The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 1:32 pm EDT on May 3, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation.
Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, and the radio blackout for this flare has already subsided.
This flare is classified as an M5.7-class flare. M-class flares are the weakest flares that can still cause some space weather effects near Earth.
Increased numbers of flares are quite common at the moment, as the sun’s normal 11-year activity cycle is ramping up toward solar maximum, which is expected in late 2013.
911
Starburst Galaxy Could Illuminate Early Universe
A newfound primordial galaxy nearly 13 billion light-years away is breaking distance records and may unlock the secrets of how and when some of the most massive star factories were born in the early universe, according to a new study.
Image: An illustration of a starburst galaxy, similar to one—dubbed HFLS3—recently found by researchers. Illustration courtesy C. Carreau, ESA
Using the infrared mapping capabilities of the European Space Agency’s Herschel space telescope, a team of astronomers have spied the faraway light of a starburst galaxy—one that exhibits a high rate of star formation—from when the 14-billion-year-old universe was just 880 million years old.
Dubbed HFLS3, the galaxy—which is the farthest starburst galaxy yet found—was caught in the act of forming and pumping out new stars at unheard of rates more than a billion years earlier than expected.
“This newly discovered galaxy is pushing the extremes in virtually every aspect of its existence,” said Dominik Riechers, an astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and lead author of the new paper published April 17 in the journal Nature.
“It is not only the earliest we have discovered, but also one of the most intensely star-forming, even among its peers that exist at later epochs,” he said.
While its overall size is estimated to be similar to the size of our own Milky Way, scientists were stunned to find that the starburst galaxy is churning out matter with the mass equivalent of 2,900 suns every year.
“It forms stars at a rate more than 2,000 times that of our own Milky Way, and close to the limit where it can stay stable in light of the intense, plentiful, high-energy radiation emitted by the many newly formed young stars,” Riechers added.
The Lagoon Nebula - Infrared and Optical Comparison
This infrared image of the Lagoon nebula contrasts heavily with traditional images taken in visible light. Such images primarily display the striking magenta colour from glowing Hydrogen gas, as well as large dark obscuring clouds of dust.
The infrared part of the spectrum penetrates these clouds better and reveals complex details and thousands of young stars that are otherwise completely invisible. These stars shine primarily in the infrared and appear as golden red in this image. Only a minority of these are visible in traditional optical images. — Rolf Wahl Olsen
"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves."
IC 4604 in Ophiuchus
Rho Ophiuchi is a triple star system located at the southern end of the constellation Ophiuchus near de limit with Scorpius.
The stars are embedded in a large blue reflection nebulosity catalogued as IC 4604 which is mixed with several filaments of dark nebulae. This region is also part of a larger dust and nebulosity region known as the Rho Ophiuchus / Antares complex. — Sergio Eguivar
"If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars."
![Near Anteres Region
The many spectacular colors of the Rho Ophiuchi (oh’-fee-yu-kee) clouds highlight the many processes that occur there.
The blue regions shine primarily by reflected light. Blue light from the star Rho Ophiuchi and nearby stars reflects more efficiently off this portion of the nebula than red light. The Earth’s daytime sky appears blue for the same reason.
The red and yellow regions shine primarily because of emission from the nebula’s atomic and molecular gas. Light from nearby blue stars - more energetic than the bright star Antares - knocks electrons away from the gas, which then shines when the electrons recombine with the gas. The dark regions are caused by dust grains - born in young stellar atmospheres - which effectively block light emitted behind them.
The Rho Ophiuchi star clouds, well in front of the globular cluster M4 visible above on far lower left, are even more colorful than humans can see - the clouds emits light in every wavelength band from the radio to the gamma-ray. [**]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/bc61c4a59d867a210414140c0f501750/tumblr_mlmygsaPi91qbn5m1o1_500.jpg)
The many spectacular colors of the Rho Ophiuchi (oh’-fee-yu-kee) clouds highlight the many processes that occur there.
The blue regions shine primarily by reflected light. Blue light from the star Rho Ophiuchi and nearby stars reflects more efficiently off this portion of the nebula than red light. The Earth’s daytime sky appears blue for the same reason.
The red and yellow regions shine primarily because of emission from the nebula’s atomic and molecular gas. Light from nearby blue stars - more energetic than the bright star Antares - knocks electrons away from the gas, which then shines when the electrons recombine with the gas. The dark regions are caused by dust grains - born in young stellar atmospheres - which effectively block light emitted behind them.
The Rho Ophiuchi star clouds, well in front of the globular cluster M4 visible above on far lower left, are even more colorful than humans can see - the clouds emits light in every wavelength band from the radio to the gamma-ray. [**]
When Supermassive Supergiants Go Superboom
Article by Phil Plait via Slate
I have long been fascinated by gamma-ray bursts (or GRBs). These are incredibly violent events: It’s like taking the Sun’s entire lifetime energy output and cramming into a single event that lasts for mere seconds! The energy emitted is so intense, so bright, we can see GRBs from a distance of billions of light years.
Gamma rays themselves are just a form of light, like the kind we see, but with huge energy; each photon is packed with millions or billions of times the energy in a single photon of visible light. Only the most energetic events in the Universe can make them, so if we detect a burst of them coming from the sky, we know something literally disastrous has happened.
We know GRBs come in many flavors. Some last literally for milliseconds, while others stretch on for minutes. We also know different events can cause them, too. Short ones seem to come from merging neutron stars, ultra dense compact objects left over after stars explode. The longer ones occur when massive stars explode, leaving their cores to collapse. In both cases, the huge blast of high-energy gamma rays signals the birth of a black hole.
But astronomers were recently surprised to find a third type of GRB, one that lasts not for minutes, but for hours. Whatever these objects are, they don’t just flash with light, they linger, blasting out far, far more gamma rays for far, far longer than was previously thought. What could do such a thing?
Several ideas were put forth, but new observations provided the linchpin: an ultra-long-duration GRB occurred on Christmas Day in 2010, and its distance was found to be a soul-crushing 7 billion light years away, about halfway across the visible Universe! This left only one possible candidate for the progenitor: a hugely massive star, one so big it dwarfs the Sun into insignificance.
The Winter Hexagon or Winter Circle/Oval is an asterism appearing to be in the form of a hexagon with vertices at Rigel, Aldebaran, Capella, Pollux, Procyon, and Sirius.
It is mostly upon the Northern Hemisphere’s celestial sphere. On most locations on Earth (except the South Island of New Zealand and the south of Chile and Argentina and further south), this asterism is prominently in the sky from approximately December to March. [**]
Watching starbirth isn’t easy: tens of millions of years are needed to form a star like our Sun. Much like archeologists who reconstruct ancient cities from shards of debris strewn over time, astronomers must reconstruct the birth process of stars indirectly, by observing stars in different stages of the process and inferring the changes that take place. Studies show that half of the common stars, including our Sun, formed in massive clusters, rich with young stars, from which they eventually escape. As part of his PhD thesis work, Thomas Allen, University of Toledo, has been observing such a region where stars are forming.
Cep OB 3b is rich young cluster located in the northern constellation of Cepheus. This image was created by combining individual images observed through four different filters on the 0.9 meter telescope at Kitt Peak: blue, visual (cyan), near infrared (orange) and an emission line of hydrogen (red).
The brightest yellow star near the center of the image is a foreground star, lying between us and the young cluster. The other bright stars are the massive young stars of the cluster that are heating the gas and dust in the cloud and blowing out cavities. Surrounding these massive cluster stars are thousands of smaller young stars that may be in the process of forming planetary systems.
![New Theory of How Giant Stars Grow Unveiled
Baby stars can grow to an incredibly large size — 10 times more massive than the sun, at the least — if they are cocooned in a group of older stars feeding gas to the youngsters, a new study suggests.
This theory could explain how young stars get so big, rather than pushing away gas as they grow and starving themselves once they get about eight times as massive as the sun.
Researchers spotted evidence of this type of “convergent constructive feedback” with the Herschel Space Observatory. It took pictures of a large dust and gas cloud called Westerhout 3, located about 6,500 light-years from Earth, in wavelengths ranging from infrared to part of the microwave spectrum.
[Full Article]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/deb1ee31cb024c71e63700e2831fec04/tumblr_mkdpcsYwXN1qbn5m1o1_500.jpg)
New Theory of How Giant Stars Grow Unveiled
Baby stars can grow to an incredibly large size — 10 times more massive than the sun, at the least — if they are cocooned in a group of older stars feeding gas to the youngsters, a new study suggests.
This theory could explain how young stars get so big, rather than pushing away gas as they grow and starving themselves once they get about eight times as massive as the sun.
Researchers spotted evidence of this type of “convergent constructive feedback” with the Herschel Space Observatory. It took pictures of a large dust and gas cloud called Westerhout 3, located about 6,500 light-years from Earth, in wavelengths ranging from infrared to part of the microwave spectrum.
This pretty sprinkling of bright blue stars is the cluster NGC 2547, a group of recently formed stars in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sails). This image was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Image: Wide-field view of the open star cluster NGC 2547 Credit: ESO/DSS 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin
The Universe is an old neighbourhood — roughly 13.8 billion years old. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is also ancient — some of its stars are more than 13 billion years old (eso0425). Nevertheless, there is still a lot of action: new objects form and others are destroyed. In this image, you can see some of the newcomers, the young stars forming the cluster NGC 2547.
But, how young are these cosmic youngsters really? Although their exact ages remain uncertain, astronomers estimate that NGC 2547’s stars range from 20 to 35 million years old. That doesn’t sound all that young, after all. However, our Sun is 4600 million years old and has not yet reached middle age. That means that if you imagine that the Sun as a 40 year-old person, the bright stars in the picture are three-month-old babies.
NGC4755: Jewel Box Star Cluster by Sam Frizza
Nearby Star Has Strange Cool Layer Like the Sun
The atmosphere of the sun has a strange cool spot amid its many layers. The outer atmosphere is super-heated to millions of degrees, while the surface is about 6,000 degrees Celsius. Sandwiched in between is a 4,000-degree C layer. Astronomers have found a similar cool layer in the atmosphere of the nearby star Alpha Centauri A.
NGC 6188
Dark shapes with bright edges winging their way through dusty NGC 6188 are tens of light-years long. The emission nebula is found near the edge of an otherwise dark large molecular cloud in the southern constellation Ara, about 4,000 light-years away.
Copyright: Piotrek Sadowski
Side note: I did the filter editing for this pic (something I don’t really do but felt compelled to with this pic), this is the original filter from the astrophotographer. You’ve probably seen the pic above with the same color editing used throughout tumblr for others means (namely for cute sciency quotes but I assure you this version originated here). I wanted the emission to be so saturated that when people looked at it they noticed how the ionized hydrogen dominated the area and how much light years the area took up so you’d get an idea of just how massive these stars are despite them not reaching their main sequence (when they typically are most stable) phase yet. Normally these are considered stellar nurseries largely due to the fact that there are young and very hot stars kicking up the activity surrounding it. Usually only very hot stars, like the young ones, have enough radiation in the ultraviolet region to ionize the hydrogen and give off a view this gorgeous when seen through specific astrophotographic filters (depending on what kind of composition you’re trying to highlight or look at).
