Tag Archives: ESA

Mergers and Acquisitions

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galactic_mergerSeveral telescopes have teamed up to examine a rare and massive merger of two galaxies that took place when the universe was just 3 billion years old (that was over 10 billion years ago). The galaxies, collectively called HXMM01, were creating a couple of thousand new star a year as they merged. These days, our galaxy, the Milky Way, hatches about two to three a year. The total number of stars in both colliding galaxies averages is around 400 billion.

The Herschel Space Observatory first spotted the collision in images taken with infrared light (the image at left). Follow-up observations from other telescopes showed the extreme degree of star-formation taking place in the merger.

The merging galaxies are circled in the close up view (on the right). The red data from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Submillimeter Array atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii, show dust-enshrouded regions of star formation. The green data, taken by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array, near Socorro, N.M., show carbon monoxide gas in the galaxies.

Blue shows visible starlight. The blue blobs outside of the circle are galaxies located closer to us as seen via near-infrared light observations are from the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine/STScI/Keck/NRAO/SAO

A Shell in a Fish

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supernova_shellThese thin wisps of gas are an object known as SNR 0519. The blood-red clouds are the remains from a violent explosion of a star as a supernova seen about 600 years ago. The star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star—a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life.

SNR 0519 is over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud, a region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects. The Large Magellanic Cloud orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA

Water, Water, Everywhere:

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Nor any drop to drink.Jupiter_water

Astronomers have finally found direct proof that almost all water present in Jupiter’s stratosphere, an intermediate atmospheric layer, was delivered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which struck the planet in 1994. The findings are based on new data from the Herschel space observatory and reveal more water in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, where the impacts occurred, than in the north. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission.

Jupiter_Shoemaker_LevyThe origin of water in the upper atmospheres of the solar system’s giant planets has been a hot topic among planetary astronomers since the late ’90s. Astronomers were quite surprised when water was found in the stratospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune by ESA’s Infrared Space Observatory.

The composite photo at left was assembled from separate images of Jupiter and comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994.

Image Credits: Top, ESA. Left, NASA

Cool Andromeda

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Cool_AndromedaThis view of the Andromeda galaxy from the Herschel space observatory shows relatively cool lanes of forming stars. Herschel is sensitive to the far-infrared light from cool dust mixed in with the gas where stars are born. This image reveals some of the very coldest dust in the galaxy (colored red here) that is only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero. Warmer regions such as the densely populated central bulge, home to older stars, appear as blue. Star-formation zones are in the spiral arms with several concentric rings interspersed with dark gaps where star formation is absent.

Andromeda (aka M31) is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way about 2.5 million light-years away. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission.

Image Credit: ESA

The Whole Universe

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Planck_light_mapThis is a map of oldest light in our universe. It is derived from data detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. The ancient photons, also called the cosmic microwave background, give us a view of the universe when it was about 370,000 years old. The variations are related to the tiny temperature fluctuations caused by regions of slightly different densities—the seeds of all the future structure of the Universe—the stars, galaxies, and life existing today.

Planck is a European Space Agency mission with significant participation from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Image Credit: ESA

Betelgeuse

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betelgeuse_bow_shockThe supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright red star in Orion’s shoulder, is surrounded by an envelope of nearby material which is probably matter that it shed as it evolved into a supergiant. The arcs to the left in this image taken by the Herschel Space Observatory are material ejected from the star as it evolved into a red supergiant, and are shaped by its bow shock interaction as it move through the interstellar medium. The faint linear bar of dust on the left may represent a dusty filament connected to the local galactic magnetic field or the edge of an interstellar cloud. If so, then Betelgeuse’s motion across the sky implies that the arcs will hit the wall in 5,000 years time, and the star itself will smack into the wall 12,500 years later.

Image Credit: ESA

Titan

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titan_surfaceNo, this isn’t a picture from Mars. It’s from Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. This view taken by the Huygens lander on the moon’s surface shows pebble-sized objects thought to be rocks or ice blocks. The two objects just below the middle of the image are about 150 mm and 40 mm across, respectively, and are about 840 mm from Huygens. The surface is darker than originally expected and made up of a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice. There is also evidence of erosion at the base of the objects.

Image Credit: ESA/NASA

A Dwarf Galaxy

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This infrared light picture of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy was assembled using data from the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency-led mission, and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are the two biggest satellite galaxies of our home galaxy. They are considered dwarf galaxies compared to the big spiral of the Milky Way.

By combining data from Herschel and Spitzer, the irregular distribution of dust in the Small Magellanic Cloud becomes clear. A stream of dust called the galaxy’s “wing” extends to the left in the picture, and a vertical line of star formation is on the right.

The colors in this image indicate temperatures in the dust in the Cloud. Regions where star formation is at its earliest stages or is shut off are cooler. Warm spot occur around new stars heating surrounding dust. The coldest areas and objects are red, corresponding to infrared light taken up by Herschel’s at 250 microns (A micron is 0.000001 m). Herschel 100 and 160 micron data shown in green indicates warmer areas.1 The warmest spots appear in blue and are derived from 24 and 70 micron data from Spitzer.

Image Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL

Stellar Nursery

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This infrared view (click the image to embiggen) made by the Herschel Space Observatory of Cygnus X spans some 6×2 degrees of one of the closest, massive star forming regions in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. The rich stellar nursery already holds the massive star cluster known as the Cygnus OB2 association. Those stars are more evident by the region cleared by their energetic winds and radiation near the bottom center of the picture. They can’t be detected by Herschel instruments operating at long infrared wavelengths, but Herschel does reveal the region’s complex filaments of cool gas and dust around the locations where new massive stars are forming. Cygnus X lies some 4500 light-years away toward the heart of the northern constellation of the Swan. This picture covers a view about 500 light-years wide.

Image Credit: ESA

Eagle Nebula

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ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory captured the image above of the Eagle nebula with its intensely cold gas and dust. The Pillars of Creation are seen inside the circle and at left in a famous picture made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.

The Herschel image of the Eagle nebula shows the self-emissions of the intensely cold nebula’s gas and dust as never seen before. Each color shows a different temperature of dust, from around 10 degrees above absolute zero (10 K or -442 °F) for the red, up to around 40 K (or -388 °F) for the blue.

Herschel reveals the intricate nature of the nebula’s tendrils of gas and dust, with large gaps forming a cave-like surrounding to the famous pillars. The gas and dust provide the material for the star formation that is still under way inside this enigmatic nebula.

Image Credits: Herschel, ESA. Hubble, NASA

Planck’s Map of the Cosmic Microwave Background

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This image of the microwave sky was synthesized using data spanning the range of cosmic background radiation detected by ESA’s Planck satellite. These frequencies, which cannot be seen with the human eye, cover the range of 30 to 857 gigahertz.

The grainy structure of the cosmic microwave background is clearly visible in the high-latitude regions of the map. The tiny temperature fluctuations are the result of the density variations from which the structure of the universe originated.

Image Credit: ESA