If you’re a newly forming star system, there’s no better place to be than a stellar nursery. All those raw elements make the perfect building blocks of stars and planets. The problem is that super hot giant stars can release great torrents of radiation, blasting away newly forming planets.
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Matter Should Dominate the Universe Forever
Thanks to Einstein, we know that matter and energy are just different versions of one another. E=mc2 tells you how much energy you’d get if you converted mass into energy. Don’t try, it’s hard. Physicists were concerned that all matter in the Universe would eventually decay into radiation after trillions and trillions of years of time.
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Hubble’s Detailed Photograph of the Carina Nebula
It’s hard to believe, but the Hubble Space Telescope has been churning out discovery after discovery for 17 years now. To celebrate the anniversary, NASA and ESA released a high-resolution image taken by Hubble of the Carina Nebula. And what a photograph!
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Observatories Get the Jump on Gamma Ray Bursts
Even though gamma ray bursts are the most powerful known explosions in the Universe, you’ve got to move quickly if you want to capture useful science from them. A new press release from the European Southern Observatory goes into detail about how they work quickly to catch a burst’s fading light.
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Supersonic “Bullets” of Gas Ejected from the Orion Nebula
This beautiful photograph shows a small portion of the star-forming Orion Nebula. The strange, wake-like structures are supersonic “bullets” of gas ejected from the nebula. What actually caused these ejections is still unknown, but astronomers think there was a recent violent event that fired them out.
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Jupiter As Seen From Saturn
It’s not a great picture of Jupiter, but that’s not the point. The point is that the photograph was taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Saturn.
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A Very Long Lasting Gamma Ray Burst
Gamma ray bursts are some of the most energetic events in the Universe. Even more amazing is just how quickly it all unfolds. One moment, everything’s quiet. A moment later, there’s a tremendous explosion that we can see from billions of light years away. And just seconds later, it’s gone again – the afterglow will be around for a few days, but that’s it. Astronomers and spacecraft have only a few seconds to a few minutes to find the explosion and study it before it fades away.
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New Globular Cluster Discovered
Globular star clusters are gigantic collections of stars formed at the same time, and held together by their mutual gravity. Amazingly, they’re some of the oldest objects in the Universe – some are more than 10 billion years old. More than 150 globular clusters have been discovered in the Milky Way by astronomers. And now you can add one more to that list.
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Podcast: The Story of Galaxy Evolution
Our Milky Way is a complex and majestic barred spiral galaxy. But 13.7 billion years ago it began, like all galaxies, from the elementary particles formed in the Big Bang. How did our galaxy grow from nothing to the hundreds of billions of stars we see today?
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A Baby Picture of the Sun
Obviously there’s no way to see what our Sun looked like when it was still forming billions of years ago, but you can do the next best thing. Find a newly forming star with very similar mass and chemical constituents, and see how it’s starting out.
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