Cosmic Waves! 🌊
What at first sight may appear to be a cosmic current with turquoise-tinted streams and nebulous strands reaching through the stars is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The brightly glowing plumes of this image capture part of the LMC called the Tarantula Nebula, a small nearby galaxy that orbits our Milky Way and appears as a blurred blob in the night sky.
Traditionally, images of the LMC aren’t so tranquil. For this image @NASAHubble researchers substituted the lens filter which selects red light and replaced it with a filter letting through near-infrared light. The result: the dominant hydrogen gasses which typically present an image brimming in hues of pink are replaced by other less prominent emission lines encompassing shades of blue and green.
Unique data such as this helps shed new light on our understanding of the cosmos. This data is part of a project that gathered together and processed over 1,000 images taken using the Hubble telescope. This collection of data is used to study a wide range of astronomical topics, from gravitational lensing, which is how the gravity of massive galactic objects bends light, to exploring and studying the creation of stars in distant galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA: acknowledgment: Josh Barrington
#thespaceport#spaceexploration#hubblespacetelescope#NASA#ESA#learn#Galaxies#galaxy#Cosmos#Astronomy#Astrophotography#Universe#space#stars#star#science#pic#picoftheday#pictureoftheday#picture#photo#photooftheday#insta#instagram#milkyway#instalike#instaspace#astro#instafollow#nebula
Cosmic cannibalism :
Study of a dead star - a white dwarf G238-44 has revealed that it is siphoning off debris from both the system’s inner and outer reaches - both rocky-metallic and icy matter.
The archival data of Hubble Space Telescope and other NASA observatories was part of the study.
The study of this "cannibalism" is helping scientists find out about the violent nature of evolved planetary systems and how new systems form, contents of planets etc.
Comets and asteroids are thought to have "delivered" the water to Earth, sparking the conditions necessary for life. The content of bodies being consumed by the white dwarf suggests, that icy reservoirs might be common among planetary systems, as per researchers.
,
,
,
,
,
#space#astronomy#nasa#earth#hubblespacetelescope#planets#stars#whitedwarfstar#hubbletelescope#comets#asteroids#planetformation#wateronplanets#cosmiccannibalism#spacelovers#astronomylovers#spaceexploration#hubblearchives
Image/illustration credit :
NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)