Source: Photo Release eso1503
VLT image of the cometary globule CG4.
Image credits:ESO
Like the gaping mouth of a gigantic celestial creature, the cometary globule CG4 glows menacingly in this new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Although it appears to be big and bright in this picture, this is actually a faint nebula, which makes it very hard for amateur astronomers to spot. The exact nature of CG4 remains a mystery.(read more)
Source: Science
Landscape on the smaller of the two lobes of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko
taken from a distance of just 5 miles (8 km).
Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team
MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
A series of scientific papers in journal Science published on January 23rd offers a complete, if preliminary, look at Rosetta’s comet. And what a wonderful and complex world it is.
Taylor & al. made an abstract of the articles that states that the surface of the comet shows evidence of many active processes and is highly complex. The solid nucleus is an object for which neither horizontal nor vertical variations are modest. He also says that the current comet shape model suggests that the mass is 1013 kg (about 100 million times the mass of the international space station), with a bulk density of ~470 kg/m3 (similar to cork, wood, or aerogel). The low mass and density values strongly constrain the composition and internal structure of the nucleus, implying a relatively fluffy nature, with a porosity of 70 to 80%". There is also some ideas about nucleus surface that appears rich in organic materials, with little sign of water ice.
It seems also that the coma produced by ices sublimating from the nucleus is highly variable, displaying large diurnal and possibly seasonal changes. (learn more)
Source: Astronomy Magazine
Venus & Mercury at dusk on the 6th of January.
Image credits: Derek Rowley.
Mercury reaches greatest elongation on 14th of January, when it lies 19° east of the Sun and hangs 10° above the southwestern horizon a half-hour after sunset. Although the innermost planet glows brightly, at magnitude –0.7, the easiest way to find it is to look 1.3° to the right of brilliant Venus. Binoculars will show you the pair best. When viewed through a telescope, Mercury appears 7" across and slightly more than half-lit.
Use brilliant Venus as a guide to its fainter companion Mercury on the 14th of January.
Source: Universe Today
Comet Lovejoy’s nightly position among the winter stars through January 19.
Image credit: Bob King.
Beautiful New Year’s comet – Comet C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy – passed closest to Earth on January 7, 2015 and therefore (probably) now appears at its brightest in our sky. On January 7, it was 70.2 million km away and shining at an apparent magnitude of +4. Many across the globe have already seen this comet as it has brightened in recent weeks. Plus, the moon is no longer a hindrance. More good news. The comet has been moving northward on the sky’s dome. On January 9, it crossed over into the easy-to-find constellation Taurus (the Bull). Look to the photo above to try to spot it in the night sky. (learn more)
Source: Universe Today
Before and after.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/UA
The surface of Mars is a well worn place in the Solar System, heavily pounded by countless meteor impacts. And some of these craters are hundreds of millions of years old. So it’s unusual for there to be a completely fresh impact on the surface of Mars: but that’s just what NASA scientists discovered looking through a recent batch of images returned from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
You’re looking at a composite of two images taken by the Mars Context Camera, an instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter the most recnt one on the right and an older photograph taken of the same region in February 2012 on the left. On the older one there was just a bunch of old craters. And then, in the newer image, taken June 2014, this fresh scar on the surface of Mars is clearly visible. (learn more)
Source: ESA/Hubble Photo Release heic1502
Andromeda Galaxy.
Image credits: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton (University of Washington, USA),
B. F. Williams (University of Washington, USA), L. C. Johnson
(University of Washington, USA), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the sharpest and biggest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy — otherwise known as Messier 31. The enormous image is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40 000 light-years.(learn more)
Source: ESA/Hubble Photo Release heic1501
The Pillars of Creation.
Image credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured many breathtaking images of the Universe, but one snapshot stands out from the rest: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. In 1995 Hubble’s iconic image revealed never-before-seen details in the giant columns and now the telescope is kickstarting its 25th year in orbit with an even clearer, and more stunning, image of these beautiful structures.
Source: ESO Photo Release eso1501
The Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the
La Silla Observatory in Chile snapped this image of the dark nebula LDN 483.
Image credit: ESO
Some of the stars appear to be missing in this intriguing new ESO image. But the black gap in this glitteringly beautiful starfield is not really a gap, but rather a region of space clogged with gas and dust. This dark cloud is called LDN 483 — for Lynds Dark Nebula 483. Such clouds are the birthplaces of future stars. The Wide Field Imager, an instrument mounted on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, captured this image of LDN 483 and its surroundings. (learn more)
Source: Gemini Planet Imager
First light image of thedisk around the young star HR4796A. Image credit: Marshall Perrin (Space Telescope Science Institute) / the GPI Team.On the left: all radiation; on the right: polarized radiation.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of 51 Peg b, the first exoplanet detected around a Sun-like star. And although the number of sheer detections in the years since have been remarkable, it’s also remarkable how little we still know about these alien worlds, save for their distances from their host stars, their radii, and sometimes their masses.
But the ability to directly image these worlds provides the opportunity to change all that. “It’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Marshall Perrin from the Space Telescope Science Institute in a press conference at the American Astronomical Society’s meeting earlier today. “In the long run, we think that imaging offers perhaps the best path to characterizing rocky planets on Earth-like orbits.”
Perrin highlighted two intriguing results from the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), an instrument designed not only to resolve the dim light of an exoplanet, but also analyze a planet’s atmospheric temperature and composition.
Source: Universe Today
Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
How far is the Sun? It seems as if one could hardly ask a more straightforward question. Yet this very inquiry bedeviled astronomers for more than two thousand years.
Certainly it’s a question of nearly unrivaled importance, overshadowed in history perhaps only by the search for the size and mass of the Earth. Known today as the astronomical unit, the distance serves as our reference within the solar system and the baseline for measuring all distances in the Universe.
Thinkers in Ancient Greece were among the first to try and construct a comprehensive model of the cosmos. With nothing but naked-eye observations, a few things could be worked out. The Moon loomed large in the sky so it was probably pretty close. Solar eclipses revealed that the Moon and Sun were almost exactly the same angular size, but the Sun was so much brighter that perhaps it was larger but farther away (this coincidence regarding the apparent size of the Sun and Moon has been of almost indescribable importance in advancing astronomy). The rest of the planets appeared no larger than the stars, yet seemed to move more rapidly; they were likely at some intermediate distance. But, could we do any better than these vague descriptions? With the invention of geometry, the answer became a resounding yes.(...)
Read the rest of How Did We Find the Distance to the Sun?
Source: ESA/Herschel
Galaxy Cluster Fireworks.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF/P.Tozzi, et al; Optical: NAOJ/Subaru and ESO/VLT; Infrared: ESA/Herschel/J. Santos, et al.
In the present universe galaxy clusters cores are typically populated by massive "red and dead" galaxies. At some point in cosmic history, however, these galaxies must have formed the bulk of their stars. Now Herschel has observed a massive cluster labelled XDCP0044 at redshift z=1.58 (lookback time ~9.5 Gyr) where galaxies in the cluster core exhibit strikingly high amounts of star formation, the first time this has been seen in a massive cluster (Santos et al. 2015).
For more information on this discovery and figure captions see the ESA Herschel SciTech web release.
Source: ESA/XMM-Newton
X-ray emission from dwarf galaxy J1329+3234.
Image credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/N. Secrest, et al. (2015)
First impressions can be deceptive – astronomers have used ESA's X-ray satellite XMM-Newton to find a massive black hole hungrily feeding within a tiny dwarf galaxy, despite there being no hint of this black hole from optical observations.(learn more)
Source: NASA Science News
New research shows that terrestrial gamma-ray flashes arise from an unexpected diversity of thunderstorms storms and may be more common than previously thought.(learn more)
