Posts Tagged ‘spitzer’

Big Bang Monday: Milky Way 360º

Monday, March 24th, 2014

spitzer 360

Very cool, yet incomprehensible. A 360º view of the Milky Way galaxy, composed of more than 2 million images. Not very pretty, is it? Well, you can win them all — but the sheer magnitude of this piece of work is pretty wild.

That’s astronomy for you: deeper than your deepest imagination. Never ceases to amaze most of us: there are more galaxies out there than there are stars in the Milky Way.

W T F ?!?

OK, now get this. You can put some of this “WTF?!?” up on your wall. Go check out BigBangPrints.com and order some for yourself, or your spouse, boss, kids, etc. Go ahead: make their day!


Big Bang Monday: Hot Jupiters

Monday, November 11th, 2013

hd189733

Fascinating, via NASA Visualization Explorer

In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers uncover a strange blue world.

Scientists estimate more than 100 billion planets exist beyond our solar system. These alien worlds, known as exoplanets, orbit distant stars located light-years from Earth. One such planet is called HD 189733b. A gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, HD 189733b circles its star from a distance of only 3 million miles. That’s 13 times closer than Mercury is to our sun. As a result, temperatures in its atmosphere approach 2,000°F. Astronomers discovered HD 189733b in 2005 after observing its parent star dimming with every pass, or transit, of the planet. We now know from follow-up observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope that HD 189733b is blue in color.

If only the original Star Trek was still around — they’d come up with a good episode around these “Hot Jupiters.” This one’s only 63 light years away.

We’re hoping our friends at BigBangPrints.com come out with an exoplanet gallery soon. For now, we’ll settle for regular Jupiter.


Big Bang Monday: NGC 281

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Today’s image comes to us courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope

This composite image of NGC 281 contains X-ray data from Chandra (purple) with infrared observations from Spitzer (red, green, blue). The high-mass stars in NGC 281 drive many aspects of their galactic environment through powerful winds flowing from their surfaces and intense radiation that heats surrounding gas, “boiling it away” into interstellar space. This process results in the formation of large columns of gas and dust, as seen on the left side of the image. These structures likely contain newly forming stars. The eventual deaths of massive stars as supernovas will also seed the galaxy with material and energy.

Read more about NGC 281.