Check Out This Tripping New Look for the Milky Way

Check out how cosmic dust creates a fiery lion-like mane for the Milky Way!/Image: ESA and the HFI Consortium, IRAS

From Denny: The Milky Way is finally getting its "propers." This Planck telescope captured this showy fiery mane by surveying the sky in four massive sweeps. In the video clip you can see how the telescope is scanning the entire sky while in orbit.





So, what are you looking at here?

These diva style dust clouds are within about 500 lights years of the sun. The horizontal white stripe in this far-infrared photo is the Milky Way's spiral disk. What's odd in this photo is that the white stripe is warmer and all the reddish tones are actually colder.

It was the European Space Agency that put the Planck telescope into orbit back in May 2009. To date, this telescope is creating the best ever of the cosmic radiation background that is left over from the original Big Bang scientists think happened 13.7 billion years ago.


*** THANKS for visiting, come back often, feel welcome to drop a comment or opinion, a big shout out to awesome current subscribers – and if you are new to this blog, please subscribe in a reader or by email updates!

Astronomy: Photo of Our Galactic Center!

From Denny: A very cool photo from the folks over at ESO.org (European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere). Taken during the ATLASGAL survey this is really a color composite image of the Galactic Center and Sagittarius B2. The center of our Milky Way Galaxy is home to a supermassive black hole. That's a bit scary! How big is it? (This is starting to sound like a fish story...) That huge black hole is four million times the mass of our very own Sun! This galactic center is only 25,000 light years from our planet Earth.

X-ray mosaic of Galactic Center: Chandra takes in the bright lights, big city of the Milky Way - Image by Smithsonian Institution via Flickr

OK, you ask, so who is this Sagitarrius B2 guy? It's one of the largest clouds of molecular gas in our Milky Way. Definitely one of the big guys on the block. According to the ESO, this Sagitarrius B2 is "rich in many different interstellar molecules" because it lies close to the Galactic Center. Sort of sounds like vitamins for the Universe, doesn't it? :)

Now who's who on this photo?

- the ATLASGAL submillimetre-wavelength data are shown in red, overlaid on a view of the region in infrared light

- from the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) in green and blue.

- Sagittarius B2 is the bright orange-red region to the middle left of the image, which is centered on the Galactic Center.

Galactic Center Milky Way Galaxy supermassive black hole Midcourse Space Experiment Sagittarius B2 ESO.org European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere Earth Sun infrared light black hole astronomy

Astronomy: A New Push to Turn Off the Lights in 2009

"Astronomers are fed up. One fifth of the world's population cannot see the Milky Way because street lamps and building lights are too bright. So scientists are mounting a new campaign, called Dark Skies Awareness, aiming to reduce light pollution as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy.

"Reducing the number of lights on at night could help conserve energy, protect wildlife and benefit human health," astronomer Malcolm Smith of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile wrote in a commentary Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Smith points out that billions of dollars of light is needlessly shined into the sky each year. Beyond the waste of money and energy, this light is blocking people's view of the heavens.

"Without a direct view of the stars, mankind is cut off from most of the universe, deprived of any direct sense of its huge scale and our tiny place within it," Smith wrote.

Plus, lights confuse and harm wildlife. For example, millions of birds in North America die every year because their migration patterns are disrupted by errant light. And baby sea turtles hatched in the sand often mistakenly head toward cities, instead of the sea, because they are lured by artificial lights.

Preliminary research even suggests that light at night is harmful to human health, potentially reducing the normal production of melatonin in our bodies, which suppresses cell division in cancerous tissue."

By Clara Moskowitz

From Denny: Like a lot of people I'm all for conserving energy and not wasting it needlessly. When we vacationed in Greece a few years back we were astonished at how many stars we could see in the sky with the naked eye. Talk about feel cheated when we got back home to America and suburbia! I've often wondered if turning out the city lights could boost our ability to see the skies in more detail.

What I didn't know is how excessive light during the night hours may be the reason for the increase in cancer this generation. That's a sobering thought! Even if it is only part of the problem it is significant to consider changing.