This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Calabash Nebula, the cosmic death throes of a low-mass star like our Sun. Caught during the astronomically brief phase between a red giant and a planetary nebula, the star is ejecting much of its mass out into space at velocities of over 620,000 mph. So why does it “stink?” The bright…
Category: Deep Space Objects
Galactic Collisions Meet Supermassive Black Holes in This Deep Space Image
Observations from some of the world’s most powerful telescopes—NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India, the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, and Japan’s Subaru Telescope in Hawai’i have been combined to create an image of two incredibly powerful cosmic forces colliding, two billion light-years away. Hot gas…
This Star in Our Galaxy is Almost as Old as the Entire Universe
Like anything else, stars have life spans. They are born (from collapsing clouds of interstellar dust), they go through a long main phase where they fuse various elements in their cores, and eventually they die when they run out of fuel. The finer details of these steps are based on what the star is made of, how…
“Alien Megastructure” May Actually Be Scraps of an Ingested Planet
For the past couple of years the astronomy world has been abuzz with news of the strange and randomly-occurring dimming of the star KIC 8462852—aka Tabby’s Star—located 1,276 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus and recently observed by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Hypotheses about the cause range from conservative (a transiting cloud of comets) to quite speculative (an “alien megastructure” constructed around the…
What If You Had a Black Hole in Your Pocket?
What would happen if you somehow had a coin-sized black hole to play with? (Come on, you know you’ve been wondering about this.) Well, besides the fact that you’d quickly be dead (spoiler alert) a lot of things would happen—to you, to the world around you and, depending on the kind of black hole, to…
What Can Hubble See? Find Out in This Music Video
Get into a little “Hubble trouble” with this music video by NPR’s Adam Cole, aka Skunk Bear. Produced in honor of the 25th anniversary of the space telescope’s launch aboard Discovery STS-31 on April 24, 1990, the video is a parody of Iggy Azalea’s “Trouble” and, in my opinion, surpasses it astronomically. (See what I did…
Cassini Spots the Sombrero Galaxy from Saturn
We’re all used to seeing fantastic images of Saturn and its family of moons from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has spent the last decade in orbit around the ringed world. But every now and then Cassini aims its cameras outwards, capturing images of the sky beyond Saturn – just like we might look up at the…
What is a Neutron Star, Anyway?
Neutron stars are strange cosmic beasts. Stellar corpses that are several times the mass of our Sun but only about the width of Manhattan, they can contain a mountain’s worth of star-stuff within the space of a sugar cube, creating all sorts of weird physics that requires funny-sounding names like “quark-gluon plasma” to even try to describe what’s…
Our Five-Trillion-Mile Close Call: the Star(s) That Skimmed the Solar System
It’s like something out of a Hollywood film or a science fiction novel: a dark star sneaks up on Earth from just outside the Solar System, discovered too late to do anything about it (and really, what could we do?) and plows through the cloud of comets that surrounds the Sun like a haze of icy gnats, sending them flying…
Hubble’s Stunning Star-Filled View of the Andromeda Galaxy
It’s Hubble’s 25th anniversary in space this year but it seems like we’re the ones getting all the presents! Yesterday NASA released two new high-def versions of the famous “Pillars of Creation” image, and now today there’s this: Hubble’s most detailed image ever of the Andromeda Galaxy! Containing over 100 million stars it’s not just the…
Hubble Gives Us Our Best View Yet Of The “Pillars of Creation”
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its launch this year and to commemorate the milestone it’s recently turned its gaze (during the course of about 15 orbits) back onto one of the most iconic targets of its career: the “Pillars of Creation,” five-light-year-high columns of cold gas in the process of being sculpted…
A Matter of Scale
Note: this post was first published on Feb. 22, 2011. I’m reposting it again today because 1. the video creator has since updated the soundtrack, and 2. it’s still awesome. One of the things that fascinates me so much about the Universe is the incredible vastness of scale, distance and size. On Earth we have…
Lights in the Dark 