poles. Past this, the effects of greenhouse gasses prevented the freezing of the atmosphere and it became stable. Some ice formation still occurred in the stable models where some of the CO2 would freeze in the upper atmosphere, forming clouds in much the same way it does on Mars. However, this had a net warming effect of ~12°C.

 

In other simulations, the team added in oceans of liquid water which would help to moderate the climate. Another effect of this was that the vaporization of water from these oceans also produced warming as it can serve as a greenhouse gas, but the formation of clouds could decrease the global temperature since water clouds increase the albedo of the planet, especially in the red region of the spectra which is the most prevalent form of light from the parent star, a red dwarf. However, as with models without oceans, the tipping point for stable atmospheres tended to be around 10 bars of pressure. Under that, “cooling effects dominated and runaway glaciation occurred, followed by atmospheric collapse.†Above 20 bars, the additional trapping of heat from the water vapor significantly increased temperatures compared to an entirely rocky planet.

 

The conclusion is that Gliese 581d is potentially habitable. The potential for surface water exists for a “wide range of plausible casesâ€. Ultimately, they all depend on the precise thickness and composition of any atmosphere. Since the planet does not transit the star, spectral analysis through transmission of starlight through the atmosphere will not be possible. Yet the team suggests that, since the Gliese 581 system is relatively close to Earth (only 20 lightyears), it may be possible to observe the spectra directly in the infrared portion of the spectra using future generations of instruments. Should the observations match the synthetic spectra predicted for the various habitable planets, this would be taken as strong evidence for the habitability of the planet.

 

SOURCE: Universe Today

[Trinatas 8]

Shit!

 

I was looking for the "OFFICIAL polish my bowling ball thread."

 

I took a wrong turn somewhere.

[SteVo+ 3,702]

Shit!

 

I was looking for the "OFFICIAL polish my bowling ball thread."

 

I took a wrong turn somewhere.

 

I'm gonna say this so that FSUViking doesn't have to. Fuck off.

[FSUViking 184]

"Super-Earth" Exo-Planet Found to Meet Key Crtieria for Life

May 17, 2011

 

A super-Earth exoplanet, Gliese 581d, a rocky world orbiting a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, located around 20 light years from Earth, which makes it one of our closest neighbors, has been confirmed as the first planet outside our solar system to meet key requirements for sustaining life. Astronomers' modelling of planet shows it has the potential to be warm and wet enough to nurture Earth-like life, they said.

 

Gliese 581d orbits on the outer fringes of the star's "Goldilocks zone," where it is not so hot that water boils away, nor so cold that water is perpetually frozen. Instead, the temperature is just right for water to exist in liquid form.

 

"With a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere -- a likely scenario on such a large planet -- the climate of Gliese 581d is not only stable against collapse but warm enough to have oceans, clouds and rainfall," said France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

 

More than 500 planets orbiting other stars have been recorded since 1995, detected mostly by a tiny wobble in stellar light.

 

Until now, the big interest in Gliese 581's roster of planets focussed on Gliese 581g. It leapt into the headlines last year as "Zarmina's World," after its observers announced it had roughly the same mass as Earth's and was also close to the Goldilocks zone, which has since been discounted by many experts. Some experts suspect that the Gliese 581g may not even exist but was simply a hiccup in starlight.

 

Its big brother, Gliese 581d, has a mass at least seven times that of Earth and is about twice our planet's size, according to the new study, which appears in a British publication, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

 

The planet, spotted in 2007, had initially been dismissed as a candidate in the hunt for life. It receives less than a third of the solar radiation Earth gets, and may be "tidally locked," meaning that one side of it always faces the sun, which would give it permanent dayside and nightside.

 

But the new model, devised by CNRS climate scientists Robin Wordsworth, Francois Forget and colleagues, showed surprising potential. Its atmosphere would store heat, thanks to its dense CO2, a greenhouse gas, warmed by the red light from the star.

 

"In all cases, the temperatures allow for the presence of liquid water on the surface," say the researchers. For visting space explorers, though, Gliese 581d would "still be a pretty strange place to visit," the CNRS said. "The denser air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth."

 

A spaceship traveling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years.

 

SOURCE: Daily Galaxy

 

Regardless of the fact it's 300,000 light years away, this is still very exciting.

[RazorStar 4,025]

20 light years*

 

But yeah, we really need to find a mass relay soon.

[FSUViking 184]

20 light years*

 

But yeah, we really need to find a mass relay soon.

 

20 light years traveling at the speed of light - 300,000 using current rocket technology.

[RazorStar 4,025]

That's what a light year is doh... a year traveling at the speed of light. Anyway, I should fix the typo in the topic title that I just noticed.

[SteVo+ 3,702]

That is very exciting news...and I also think it's cool that half the planet is always in sunlight and half is always in darkness. How weird would it be if Earth were like that?