It’s not the years…it’s the mileage 🤠
Scientists studying the origins of our galaxy can sometimes feel like they are cosmic archeologists, uncovering the building blocks of our galaxy’s earliest days. One way astronomers can get a better sense of the foundations of our solar system is by observing ancient stellar relics like white dwarf stars, the immensely dense remnants of once-massive stars.
@NASAHubble captured a collection of these galactic monuments 26,000 light-years from Earth. These primordial remains are from stars that formed quickly, at least on a cosmic timescale, in less than 2 billion years. Since we know the location of these white dwarf stars, we can tell how fast and far they move compared to the rest of our galaxy.
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Calamida and K. Sahu, and the SWEEPS Science Team
#FlashingLights#Stars#Hubble#Universe#Whoa#NASA#Astrophotography#Astronomy#Space#Starlight
A Cosmic Flower in Bloom 🌸
Captured in all of its glory by our Spitzer Space Telescope, this delicate cosmic "flower" can be found in the Ring Nebula. The outer shell of this planetary nebula is formed from material ejected from a dying star. Despite the star decaying, it releases a beautiful display that looks surprisingly similar to the delicate petals of a camellia blossom.
The “ring” in the center of the image is a thick cylinder of glowing gas and dust around the doomed star. As the star begins to run out of fuel, its core becomes smaller and hotter, boiling off its outer layers.
Spitzer's infrared array camera detected this material expelled from the withering star. Previous images of the Ring Nebula taken by visible-light telescopes usually showed just the inner glowing loop of gas around the star. The outer regions resembling petals are especially prominent in this image because Spitzer saw infrared light from hydrogen molecules that absorbed ultraviolet radiation from the star, or were heated by powerful winds from the star.
Located about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra, this is one of the best examples of a planetary nebula, and a favorite target of amateur astronomers.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
#NASA#SpitzerTelescope#Spitzer#Space#Cosmos#AstroPhotography#Flowers#Spring#Bloom#RingNebula#Universe#Galaxy#Stars
The stars are aligning...so to speak. ⭐️ On March 11, the @NASAWebb Space Telescope team fully aligned the observatory’s mirrors with its primary imager, keeping its optics on track to meet or exceed science goals. “We now know we have built the right telescope,” said Ritva Keski-Kuha, deputy optical telescope element manager for Webb at @NASAGoddard. First science images are expected in about three months. So what do we see here? While the purpose of this image was to focus on the bright star at the center for alignment evaluation, Webb's optics and NIRCam imager are so sensitive that the galaxies and stars seen in the background show up. Each of the primary mirror segments have been adjusted to produce one unified image of the same star using only the NIRCam instrument. A red filter was used to enhance visual contrast. The next image shows a new “selfie,” created using a special lens inside of NIRCam. The lens is strictly for engineering purposes. Once fully operational, Webb will help solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program in collaboration with the @EuropeanSpaceAgency and the @CanadianSpaceAgency. #UnfoldTheUniverse#JWST#Webb#NASAWebb#JamesWebbSpaceTelescope#NASA#Space#Stars#Science#Selfie
Got some stardust in your eyes? 🤩 A pair of cosmic dust bunnies are pictured here by @NASAHubble. The dark tendrils threading through both galaxies are made from galactic dust. While beautiful, they add complexities to observing the galaxies. Dust in the universe tends to scatter and absorb blue light, making stars appear dimmer and redder in a process called “reddening.” The dusty pair lie in the constellation Virgo but are not as similar as they appear. One galaxy is 47 million light-years from Earth while the other is 212 million light-years away. The enormous distances between the two galaxies means that they are not interacting and only appear to overlap because of a chance alignment from our earthly perspective. Astronomers create maps of the dust in the foreground galaxy’s spiral arms, by measuring how dust in the foreground galaxy affects starlight from the background galaxy. These “dust maps” help researchers calibrate measurements of everything from cosmological distances to the types of stars that call these galaxies home. Credit: NASA/ @EuropeanSpaceAgency/Hubble, T. Boeker, B. Holwerda, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab/Dark Energy Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab/National Science Foundation/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: R. Colombari #NASA#NASAHubble#Astronomy#Galaxies#SpaceTelescope#DustBunnies#Dusty#Space#Stars
There are three sides to this story 👇 A triangular star-birthing frenzy is fueled by a spectacular collision between two galaxies in this image captured by @NASAHubble. Astronomers suggest that as the galaxies passed by each other they ignited the uniquely-shaped star-formation firestorm, where thousands of stars are bursting to life on the right-hand side of the image. The gravitational tussle between the two galaxies shows their differences: the galaxy on the left contains old stars and no new star birth because it lost its gas long ago, well before this galactic encounter. This is the galaxy responsible for yanking taffy-like strands of gas from its partner, stoking the streamers of young, blue stars that appear to form a bridge between the two galaxies. The galaxy on the right is home to younger stars no older than 1 million to 2 million years forming close to its center – Hubble’s sharpness reveals even some individual stars. They are among the brightest and most massive in the galaxy. Most of the brilliant blue clumps are groupings of stars. The pink blobs are giant, young, star clusters still enshrouded in dust and gas. Credit: NASA, @EuropeanSpaceAgency, STScI, Julianne Dalcanton (Center for Computational Astrophysics / Flatiron Inst. and University of Washington); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) #NASA#Cosmos#Hubble#Galaxies#AstroPhotography#Triangles#Space#Stars
Dancing with the Stars 💃
@NASAHubble captured this stellar image of two interacting galaxies, 200 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pegasus. The larger of the two galaxies shown here, is a barred spiral galaxy contains a supermassive black hole, and a bright ring of star cluster, which is an area of intense star formation.
If these interacting galaxies start to collide, they will approach one another and conduct a delicate "dance," gas in the galaxies will lose angular momentum and funnel toward the center, triggering additional star formation at an accelerated rate.
Studying galaxies like these will help scientists learn how galaxies with supermassive black holes at their center create stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
#NASA#Stars#Dancing#BlackHole#Hubble#Science#Astronomy#Galaxies#Galaxy