This rugged road through the dark Atacama Desert seems
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I love a good coincidence. On Monday morning, I posted a gorgeous picture of the planetary nebula Abell 31, an object formed when a dying star blows off its outer layers in a series of winds which collide with each other. I mentioned that these nebulae are usually symmetric — Abell 31 happens not to be because it’s moving rapidly through space, and the gas through which it moves is compressing one side of it. But events like that are not the norm; most planetaries show stunning symetric features… like Henize 3-1333, as you can see in this nice Hubble image of it:
[Click to ennebulenate.]
It looks like a flower, doesn’t it? The petals you see are actually sculpted lobes of gas. I’m guessing it undergoes periodic episodes where it blows out gas in focused beams, which then move outward and form those features as they plow into gas previously blown out by the star. It’s a guess, but it fits what’s known about the inner regions of the cloud near the central star. There’s a thick disk of material surrounding the central star, ...
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Tags: Astronomy, Cool stuff, HEN 3-1333, Hubble Space Telescope, Planetary Nebula, Pretty pictures Leave a Comment
These two spiral galaxies make a photogenic pair, found
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At the West Wall of Aristarchus Crater
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Not to overwhelm you with pictures of weather from space, but this is too amazing to pass up: 8000 km to the southeast of that Italian snowstorm, a different storm is slamming into Madagascar. Tropical cyclone Giovanna made landfall on the east coast of the island at 06:30 GMT Monday morning.
This picture — click to encyclonate — again taken by the ESA’s Envisat, shows just how big this storm is, about 1500 km from north to south, the size of Madagascar itself. What I said about the picture of snow in Italy goes double here: the violence of this storm is transformed into terrible beauty when viewed from above. I’ll note that the satellite’s orbital height is about 800 km, a bit over half the width of the storm it’s observing.
Image credit: ESA
Related posts:
- Attack of the Cyclones
- Landfall
- Hurricane Irene from start to finish
- Hurricane double whammy
Dark matter, to re-interpret Obi Wan Kenobi, surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.
At least that’s what a new scientific study seems to show. Dark matter appears to stretch well beyond the visible limits of galaxies, flowing through and filling even the vast, previously-thought empty space between galaxies. The researchers, led by Shogo Masaki of Nogoya University, used computer simulations to model how dark matter behaves over time as it helps form galaxies, and found that while it’s concentrated in and around galaxies, it doesn’t fade away into nothing with distance. It does get thinner, but still exists to a measurable degree well outside of galaxies. The model structure they found is actually quite lovely:
Remember, this is a model, and not an actual map. It does show concentrations of dark matter along galaxies and clusters of galaxies, but also shows how even "empty" space well outside of galaxies has pervasive dark matter in it.
OK, so what’s the deal then?
Dark matter was discovered a long time ago, when it was found that galaxies that live in clusters were moving way too fast to be held by the cluster gravity. They ...
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Tags: Astronomy, Cool stuff, dark matter, galaxies, gravitational lensing, Pretty pictures Leave a Comment
These two spiral galaxies make a photogenic pair, found
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It’s been a while since I’ve spent a whole day at an observatory, slaving away to catch a few photons from some distant object. Maybe if it had been as awesomely cool as depicted in this video of the Keck observatory by Andrew Cooper (and dedicated to the summit day crew), I’d still be doing research instead of writing about it!
How fun! All the action is documented on the Vimeo page for the video so you can figure out what you’re seeing. I love the lasers — Keck, Defender of Planet Earth!
Also, I love the music. Very Rube Goldbergy/Pee Wee Hermanesque.
It’s been cold and snowy here in Boulder, but Europe is getting hit far harder: they’re having record freezes, and over the weekend Italy got a huge pile of snow dumped on them too, the largest in about 30 years. It’s closed airports and disrupted a lot of the daily activity… but from space, it’s actually quite beautiful:
[Click to molto embiggiano.]
The clouds and snow make it hard at first to see Italy, but it runs from the upper left to lower right in this picture, taken by the European Space Agency’s Envisat. The Adriatic Sea is above Italy, and the Tyrrhenian Sea below. You can just see a piece of Sicily, and the islands of Corsica and Sardinia are visible as well.
I’m always amazed at the perspective of space. Disasters, trouble, and the frailty of life are so apparent when you’re in their midst, but they fade rapidly with distance. It doesn’t make them any less real or any less terrible, but it does provide a longer view that all of us, perhaps, can use sometimes.
Image credit: ESA
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- Buonanotte, Italia
- Claire de lune
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