CWL

Betelgeuse

However you pronounce its name, the star Betelgeuse is hard to miss on a clear winter’s night. Representing the top left shoulder of Orion the Hunter it blazes a bright red colour. At over 600 light years away Betelgeuse is not particularly close, but it shines 100,000 times as brightly as our Sun.

Betelgeuse is a “red supergiant” star which is nearing the end of its life. As it has swelled in size over the past few hundred thousand years, currently measuring around 1000 times the size of our Sun, the massive star has been shedding its outer layers. This material is made of gas and dust, which has cooled over time and is seen here in far-infrared light by Herschel.

The ejected outer layers of the star expanded outwards until they hit the surrounding material, creating the arc-like structures seen to the left of the image. These arcs are a bow shock, similar to the wave that travels in front of a ship moving through water, and are caused by Betelgeuse’s motion through the surrounding gas cloud at around 30 km/s (70,000 mph).

Further to the left is what appears to be a straight wall of gas and dust, the origin of which is uncertain. It is very hard to measure distances in images such as this, so the wall could be much futher away or closer to Earth than Betelgeuse - essentially in the foreground or background.

discoverynews:

What kind of superhero would live on a homeworld like this?

Read more: “Monster ‘Super-Jupiter’ Discovered”

Black Sun and Inverted Starfield

Does this strange dark ball look somehow familiar? If so, that might be because it is our Sun. In the above image, a detailed solar view was captured originally in a very specific color of red light, then rendered in black and white, and then color inverted.

Once complete, the resulting image was added to a starfield, then also color inverted. Visible in the above image of the Sun are long light filaments, dark active regions, prominences peaking around the edge, and a moving carpet of hot gas.

The surface of our Sun has become a particularly busy place over the past two years because it is now nearing Solar Maximum, the time when its surface magnetic field is wound up the most. Besides an active Sun being so picturesque, the plasma expelled can also become picturesque when it impacts the Earth’s magnetosphere and creates auroras.

Cosmic Garden Sprinkler

Ever wonder what our sun will look like during its eventual death billions of years from now? Here’s something close

The Universe is filled with mysterious objects. Many of them are as strange as they are beautiful. Among these, planetary nebulae are probably one of the most fascinating objects to behold in the night sky. No other type of object has such a large variety of shapes and structures. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides us this week with a striking image of Hen 3-1475, a planetary nebula in the making.

Planetary nebulae — the name arises because most of these objects resembled a planet when they were first discovered through early telescopes — are expanding, glowing shells of gas coming from Sun-like stars at the ends of their lives. They glow brightly because of the radiation that comes from a hot, compact core, which remains after the outer envelope is ejected, and is powerful enough to make these gossamer shells shine.

Each planetary nebula is complex and unique. Hen 3-1475 is a great example of a planetary nebula in the making, a phase which is known to astronomers as a protoplanetary or preplanetary nebula.

White Dwarf Surrounded By Dust and Rocky Material

Credit: © Mark A. Garlick /space-art.co.uk/University of Warwick

Rocky material in orbit around a white dwarf star (center). Collisions turn larger material into dust, some of which then rains down on to the white dwarf.

Newborn Star’s ‘Heartbeat’ Seen by X-ray Telescopes

Using the X-ray eyes of three space telescopes, astronomers have captured a behind-the-scenes look at the dramatic behavior of a newborn sun-like star, as it spins rapidly and churns out powerful and long-lasting eruptions.

The infant star, called V1647 Orionis, is known as a protostar, and was formed by clouds of surrounding gas and dust. The star is located 1,300 light-years away in McNeil’s Nebula, which is a bustling hotspot of star formation in the constellation of Orion.

V1647 rotates once each day, which is around 30 times faster than the sun, and has two active X-ray emitting spots, where gas flows from a surrounding disk and feeds the growing star.

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Got my sun finished //idea and sketch by me, outline tatted by Kujo, shaded in by Chino @ Higher Level Tattoos

Mount Matterhorn & Orion

Image Copyright: Stephane Vetter

The Matterhorn (German), Monte Cervino (Italian) or Mont Cervin (French), is a mountain in the Pennine Alps on the border between Switzerland and Italy.[*] In the above image, the Orion constellation flashes behind the backdrop of the night sky.

Youthful Star

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Artist’s conception image of a young star surrounded by an accretion disk (made up of rings).

Space Bubbles Offer Glimpse at Our Sun’s Evolution

Bubbles full of stars are now shedding light on how our sun and its siblings might have formed, scientists find.

Stars like our sun likely formed in clusters associated with massive stars. These huge stars are thought to form in the centers of giant clouds of cold gas maybe a million times the mass of our sun, with the hot winds these massive stars give off carving out bubbles within these clouds.

“Almost all the stars in the galaxy formed in hot bubbles where huge stars formed,” said the study’s lead author, Xavier Koenig, at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

How About No?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for being realistic but this is actually not entirely true. I don’t mind looking a bit foolish explaining this if this is actually a joke but whatever.

I don’t really believe in wishing upon a star, but on the defense of those that do believe in that; Stars vary in shapes, sizes, energy output, and even chemical composition which allows it to either grow really old before it dies or die a youngster. With this in mind, you’re only a few million lightyears late if the star was rather young and weak or old and at the end of its life and perhaps really distant from your position, and even then you ought to consider a few of the following..

For instance our star, the sun, has a couple billion years of life to go before it turns into a white dwarf star and dies collapsing under its own gravity. Our star is an average star, and average stars are a plenty in this universe.. that’s why they’re called average. So if some hypothetical alien was wishing upon this star, our star, and it was a mere few million light years away, this star would still be alive and kicking off its energy since our star still has some couple billion years to go before it dies. Also, light years are measured by time not distance.

So when you say “FUCK YOU AND YOUR DREAMS YOU’RE A FEW MILLION LIGHTYEARS LATE DOHOHOHOHO >:]” it does not imply that the star is dead but rather that the star you’re viewing now in real-time is but a baby picture of what the star actually is now. It may dead, it may be kicking its few bits of energy, it may still be energy abundant or in its prime. But know this, not every star you view in the night sky is dead.

Just like not every wish or dream you make is dead. Keep dreaming the good dreams and make em’ happen!

Science: 1 Pessimists: 0

PS: I really need to stop arguing with pictures..

rhamphotheca:

What is Dark Matter?

by NASA staff

By fitting a theoretical model of the composition of the Universe to the combined set of cosmological observations, scientists have come up with the composition that we described above, ~70% dark energy, ~25% dark matter, ~5% normal matter. What is dark matter?

We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see. Observations show that there is far too little visible matter in the Universe to make up the 25% required by the observations. Second, it is not in the form of dark clouds of normal matter, matter made up of particles called baryons. We know this because we would be able to detect baryonic clouds by their absorption of radiation passing through them. Third, dark matter is not antimatter, because we do not see the unique gamma rays that are produced when antimatter annihilates with matter. Finally, we can rule out large galaxy-sized black holes on the basis of how many gravitational lenses we see…

(read more: NASA Astrophysics)   

(image: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ITA/INAF/J.Merten et al, Lensing: NASA/STScI; NAOJ/Subaru; ESO/VLT, Optical: NASA/STScI/R.Dupke)

Blue Flash From The Sun

by Mario Cogo

Difficult to observe, the momentary green flash above the rising or setting sun has been documented as a phenomenon caused by the atmospheric bending or refraction of sunlight.

Like a weak prism, the Earth’s atmosphere breaks white sunlight into colors, bending red colors slightly and green and blue colors through increasingly larger angles.

When the sky is clear, a green flash just above the sun’s edge can sometimes be seen for a second or so, when the sun is close to a distant horizon.

starlight-nightlight:

Young Stellar Grouping in Cygnus X