Author: Fraser Cain

NASA’s Swift satellite is pretty jittery as space telescopes go. It’s designed to wait until it detects a gamma ray burst, and then swing around quickly to start observing. But it’s actually equipped with some sensitive instruments, including a wonderful telescope designed for observing in the ultraviolet. In between searching for gamma ray bursts, Swift found the time to build up the most detailed ultraviolet image of an entire galaxy ever taken.

The ultraviolet spectrum is outside the normal range of visual light that we can see with our eyes. But it can sure affect you. Spend to much time out in the sunlight, and the ultraviolet radiation will give you a sunburn.

Young, hot, newly forming stars also give off a tremendous amount of ultraviolet radiation. Look at a galaxy in the ultraviolet, and you see the regions of star formation.

And that’s just what Swift did. The space telescope zeroed in on M33 – the Triangulum Galaxy. The galaxy is about half the size of the Milky Way, and located about 2.9 million light-years from Earth.

Even though it’s relatively small, M33 is awash in star formation.

“The ultraviolet colors of star clusters tell us their ages and compositions,” says Swift team member Stephen Holland of NASA Goddard. “With Swift’s high spatial resolution, we can zero in on the clusters themselves and separate out nearby stars and gas clouds. This will enable us to trace the star-forming history of the entire galaxy.â€?

This image is actually a mosaic of 13 individual images, captured between December 23, 2007 and January 4, 2008. Astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center then stitched the individual pieces together into a single image. It’s the most detailed ultraviolet image ever taken of an entire galaxy.

Original Source: NASA News Release

When researchers examine meteorites, they often find them sprinkled with teeny tiny diamonds – 25,000 times smaller than a grain of sand. In fact, these nanodiamonds make up 3% of the carbon found in meteorites. Astronomers think diamonds might actually be common out there in the Universe, and they’ve developed a new technique to find them.

The first hint of space diamonds came in the 1980s, when scientists studying meteorites discovered they were sprinkled with nanometer-sized diamonds. This has to be an indication of the environment of the stellar environment where the meteorites formed. There could be 10,000 trillion particles in a single gram of dust and gas.

Researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center developed a computer simulation that simulated the conditions of the interstellar medium that would be rich in nanodiamonds. According to their simulation, clouds with these particles should be visible to NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The diamonds haven’t been seen in space because astronomers haven’t been looking in the right places. Since it takes a lot of high-energy ultraviolet light to make the diamonds shine, the researchers think Spitzer should be examining the environments around very hot, young stars, which produce large amounts of ultraviolet radiation.

Here on Earth, diamonds are formed by the intense heat and pressure of the Earth’s interior working over long periods. So how can they form in space? Instead of the heat and pressure we have on Earth, their environment is the exact opposite: diffuse clouds of cold molecular gas.

Astronomers aren’t sure, but now that they’ve got a technique to spot them with Spitzer, they’ll be studying gas clouds to understand the common conditions.

Original Source: NASA/Spitzer News Release