This one’s a star cluster not a firecracker.
M80 is in the constellation Scorpius between the stars α Scorpii (Antares) and β Scorpii in a part of the Milky Way rich in nebulae. When viewed with a modest amateur telescope (like mine), it appears as a mottled ball of light. This Hubble image shows more detail. M80 is roughly 95 light-years in diameter. It contains several hundred thousand stars, making it one of the more densely populated globular clusters in the galaxy.
M80 contains a fair number of blue stragglers, stars that appear to be much younger than the cluster itself. Astronomers believe that these stars lost part of their outer layers during close encounters with other cluster members or as the result of collisions between stars in the tightly packed cluster. Images from Hubble show regions with very high blue straggler densities which suggests that the center of the cluster probably has a very high capture and collision rate.
Image Credit: NASA
The Veil Nebula is about 2,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan), making it a relatively close neighbor in astronomical terms. It’s the visible portion of a supernova remnant formed around 10,000 years ago known as the Cygnus Loop.
27NGC 7678 is a galaxy with only one particularly prominent arm. It’s around 115,000 light-years across, similar size to our ownMilky Way. The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies catalogs NGC 7678 as Arp 28 in a group of “spiral galaxies with one heavy arm.”
This is dwarf galaxy NGC 4214 which is forming clusters of new stars from its interstellar gas and dust. The young clusters of new stars are within glowing gas clouds. The gas glows because it is excited by the strong ultraviolet light emitted from the young stars forming in the gravitational collapse of the gas. These hot stars eject stellar winds moving at thousands of km/s which blow bubbles in the gas. Near the center of the galaxy, there is a cluster of hundreds of massive blue stars, each more than 10,000 X brighter than our Sun, and a huge bubble inflated by stellar winds and radiation pressure surrounds the cluster.
This Hubble Space Telescope image of the core of the spiral galaxy M51 shows a dark “X” silhouetted across the galaxy’s nucleus. The “X” is caused by absorption of light by dust and marks the position of a black hole which may have a mass about one-million times the mass of the Sun. The darkest bar may be an edge-on view of a dust ring 100 light-years in diameter. It blocks the black hole its accretion disk as seen from Earth. The second bar of the “X” could be a second disk seen edge on, or it might be rotating gas and dust in M51 intersecting with the jets and ionization cones from the black hole.
This is a globular cluster called NGC 6397. It’s abou
This is the first image of Saturn’s aurora that was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997 when Saturn was 1.3 billion km from Earth. Saturn’s auroral displays are caused by an energetic wind of charged particles from the Sun that sweeps over the planet. Unlike the Earth’s, Saturn’s aurora is only seen in ultraviolet light. Because the UV doesn’t penetrate our atmosphere, Saturn’s aurora can only be observed from space.
The gas and dust shells of ESO 455-10 would have been initially held tightly together as layers of its central star, but the distinct asymmetrical arc of material over the north side of the nebula is a clear sign of chaotic interactions between it and the interstellar medium. The star at the center of ESO 455-10 allows use to see the interaction with the gas and dust of the nebula, the surrounding interstellar medium, and the intense light from the star itself.
NGC 3201 is an oddball among the 150-or-so globular star clusters in the Milky Way. It is moving very rapidly through the galaxy, and its motion is retrograde, that is, it’s orbiting around the galactic core in the opposite direction of most of the stars in the galaxy. That’s led to speculation that it may have come from outside and have been captured.