Here are a few spectacular images of Galaxies and Nebulae taken by the Hubble Telescope in 2016. A cosmic tapestry that will inspire a new generation of young scientists.
The Porpoise Galaxy
The Porpoise galaxy is the porpoise-shaped galaxy NGC 2936, a spiral galaxy that got too close to the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 2937 (the bright spiral galaxy below in the image) and is being distorted by the close gravitational interaction. A burst of young blue stars forms the nose of the porpoise toward the right of the upper galaxy, while the center of the spiral appears as the eye. To some eyes, the galaxy pair, together known as Arp 142, look like a penguin protecting an egg.
Arp 142 lies about 300 million light years away toward the constellation of the Water Snake (Hydra). In a billion years or so the two galaxies will likely merge into one larger galaxy. apod.nasa.gov/...
The Calabash Nebula
The Calabash Nebula (OH 231.8+04.2) is a spectacular example of the death of a low-mass star like the sun. The star is going through a rapid transformation from a red giant to a planetary nebula, during which it blows its outer layers of gas and dust out into the surrounding space. The recently ejected material is spat out in opposite directions with immense speed — the gas shown in yellow is moving close to one million kilometers per hour. The ejected material helps form future planets and seeds elements and molecules in interstellar space in its surrounding galaxy.
Over the next thousand years the nebula is expected to evolve into a fully-fledged planetary nebula.
The nebula is also known as the Rotten Egg Nebula because it contains a lot of sulphur, an element that, when combined with other elements, smells like a rotten egg — but luckily, it resides over 5,000 light-years away in the constellation of Puppis. www.nasa.gov/...
The Red Spider Nebula
The Red Spider Nebula is a two-lobed nebula, located 3,000 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius, near the heart of the Milky Way. This warm planetary nebula harbors one of the hottest stars known, a white dwarf, and its powerful stellar winds generate waves 100 billion kilometers high. The waves are caused by supersonic shocks, formed when the local gas is compressed and heated in front of the rapidly expanding lobes. The atoms caught in the shock emit strong visible light radiation. The central star very likely has a binary companion. www.nasa.gov/...
The Butterfly Nebula
The Butterfly Nebula (NGC 6302) with a wingspan over 3 light-years, lies about 4,000 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.
The dying central star of this nebula has become exceptionally hot, shining brightly in ultraviolet light but hidden from direct view by an equatorial dense torus of gas and dust. The structure in the nebula is among the most complex ever observed in planetary nebulae.
The dust detected in NGC 6302 contains both Oxygen-rich material (i.e. silicates) and Carbon-rich material (i.e. poly-aromatic-hydrocarbons). Stars are usually either O-rich or C-rich, the change from the former to the latter occurring late in the evolution of the star due to nuclear and chemical changes in the star's atmosphere. NGC 6302 belongs to a group of objects where hydrocarbon molecules formed in an oxygen-rich environment.
www.nasa.gov/...
Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant
The Veil Nebula is the remnant of a massive star that went supernova and exploded just 8,000 years ago.
The fast-moving blast wave from the ancient explosion is plowing into a wall of cool, denser interstellar gas, emitting light. The nebula lies along the edge of a large bubble of low-density gas that was blown into space by the dying star prior to its self-detonation
The entire nebula is 110 light-years across, covering six full moons in the sky as seen from Earth, and resides about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. hubblesite.org/...
Star Cluster R136
Star cluster R136 is only a few light-years across and is located in the Tarantula Nebula within the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 170,000 light-years away. The young cluster hosts many extremely massive, hot and luminous stars whose energy is mostly radiated in the ultraviolet range of its light spectrum.
As well as finding dozens of stars exceeding 50 solar masses, HST has discovered nine very massive and extremely bright stars in the cluster, all more than 100 times more massive than the sun. Together these nine stars outshine the sun by a factor of 30 million. www.nasa.gov/...
The Cat’s Paw Nebula
The Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334, upper right) and the Lobster Nebula (NGC 6357, lower left) are regions of active star formation where hot young stars are causing the surrounding hydrogen gas to glow red.
The three toepads as well as the claw-like regions in the nearby Lobster Nebula, are regions of gas — predominantly hydrogen — energized by the light of newborn stars. With masses around 10 times that of the Sun, these hot stars radiate intense ultraviolet light. When this light encounters hydrogen atoms still lingering in the stellar nursery that produced the stars, the atoms become ionized. Accordingly, the vast, cloud-like objects that glow with this light from hydrogen (and other) atoms are known as emission nebulae. eso.org/...
This image was taken by the ESO VLT Survey Telescope, not Hubble.
The Crab Nebula
The Crab Nebula, 6,500 light-years from Earth, is the result of a bright supernova explosion, which was seen by Chinese and other astronomers in the year 1054. At its center is a super-dense neutron star, a pulsar, rotating 30 times per second, shooting out rotating lighthouse-like beams of radio waves and light. The nebula's intricate shape is caused by a complex interplay of the pulsar, a fast-moving wind of particles coming from the pulsar, and material originally ejected by the supernova explosion and by the star itself before the explosion.
This image combines data from five different telescopes: the VLA (radio) in red; Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) in yellow; Hubble Space Telescope (visible) in green; XMM-Newton (ultraviolet) in blue; and Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-ray) in purple.
Rose of Galaxies
Arp 273 consists of a pair of interacting galaxies and is also known as the Rose of Galaxies. This famous image was released to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 2011.
The larger of the spiral galaxies (UGC 1810) has a disk that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it (UGC 1813). A swath of blue jewels across the top is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot young blue stars. These massive stars glow fiercely in ultraviolet light.
Arp 273 lies in the constellation Andromeda and is roughly 300 million light-years away from Earth.
www.nasa.gov/...
The Milky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. Here is a video from NASA that zooms into the core of the Milky Way. Located 27,000 light-years away, this region is packed with a million stars, crammed into the volume of space between us and our closest star Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. At the very hub of our galaxy, this star cluster surrounds the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, which is about 4 million times the mass of our sun.
Our Future
The animation below depicts the collision between our Milky Way galaxy and the nearby Andromeda galaxy. Hubble observations indicate that the two galaxies, pulled together by their mutual gravity, will crash together about 4 billion years from now and merge over the next few billion years to form a single galaxy. The galaxy product of the collision has been nicknamed Milkomeda or Milkdromeda.
Scientists predict predict a 12% chance that the Solar System will be ejected from the new galaxy. Such an event would have no adverse effect on the system and the chances of any sort of disturbance to the Sun or planets themselves may be remote.
However, our Sun itself is going to expand and get much brighter in the next few billion years. In approximately 5 billion years, it will turn into a red giant and will grow so large that it will engulf Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth. Earth will become uninhabitable long before the galactic collision. So, we better “evolve" and find ourselves a new home before these cosmic events occur ;)
Galaxy
A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, planets, gas, dust and dark matter.
Galaxies range in size from dwarfs with just a few billion (109) stars to giants with one hundred trillion (1014) stars. Many galaxies are thought to harbor black holes at their active centers.
Recent estimates of the number of galaxies in the observable universe range from 200 billion (2×1011) to 2 trillion (2×1012) or more.
Our home galaxy, the Milky Way is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars and 100 billion planets.
Galaxies can interact with each other, collide, pass through each other, pass by each other in near misses and merge.
The Milky Way galaxy is currently in the process of cannibalizing the smaller Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy and the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy.
Nebula
A Nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases not stars. Some nebulae form from gas that is already in the interstellar medium while others are produced by stars. A nebula is much smaller than a galaxy in size and many are part of larger galaxies.
The Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was launched in 1990 and is still going strong. With a 2.4-meter mirror, Hubble's four main instruments observe in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared spectra. After launch by Space Shuttle Discovery in 1990 into an orbit 540 km above the surface of the Earth, five subsequent Space Shuttle missions repaired, upgraded, and replaced systems on the telescope, including all five of the main instruments.
The James Webb Space Telescope, a more powerful space telescope with a 6.5 m primary mirror, operating in the Infrared spectrum, is being readied for launch in October 2018. For more details, please see the diary at www.dailykos.com/….
NASA Funding
This is but a tiny sample of the enormous work done by NASA and our science agencies. NASA’s operating budget is around $19B, less than the estimated cost to build the stupid Mexican Wall, not including its operating and maintenance costs. Let’s make sure that our congressional reps. are aware.
References
- Hubble Telescope — hubblesite.org
- Hubble Wiki — en.wikipedia.org/...
- Hubble Twitter — twitter.com/...
- Galaxy and Nebulae photo gallery — hubblesite.org/… hubblesite.org/… eso.org/...
- James Webb Space Telescope diary — www.dailykos.com/...
- Other diaries on Space and Science at — www.dailykos.com/...