Astronomy: Butterfly Nebula

From Denny: This week, Sept. 9, NASA's been releasing new Hubble Telescope photos taken since those billion dollar repairs of the Telescope in May. The new photos are sharper of awesomely beautiful nebulas and galaxies in our universe, some with halo effects of light.

The Butterfly Nebula is known by other names such as the Bug Nebula and proper - and boring - catalogue name of NGC 6302. The Butterfly Nebula is in our own Milky Way Galaxy! It's approximately about 3,800 light years away in the constellation of Scorpius.

How did this nebula get that cool looking glowing effect on its outer edges? Photoshop, cosmic level? No, it's caused by a glowing gas that's being expelled out over 2,200 years! Quite the spectacular view from our perspective.

The butterfly shape stretches out over two light years. How do you envision the distance of two light years? It's about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.

Astronomy: Top Ten Hubble Scientific Discoveries

Hubble Telescope Image via Wikipedia

From Denny: Popular Science has a new article that is mostly awesome photos of what Hubble has captured over time! They explain the significance of each photo to the furthering education in astronomy. If you prefer a larger view, take a look at the slide show by clicking on the title link and it will take you to the Popular Science site. I love space photos like this!

So much of their article is the history of astronomy: how scientists thought about the universe, speculated and now they know for sure because of the Hubble Telescope. This is such a great summary article that I quoted it here in its entirety as a free source.



All Photos Courtesy of NASA

"10. The Source of Long Gamma Ray Bursts

In the 1960s, US satellites designed to detect gamma radiation from Russian nuclear testing began picking up huge radiation bursts from deep in space. For decades, no one knew where the bursts were coming from. When the Hubble went on line, scientists were able to track the gamma ray bursts back to galaxies with rapid star production, like the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy (pictured). According to Livio, the gamma ray bursts occur when one of the galaxy’s massive stars collapses in on itself.



9. Accurate Measurement of the Hubble Constant

For years, scientists argued over the value of the Hubble Constant, a key component in the equation that measures the speed at which the universe expands. “Before the Hubble telescope, the estimates for the Hubble Constant were different by at least a factor of two,” said Livio. After analyzing Hubble pictures of far-off super novae (the remnants of one are pictured here), astronomers narrowed the value of the Hubble Constant down to within an error of five percent.



8. Stellar Populations

While some of the Hubble’s most notable pictures involved looking deep into space and time, it also made some important observations closer to home... if you consider 2.5 million light years close to home. Scientists knew very little about the histories of even our closest galactic neighbors (like the Andromeda galaxy shown here). But the Hubble, which can focus on individual stars in these galaxies, has allowed scientists to better understand the history of our corner of the universe.



7. Collision Images

Speaking of close to home, Hubble took one of its most important pictures of a planet right here in our own solar system. In 1994, fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter (pictured here), and Hubble provided the first ever recorded images of a collision between two bodies in space. Aside from simply looking cool, photos of the scars left by the collision provided new insights into the makeup of Jupiter’s atmosphere.



6. Counting Planets

Naturally, being the egocentric species that we are, contemplating the mysteries of the cosmos inevitably leads to the question of whether life exists on other planets. To answer that question, we need to know just how many other planets there are. Pictures from the Hubble went a long way towards answering that question. By capturing images of the solar debris disks that eventually coalesce into planets (like the disk shown here around a star in the Orion nebula), the Hubble showed that planets are far more common than scientists previously thought.



5. Extrasolar Planets

And while we’re on the subject of extrasolar planets, the Hubble also snapped the first shot of a planet outside of our solar system. Before this picture of a planet around the star Fomalhaut was taken, scientists had to calculate whether a star had a planet by evaluating the star's wobble. With the Hubble, the astronomers could just take a picture of the planet itself.



4. Black Holes

Astronomers had been theorizing that super massive black holes laid at the center of galaxies for years, but it wasn’t until the Hubble actually took a shot of one of those black holes that the debate was put to rest. “Not only did Hubble discover that there are black holes in the center of the galaxies, but it discovered that there was correlation between the size of the black hole and the size of the bulge,” said Mario Livio, a senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and author of Is God A Mathematician?. “Before that, we did not know that there was a black hole in the center, and definitely did not know that relationship.”



3. Deep Field Shot

This is one of the cases where the aesthetic beauty of one of Hubble’s pictures matched up with its scientific value. The Hubble Deep Field Shot, the most magnified picture of a spot of the sky ever taken with optical light, provided this gorgeous image, and gave scientists the information they needed to accurately calculate the age of the universe.



2. Dark Matter

Long theorized and to this date never directly observed, dark matter may make up as much as 22 percent of the material in the universe. Because dark matter doesn’t reflect or emit light (hence the name), it cannot be viewed with a telescope. However, dark matter still exerts a gravitational pull on the light that passes by it, bending the light like a lens. The Hubble was able to take a picture of light bent by the gravitational lens of nearby dark matter, thus detecting the previously undetectable. This is a picture of light from the galaxy cluster Abell being warped by a gravitation lens from dark matter.



1. Dark Energy

According to the theory of General Relativity, the gravitational pull of every object in the universe would eventually slow, and then reverse, the expansion of the universe. For years, that’s what astronomers assumed was happening. Then came Hubble. “Arguably the most important Hubble discovery is that of dark energy, which is this form of energy that propels the expansion of the universe,” said Livio. “We knew since the late 1920s that the universe was expanding, but thought that this expansion would be slowing down. Instead, we discovered in 1998 that this expansion was speeding up.” This momentous discovery came from measuring light emitted by super novae, like the explosion of the star Sanduleak -69° 202a, pictured here."

Astronomy: Enjoy the Outer Space Circus

From Cosmic Log on MSNBC.com:

"The month of May is bringing in so many outer-space wonders, it's as if a three-ring circus were rolling into town with four or five rings. Today is Space Day, which morphs into Astronomy Day and the Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday, followed by the peak of the Eta Aquarid meteor shower next week ... all leading up to one of the greatest shows off Earth, the final upgrade to the Hubble Space Telescope.

And if that still isn't enough rings for you, there's a sparkling new image of a ring galaxy from Hubble's younger sibling, the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Rivers of stars

The fresh infrared view of the spiral galaxy NGC 2841, which is 46 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, figures in recently published research that looks at why stars become so smoothly distributed in such galaxies. After all, stars are created in bursts of clusters, and thus start out their lives in lumps.

"Our analysis now answers the great puzzle," David Block, an astronomer at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, said in a news release issued Thursday by Spitzer's science team. "By finding a myriad of streams of young stars all over the disks of galaxies we studied, we see that the mechanism for pulling the clusters of young stars apart is shearing motions of the parent galaxy. These streams are the 'missing link' we needed to understand how the disks of galaxies evolve to look the way they do."

For much more and an interesting read, just click on the title link. (Didn't have time to re-write this into a smaller read as I have jury duty this week and working hard to load posts for all 9 blogs! Thanks for your patience.)

Astronomy: Twin Black Holes Discovered

From: National Optical Astronomy Observatory

"Finding a needle in a haystack might be easy compared to finding two very similar black holes closely orbiting each other in a distant galaxy.

Astronomers from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson have found what looks like two massive black holes orbiting each other in the center of one galaxy. It has been postulated that twin black holes might exist, but it took an innovative, systematic search to find such a rare pair.

The newly identified black holes appear to be separated by only 1/10 of a parsec—a tenth of the distance from Earth to the nearest star. This discovery of the most plausible binary black hole candidate ever found may lead to a greater understanding of how massive black holes form and evolve at the center of galaxies. Their results are published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

After a galaxy forms it is likely that a massive black hole can also form at its center. Since many galaxies are found in cluster of galaxies, individual galaxies can collide with each other as they orbit in the cluster. The mystery is what happens to these central black holes when galaxies collide and ultimately merge together. Theory predicts that they will orbit each other and eventually merge into an even larger black hole.

Each black hole is surrounded by a disk of material gradually spiraling into its grasp, releasing radiation from x-rays to radio waves. The two black holes complete an orbit around their center of mass every 100 years, traveling with a relative velocity of 6000 kilometers per second.

Credit: p. Marenfeld and NOAO/AURA/NSF" - Check out the rest of the article with the link above.

From Denny: As someone who does a lot of needle in a haystack kind of research I can really appreciate these guys' efforts! More than that let's celebrate their find, wow! the statistical probability of ever finding this unusual phenomenon...