Scienceblogtwo

The majestic Wide Field Camera 3 image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5495's stately, arching spiral arms. NGC 5495 is a Seyfert galaxy, a kind of galaxy with a very brilliant center region, and is around 300 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Hydra. The electromagnetic radiation released by dust and gas sucked into a supermassive black hole dominates the electromagnetic radiation in these extremely bright cores, which astronomers refer to as active galactic nuclei. A series of observations, including this one, were made by astronomers who are investigating supermassive black holes that are hiding in the centers of distant galaxies. It can be particularly difficult to study the central regions of galaxies since they are so brilliant due to a combination of star formation regions, light from existing stars, and light produced by materials falling into supermassive black holes. Astronomers were able to separate the numerous ...

A pair of symmetric rings may be seen around the Cat's Eye Nebula's outer shell in the first computer-generated three-dimensional model of the nebula. The rings' symmetry suggests that a precessing jet coming from the nebula's main star created them. This offers solid proof that the nebula's center is a binary star system. Ryan Clairmont served as the study's principal investigator, and it was just published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. When a dying star expels its outer layer of gas, it generates a structure that is unique to planetary nebulae and is colorful and shell-like. One of the most intricate planetary nebulae is NGC 6543, sometimes known as the Cat's Eye Nebula. It is located in the constellation Draco and is little over 3,000 light-years from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope has also captured the Cat's Eye Nebula in remarkable detail, revealing its intricate structure of knots, spherical shells, and arc-l...

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the globular cluster Terzan 4 filled with a sparkling sea of stars. Globular clusters, which can have millions of individual stars inside of them, are groups of stars held together by their gravitational pull. The centre of a globular cluster like Terzan 4 is a tightly packed, crowded field of stars, as this image demonstrates, which makes for amazing photos! The investigation of globular clusters underwent a revolution after Hubble's 1990 debut. With ground-based telescopes, it is practically hard to tell the individual stars apart from one another, but with space telescopes, it is conceivable. Hubble's sharp vision has allowed astronomers to analyze the stars that make up globular clusters as well as how these systems evolve over time. This particular observation was made by astronomers using Hubble to study Terzan 4 and other globular clusters to learn more about the structure, age, and density of globular clusters around the ...

This beautiful photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows two spiral galaxies that are overlapping one another. The names of the two galaxies, which are more than a billion light-years away from Earth, SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461, are uninteresting. Despite the fact that they appear to collide in this image, the two galaxies' alignment is probably only a result of coincidence; they aren't really colliding. These two galaxies might just be passing ships in the night, but Hubble has previously photographed a stunning array of interacting galaxies. One of many NASA/ESA Hubble observations exploring key aspects of the Galaxy Zoo project is this image. The Galaxy Zoo project, which began in 2007, and its offshoots are enormous citizen science initiatives that crowdsource galaxy classifications from a pool of hundreds of thousands of participants. These volunteers categorize galaxies that robotic telescopes have captured, and they frequently are the first people to ever see a...

After a star exhausts its hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion and starts to die, a red giant emerges. The delicate interplay between a star's inherent gravitational pull and the pressure from continuing thermonuclear fusion reactions at its core allows stars to remain stable. That balance is destroyed when a star's core runs out of hydrogen, and the core starts to collapse. The plasma shell that surrounds the core heats up enough to start fusing hydrogen as the core collapses. The star's outer layers dramatically expand as fusion in this shell starts, and the surface can grow up to several hundred times larger than the star's original size. The swollen surface of the star cools and changes color from white or yellow to red as the energy at its surface dissipates much more. A red giant develops. It may take hundreds of millions of years for this process to complete. It only applies to stars of intermediate mass (80% to 800% of the mass of the Sun or less), which go on to ge...

How Do Nebulae Form? Interstellar clouds of gas and dust are known as nebulae. The remains of dying stars constitute the starting point for many nebulae. New stars are frequently born in nebulae as well. The term "nebula" today describes an interstellar cloud of gas and dust. Planetary nebulae or the scattered debris from supernova explosions are two common sources of nebula formation from the remains of dying stars. As a result of the abundance of dust and gas present in these areas, which serve as frequent sites of strong star formation, new stars are frequently created there. Nebulae are typically enormous, measuring many light years across. Previously, the term "nebula" applied to any astronomical object that looked to have a diffuse structure, including what we now refer to as galaxies. Beautiful and vibrant nebulae have appeared in some of the Hubble Space Telescope's most well-known photographs. Here, you can browse the enormous ESA/Hubble database of doz...