the-absolute-best-posts:

Submitted by iaydl

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(Source: rainbowparoxysm)

unknownskywalker:

Galactic bridge

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, appears in this stunning wide angle view as a bridge which seems to connect Paranal Mountain, the VLT site (on the left) with the nearby peak, home of the VISTA survey telescope. The brightest area, crossed by dark lanes corresponds to the central bulge of our galaxy that we see perfectly edge-on.

On the right, just above the VISTA telescope, the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is clearly visible as an elongated bright spot. M31 is a giant spiral galaxy, larger than the Milky Way, member of our Local Group and located some 2 million light-years away.

Because of the exceptional quality of the sky, stars are still perfectly visible just above the horizon, where clouds typically cover the Pacific Ocean, only 12 km away from the observatory.

unknownskywalker:

Strange new “species” of ultra-red galaxy discovered

In the distant reaches of the universe, almost 13 billion light-years from Earth, a strange species of galaxy lay hidden. Cloaked in dust and dimmed by the intervening distance, even the Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t spy it. It took the infrared revealing power of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to uncover not one, but four remarkably red galaxies.

While astronomers can describe the members of this new “species,” they can’t explain what makes them so ruddy. The newfound galaxies are more than 60 times brighter in the infrared than they are at the reddest colors Hubble can detect.

Galaxies can be very red for several reasons. They might be very dusty. They might contain many old, red stars. Or they might be very distant, in which case the expansion of the universe stretches their light to longer wavelengths and hence redder colors. All three reasons seem to apply to the newfound galaxies.

All four galaxies are grouped near each other and appear to be physically associated, rather than being a chance line-up. Due to their great distance, we see them as they were only a billion years after the Big Bang.

Next, researchers hope to measure an accurate redshift for the galaxies, which will require more powerful instruments like the Large Millimeter Telescope or Atacama Large Millimeter Array. They also plan to search for more examples of this new “species” of extremely red galaxies.

Above: This artist’s conception portrays the four extremely red galaxies that lie almost 13 billion light-years from Earth. One galaxy shows signs of an active galactic nucleus, shown here as twin jets streaming out from a central black hole.

(Source: thewoodbetweentheworlds)

unknownskywalker:

In the Dragonfish mouth: Next generation of superstars to stir up our galaxy

Astronomers from the University of Toronto using ESO telescopes have found the most numerous batch of young, supermassive stars yet observed in our galaxy: hundreds of thousands of stars, including several hundreds of the most massive kind —blue stars dozens of times heavier than our Sun. The light these newborn stars emit is so intense it has pushed out and heated the gas that gave them birth, carving out a glowing hollow shell about a hundred light-years across.

Such large nurseries of massive stars have been noticed in other galaxies, but were so far away that all stars are often blurred together on images taken by telescopes. This time, the massive stars are right here in our galaxy, and astronomers can even count them individually. The cluster of bright stars is located nearly halfway across our galaxy, 30,000 light-years away, and the line of sight is blocked by dust.

The name “Dragonfish” was suggested after comparing the infrared image of the celestial gas shell with Peter Shearer’s illustration of the deep-sea creature with the same name. The astronomical image resembles a dark gaping mouth-like shape with teeth, two eyes, and a bright fin to the right. The “mouth” is the volume from which the gas has been cleared by the light of the stars, pushed outward to form a shell that is particularly bright in spots corresponding to the eyes and the fin of the animal.

The gas is cooler than what is heating it, and thus glows redder than the blue stars. Compared to the colours of a rainbow ranging from red to blue, most of the light emitted by the heated gas is in fact redder than red, and thus infrared. At the other end of the rainbow, the giant stars in the cluster are bluer than blue, and emit mostly in the ultraviolet, which is blocked by dust and thus not visible on the image.

The inside of the shell is not quite empty. For each of the few hundred superstars astronomers may have spotted, there are thousands of average stars more akin to our Sun. When the superstars have burned through their fuel, they will explode and release metals and other heavy atoms that may help form rocky planets around smaller, quieter stars —perhaps providing the building blocks for life.

unknownskywalker:

Astronomers look to neighboring galaxy for star formation insight

An international team of astronomers has mapped in detail the star-birthing regions of the nearest star-forming galaxy to our own, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Using a 22-meter-diameter radio telescope in Australia, the astronomers mapped more than 100 molecular clouds in the LMC and estimated their sizes and masses, identifying regions with ample material for making stars.

Although astronomers have a working theory of how individual stars form, they know very little about what triggers the process or the environmental conditions that are optimal for star birth. Most of the molecular gas mass in a galaxy is apportioned to a few large clouds. However, the team found many more low-mass clouds than they expected – so many that a majority of the dense gas may be sprinkled across the galaxy in these small molecular clouds, rather than clumped together in a few large blobs.

The large numbers of these relatively low-mass clouds means that star-forming conditions in the LMC may be relatively widespread and easy to achieve. The team compared their molecular cloud maps to maps of infrared radiation, which reveal where young stars are heating cosmic dust. They exploited a carefully selected sample of newborn heavy stars so young that they are still deeply embedded in cocoons of gas and dust.

It turns out that there’s actually very nice correspondence between these young massive stars and molecular clouds. Astronomers assume that these stars have to form in molecular clouds, and it tells that the molecular clouds do hang around long enough for astronomers to see them associated with these massive young stars.

Above: A color image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy combining maps of neutral atomic hydrogen gas (red), hydrogen ionized by nearby young stars (blue), and new data from Wong’s team which roughly trace dense clouds of molecular hydrogen (green).

unknownskywalker:

Milky way by Boris Mrdja

theworldwelivein:

Stars, Milky Way, Jackson Lake, Grand Teton NP, Wyoming
© IronRodArt - Royce Bair

Technical Info: Click here for exposure, camera, lens, and how to.

dirtcrumbgoddess:

Cannibalistic Galaxies

Billions of years just passed before your eyes

Our neighboring galaxy Andromeda (M31) shows evidence of being a past cannibal and is 3 times the size of the Milky Way. We are predicted to be “consumed” within the next 7 billion years. “It would be a beautiful night sky, it will be quite spectacular.” -Author/Astrophysicist Mark Irwin

beautiful

(Source: fuckyeahtheuniverse)

loveyourchaos:

(by astronomicalfamily)

fuckyeahtheuniverse:

M31, the Andromeda galaxy