M.I.N.I.O.N.

(via ESO - potw1312a - The Lost Galaxy)

FORS1 on the VLT captures NGC4535 in a shot that looks clear and bright, but you can imagine that the fuzziness that you see here in the world’s most advanced optical telescope would be even more so in the 1950s. Thus, the ghostly appearance gives the nickname The Lost Galaxy.

This barred spiral is visible out through Virgo and is, in fact, one of the larger members of the Virgo Cluster, the dominant cluster in the Virgo Supercluster, to which our Local Group of galaxies, including the Milky Way and  Andromeda, belongs.

(via APOD: 2012 December 15)

When Gemini Sends Stars to Paranal

Image Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de America), TWAN

The ESO, the darkened skies over Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the Very Large Telescopes (VLT - big buildings in the middle), the Auxiliary Telescopes (for VLT interferometry - short ones that don’t look like they have hoods), and the new VLT Survey Telescope (looks like a mini-VLT on the right), all combine to make a great foreground for a shot of the Geminid meteor shower.

This multi-exposure, long-shutter (20 seconds) composite points toward the constellation Gemini, so the meteor are streaking very obviously from their radiant. Jupiter is the bright ball on the left, with Orion obvious above it, and the faint trail of the Milky Way in the middle.

(via ESO - eso1250 - Image of the Carina Nebula Marks Inauguration of VLT Survey Telescope)

You have to click through for this. JUST DO IT.

This is from a survey telescope down at Paranal. The VLT Survey Telescope, specifically, is designed to map the sky, but it has some image quality much like the VLT itself.

From the ESO page:

A spectacular new image of the star-forming Carina Nebula has been captured by the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory and released on the occasion of the inauguration of the telescope in Naples today. This picture was taken with the help of Sebastián Piñera, President of Chile, during his visit to the observatory on 5 June 2012.

The latest telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile — the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) — was inaugurated today at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) Observatory of Capodimonte, in Naples, Italy. The ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Naples, Luigi De Magistris, the INAF President, Giovanni Bignami, the ESO representatives Bruno Leibundgut and Roberto Tamai, and the main promoter of the telescope, Massimo Capaccioli of the University of Naples Federico II and INAF.

The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-metre telescope, with the huge 268-megapixel camera OmegaCAM at its heart. It is designed to map the sky both quickly and with very fine image quality. The VST is a joint venture between ESO and INAF and OmegaCam has been provided by the OmegaCam consortium [1]. This new telescope is the largest telescope in the world exclusively dedicated to surveying the sky at visible wavelengths (eso1119). The occasion of the inauguration has been marked by the release of a dramatic picture of the Carina Nebula taken with the new telescope.

The main link goes to the story, the link under it goes to the incredible zoomable image.

(via @ESO - eso1301c)

Side-by-side comparison of ALMA observations and artist’s impression of the disc and gas streams around HD 142527

Left: observations made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope of the disc of gas and cosmic dust around the young star HD 142527, showing vast streams of gas flowing across the gap in the disc. These are the first direct observations of these streams, which are expected to be created by giant planets guzzling gas as they grow, and which are a key stage in the birth of giant planets.

The dust in the outer disc is shown in red. Dense gas in the streams flowing across the gap, as well as in the outer disc, is shown in green. Diffuse gas in the central gap is shown in blue. The gas filaments can be seen at the three o’clock and ten o’clock positions, flowing from the outer disc towards the centre. The dense gas observed is HCO⁺, and the diffuse gas is CO. The outer disk is roughly two light-days across. If this were our own Solar System, the Voyager 1 probe — the most distant manmade object from Earth — would be at approximately the inner edge of the outer disk.

Right: artist’s impression of the disc and gas streams, for illustration.

Credit:

(via ESO - eso0848a - NGC 2264 and the Christmas Tree cluster*)

Season’s Greetings courtesy of the La Silla Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Blue, Violet, Red, and Hydrogen-alpha filters combined using the Wide Field Imager.

Credit: European Southern Observatory, 16 December 2008.

Related post: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso0848/

(via APOD: 2012 October 18 - A View from Next Door)

So, you may have noted at some point yesterday that the European Southern Observatory (@ESO on twitter!) found an Earth-size planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B. Here’s a artist’s rendition of what the view might be like from there. Not much chance of us going there, though. It orbits way, way too close to Alpha-Cen B. 0.04 an AU around a star only a little less bright that the Sun. That’s a really high surface temp.

In any case, Phil, over at the BA blog, pulls out the actual HARPS data for us to see:

Average the radial velocity measurements (all the gray data points) and you get the red data points (with error bars) for the radial velocity (how quickly something is moving toward or away from you, not the overall speed, easily measured by Doppler shift readings) and you see the tell-tale sine wave of a planetary orbit. (Most of them are nearly-circular, which leads to a sine-wave when you plot the corresponding radial velocity of the star with respect to time.)

(via APOD: 2012 September 24 - NGC 2736: The Pencil Nebula)

Courtesy the awesome folks at @ESO (#ESO50Years), comes this pretty image of the Pencil Nebula.

NGC 2736: The Pencil Nebula 
Image Credit: ESO

This is the edge of a supernova shock-wave, the Vela supernova (or, perhaps, a younger one that was hard to distinguish from Vela a long time ago, more on that later), and shows the re-ionization of the gasses as they cool after being suddenly compressed and heated by the outgoing shock-wave from the supernova.

This kind of effect will fade, unlike emission nebulae that are powered by stellar winds and radiation, as the material cools slowly. You’ll note there’s a leading and trailing “edge” to the nebula. The blue at the front is hotter oxygen gas that’s begun to cool enough only to allow (in the majority) the oxygen to de-ionize. The red is from hydrogen-alpha emission and is futher “back” in the wave, so it is part of gas that has been cooling for longer. (The shock-wave, in this shot, moves from top to bottom.)

Here’s Hubble’s shot of the Pencil Nebula:

That comes from this great overview of the Vela Supernova from Bill Blair, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins.

Trust me, you want to click through and see some of the great x-ray imagery he’s collected together on one page to explain (or problematize) some of the more interesting features of the larger Vela complex of which the Pencil Nebula is a part.

(via Chandra :: Photo Album :: NGC 1929 :: August 30, 2012)

NGC 1929 (star forming region) in N44 (nebular cloud): A Surprisingly Bright Superbubble

Hey all, before I bid you good night (though I wasn’t exactly on this evening, but hey, I had a queue going…for a bit…in the afternoon mostly but you know what I mean…anyway…) I want you to slow your tumblr-scroll for a second and take a look see here. That amazing picture above? That’s an in-depth analysis of an amazing nebular cavity in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of our Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. What’s going on here is a classic story of a stellar nursery in a dust cloud. When the particles start to create gravitational collection points, they rapidly accrete matter. As the compressed matter pulls in more gas and dust from the surrounding cloud, it also heats up. Continue this process long enough and you start to form a proto-star, then, once the core gets hot enough, and the hydrogen gets friendly enough, you start getting fusion reactions. Suddenly there’s a whole lot of energy at the center that can push back against the force of gravity pulling everything in. A star is born and reaches hydrostatic equilibrium. But the first new stars in an interstellar cloud are often quite massive, burning very hot, which means they throw off a lot of radiation. As this moves out (along with the particles blown out by the nuclear reactions, mostly neutrinos) it creates a stellar wind, which runs right up against the very gas and dust that gave rise to the stars in the first place. This starts to put pressure on the gas cloud, creating new dense points, eventually creating ideal conditions for another generation of stars. These young stars, however, are rather James Dean-ish. They live fast and die young. (And, if you think supernovae are pretty, they also leave a good looking corpse…unless you consider the neutron star to be the corpse, which would also be good looking. I think they’re cool anyway. Oops, digression.)

“So”, you say, somewhat bewilderedly, or not, “what’s all that got to do with a weird four-color mosaic of space bubbles?”

I’m glad you asked. Each color is from a different wavelength source. Let’s go through them, and see what they tell us about what’s going on in NGC 1929.

X-ray imaging from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (a space telescope because x-rays have a hard time getting through our atmosphere…thankfully) shows - in blue - the insanely hot gas (so hot it lights up in x-ray, now that’s energetic!) around the young stars and the where the shockwaves of the supernovae have run into the nebular material.

Infrared imaging from the Spitzer Space Telescope shows - in red - the dust and cooler gas that is glowing from the ultraviolet radiation coming off the stars. UV is not as energetic as x-rays (remember, a longer wavelength = lower energy) and so the light down in the infrared shows those parts of the cloud that aren’t getting superheated.

Optical light from the 2.2m Max-Planck-ESO telescope in Chile shows - in yellow - more of the glowing gas at a lower temperature than the superheated gas, and also gives us our nice background star field.

So, now you see how we learn so much about something so far away by combining the various types of data we can collect at each wavelength on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Buenos noches! Tschuss! Etc.