New images from the Japanese Subaru telescope show how a nearby young star ended its infancy rapidly. The star, called HD 141569A, has a hole in the disc of gas and dust surrounding it. Astronomers think that the star rapidly ionized its surrounding gas, and then pushed it away with its intense solar radiation. The gap is located about the same distance from the star as Saturn’s orbit, and it lends additional evidence to theories about how discs of material evolve around young stars.
Continue reading “Young Star Grows Up Quickly”
Nearly a Thousand Years After the Death of a Star
In 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers recorded the temporary brightening of a star in the constellation Taurus. Nearly 1000 years later, we look in the same region and see the exploded remnants of a dead star: the Crab Nebula. This composite photograph of the Crab Nebula was made by merging images from Hubble, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows only a hail of high-energy particles and expanding debris cloud that once was a massive star.
Continue reading “Nearly a Thousand Years After the Death of a Star”
Globular Clusters Sort their Stars
Globular clusters are regions of space where stars are densely packed together – 10,000 times more dense than our local stellar neighbourhood. New evidence from the Hubble Space Telescope has shown that globular clusters will sort out themselves out, hoarding more massive stars in the centre, and pushing the less massive stars out to the edges. Hubble captured images of globular cluster 47 Tucanae for nearly 7 years, allowing astronomers to carefully plot the positions of stars moving in the cluster, and then calculate how close they were to the centre.
Continue reading “Globular Clusters Sort their Stars”
Brown Dwarf Companion Seen Directly
Astronomers have directly imaged a brown dwarf companion to the star HD 3651. This star is already known to host an extrasolar planet – less massive than Saturn, but sitting within the orbit of Mercury. HD 3651 is slightly less massive than the Sun, and is located 36 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. The brown dwarf, or HD 3651B, is probably between 20 and 60 Jovian masses, and has a temperature between 500 and 600 degrees Celsius.
Continue reading “Brown Dwarf Companion Seen Directly”
Another Galaxy Smashed Through Andromeda 200 Million Years Ago
Astronomers have gathered evidence that the Andromeda Galaxy collided with dwarf galaxy M32 about 200 million years ago. The evidence was seen by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which measured the distribution of gas rings in the galaxy’s disk. These dust rings allowed astronomers to calculate when M32 smashed through Andromeda’s galactic plane, like tracing ripples in a pond.
Continue reading “Another Galaxy Smashed Through Andromeda 200 Million Years Ago”
Colliding Spiral Galaxies Captured by Hubble
This Hubble photograph shows two spiral galaxies colliding together. Known as the Antenna Galaxies, aka NGC 4038-4039, these two galaxies started interacting a few hundred million years ago. Thanks to the galactic interaction, perturbed gas clouds in both galaxies collapse into regions of furious star formation (these are the blue regions). Most of these regions will disperse their stars into galactic disks, but some will remain on as super star clusters – similar to the globular star clusters we see in our Milky Way.
Continue reading “Colliding Spiral Galaxies Captured by Hubble”
Gas Bubble Photo Wins NRAO Prize
A beautiful photograph taken by Jayanne English and Jeroen Stil has won a $1,000 prize from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. The photograph shows a dusty bubble of gas blown inside the gas disk of the Milky Way. This galactic shell’s, officially known as GS 62.1+0.2-18, is located about 30,000 light-years from Earth. The bubble is sculpted by the powerful interstellar winds and radiation from a few dozen massive, hot stars.
Continue reading “Gas Bubble Photo Wins NRAO Prize”
Hubbles Sees Galaxies Under Construction
The latest image released from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a beautiful view of a large galaxy being assembled from a collection of small galaxies. The large galaxy, officially known as MRC 1138-262, but nicknamed the Spider Galaxy, contains dozens of smaller star-forming galaxies. It’s incredibly far away, 10.6 billion years, so we see it as it looked only 3 billion years after the Big Bang. These observations match commonly held theories about how small irregular galaxies merge together to form the larger structures we see today.
Continue reading “Hubbles Sees Galaxies Under Construction”
Astronomers Peer Inside a Quasar
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe, and astronomers believe they’re caused by the outpouring of radiation from the environment around an actively feeding supermassive black hole. New research using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has looked inside a quasar, to see the disk of material spiraling into the black hole. Astronomers used the gravity from a relatively nearby galaxy as a gravitational lens to focus the light from the more distant quasar, giving this impressive view.
Continue reading “Astronomers Peer Inside a Quasar”
Planets Can’t Form in Rough Neighbourhoods
It takes a nice safe environment for planets to form, according to new data gathered by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The powerful infrared observatory recently observed powerful O-type stars in the process of stripping away nearby planet-forming disks. The gigantic stars can have as much as 100 times the mass of the Sun, and generate killer solar winds. In one case, the planetary disc takes on a comet-like appearance, as planetary material is blown away from the star.
Continue reading “Planets Can’t Form in Rough Neighbourhoods”