CASSIOPEIA the NewBorn Star in the Milky Way

Cassiopeia the New born Star on the Milky Way

This extraordinarily deep Chandra image shows Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short), the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way. 

New analysis shows that this supernova remnant acts like a relativistic pinball machine by accelerating electrons to enormous energies. The blue, wispy arcs in the image show where the acceleration is taking place in an expanding shock wave generated by the explosion. The red and green regions show material from the destroyed star that has been heated to millions of degrees by the explosion.  from here

The NEW Milky Way galaxy BLACK HOLE

New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest a highly distorted supernova remnant may contain the most recent black hole formed in the Milky Way galaxy. The remnant appears to be the product of a rare explosion in which matter is ejected at high speeds along the poles of a rotating star.

NASA - Picture of the Day - NGC 6357

NGC 6357's Cathedral to Massive Stars
Image Credit: NASA, ESA and J. M. Apellániz (IAA, Spain)

How massive can a normal star be?

Estimates made from distance, brightness and standard solar models had given one star in the open cluster Pismis 24 over 200 times the mass of our Sun, nearly making it the record holder. This star is the brightest object located just above the gas front in the above image. 

Close inspection of images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, however, have shown that Pismis 24-1 derives its brilliant luminosity not from a single star but from three at least. Component stars would still remain near 100 solar masses, making them among the more massive stars currently on record. Toward the bottom of the image, stars are still forming in the associated emission nebula NGC 6357. 

Appearing perhaps like a Gothic cathedral, energetic stars near the center appear to be breaking out and illuminating a spectacular cocoon. from here

The Most Astonishing Fact on Universe

Sun Flares - Impact Predicted for Today

Yesterday I've posted about the enormous sun explosion which unleashed  one of the biggest flares ever seen during its current activity cycle.

An X5.4-class outburst strong enough to trigger a radio blackout. The resulting geomagnetic storm could affect electrical grids, communication links, satellite navigation systems and airline schedules over the next couple of days.

First impacts are scheduled to reach Earth today.

March 6th and the Massive Sun Eruptions

Last March 6th, 2012 there was a major sun eruption that caused a gigantic flare caught on tape.

This movie was captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in the 171 and 131 Angstrom wavelength. One of the most dramatic features is the way the entire surface of the sun seems to ripple with the force of the eruption. This movement comes from something called EIT waves -- because they were first discovered with the Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) on the Solar Heliospheric Observatory. Since SDO captures images every 12 seconds, it has been able to map the full evolution of these waves and confirm that they can travel across the full breadth of the sun. The waves move at over a million miles per hour, zipping from one side of the sun to the other in about an hour. The movie shows two distinct waves. The first seems to spread in all directions; the second is narrower, moving toward the southeast. Such waves are associated with, and perhaps trigger, fast coronal mass ejections, so it is likely that each one is connected to one of the two CMEs that erupted on March 6.

Scientists said that they had implications with electric sources on Earth, causing some energie break ups.
Caption: NASA/SDO

Travelling with the Eyes in the Sky

Temporal Distortion from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

The author called it "Temporal Distortion" but after watching the movie I guess the right name would be travelling with the Eyes in the Sky.

Randy Halverson spent some months, last year, shooting the stars on the states of South Dakota, Wisconsin, Utah and Colorado. Between June and October he stared at the sky, capturing some of the most stunning images ever caught on tape. It's 4 minutes of really breathtaking sky caught is a way that conventional video cameras aren't prepared 

Most of the video was shot near the White River in central South Dakota, during September and October 2011. There are other shots, from Arches National Park in Utah, and Canyon of the Ancients area of Colorado, during June 2011.
The aurora was shot in central South Dakota, in September 2011, and near Madison, Wisconsin on October 25, 2011.
Randy was asked why the auroras appear yellow in color in many of the scenes.

“I’m not sure why they were yellow either,” he replied. “They were really far off on the horizon and I was just seeing the top of them. The exposures on those were 30 seconds at ISO 3200, maybe the long exposure did make them that way. I really don’t know.” from here

Solar Storms Hit Earth

Giant solar flare captured in UV light by NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory satellite on January 23. Credit: NASA

After a weekend filled with great auroral activity in Northern Canada and Scandinavia (Norway video) thanks to a strong gust of solar wind coming off the Sun Jan.19th, the Earth is about to get hit again -by the biggest blast of solar radiation in 7 years. Talk about a one-two punch on the cosmic scale!

On January 22d, at around 11 pm ET a giant, long lasting, solar flare erupted off the face of the Sun, sending a giant Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) – cloud of plasma and charged particles – squarely towards the Earth. 

Detected by NASA’s sun-monitoring satellites SOHO and STEREO, the solar blast was determined to be an M9 on the Richter scale of solar flares – just shy of an X- class flare which is ranked as the most powerful.

And Earth is not the only planet in its cross-hairs. Mars will get walloped too when the CME arrives there on Jan.25th.  more here

At the Cassiopeia Constelation a Bipolar Nebula

Image courtesy T.A. Rector and H. Schweiker, WIYN/UAA/NOAO/NSF

Cassiopeia is now known as a far away constelation but once Cassiopeia was known, on the Greek mythology as the Queen, wife of king Cephueus. The Queen was vain and she challenged Poseidon,, saying that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the Nereids, the nymph-daughters of the sea god Nereus.

Cassiopea as a constellation

This brought desgrace to the kingdom and caused the wrath of Poseidon ordering floods to the country and bringing misery to everyone. In a way to try to calm down Poseidon the sovereigns consulted a wise oracle and they were advised to offer their daughter Andromeda in sacrifice. Andromeda was chained to a rock, at the sea's edge, and left there to helplessly await her fate at the hands of Cetus. But the hero Perseus arrived in time, saved Andromeda, and ultimately became her husband.

But Cassiopeia could not escape her punishment, and she was placed in heavens tied to a chair in such a position that, as she circles the celestial pole in her throne, she is upside-down half the time. The constellation resembles the chair that originally represented an instrument of torture. Cassiopeia is not always represented tied to the chair in torment, in some later drawings she is holding a mirror, symbol of her vanity, while in others she holds a palm leaf, a symbolism that is not clear.
As it is near the pole star, the constellation Cassiopeia can be seen the whole year from the northern hemisphere, although sometimes upside down.

I remembered this story when I looked at this wonderful picture taken by the National Optical Astronomy Observatorys in Tucson, Arizona, showing the unusual shape of the planetary nebula KjPn8, which lies in the constellation of Cassiopeia.

Despite their name, planetary nebulae are actually the remains of dead sunlike stars. This bipolar nebula's complex structure was most likely caused by irregular ejections of gas as its star puffed up and shed its outer layers of gas. from here

The Eagle Nebula

The Eagle Nebula is 6500 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens. It contains a young hot star cluster, NGC6611, visible with modest back-garden telescopes, that is sculpting and illuminating the surrounding gas and dust, resulting in a huge hollowed-out cavity and pillars, each several light-years long. The Hubble image hinted at new stars being born within the pillars, deeply inside small clumps known as 'evaporating gaseous globules' or EGGs. Owing to obscuring dust, Hubble's visible light picture was unable to see inside and prove that young stars were indeed forming.

The ESA Herschel Space Observatory's new image shows the pillars and the wide field of gas and dust around them. Captured in far-infrared wavelengths, the image allows astronomers to see inside the pillars and structures in the region.

Herschel's image makes it possible to search for young stars over a much wider region and thus come to a much fuller understanding of the creative and destructive forces inside the Eagle Nebula.

Earlier mid-infrared images from ESA's Infrared Space Observatory and NASA's Spitzer, and the new XMM-Newton data, have led astronomers to suspect that one of the massive, hot stars in NGC6611 may have exploded in a supernova 6000 years ago, emitting a shockwave that destroyed the pillars. However, because of the distance of the Eagle Nebula, we won't see this happen for several hundred years yet.

Credits: NASA/ESA/STScI, Hester & Scowen (Arizona State University)

This 1995 Hubble Space Telescope image of the ‘Pillars of Creation’ is probably the most famous astronomical image of the 20th Century. Taken in visible light using a combination of SII/H-alpha and OIII filters, it shows a part of the Eagle Nebula where new stars are forming. The tallest pillar is around 4 light-years high  from here

Misteries - Where Did Our Sun Born?

A Hubble picture of a star-forming cloud of dust and gas called the Orion Nebula.
Image courtesy ESA/NASA

Stars like the sun typically form in clusters with other stars. Many clusters are spread out so that the stars drift apart, but others are denser, and gravity keeps their stars close together.
The sun now stands alone, so astronomers think our star—and its newborn solar system—was either ejected from its birth cluster or drifted away from its siblings about 4.5 billion years ago.

Messier 67, or M67, is a hundred-light-year-wide ball of stars that recently passed some crucial "paternity tests" for being the sun's birthplace.
The cluster not only harbors stellar bodies similar in temperature, age, and chemistry to our sun, but M67 also drifts a relatively close 2,900 light-years away.

A new study of M67, however, undermines the existing lines of evidence and leaves almost no chance that our star could hail from the region.
(Also see "Three Theories of Planet Formation Busted, Expert Says.")

Computer simulations show that a rare chain of events—two or three massive stars lining up just right to make a gravitational slingshot—would have been needed to kick the sun out of M67 and get it where it is today.
Such a powerful event is a probabilistic Hail Mary and, even if it had occurred, the speed of the kick would have ripped our nascent solar system to shreds.

"When you have that kind of gravitational disruption, planetary disks evaporate, and existing planets acquire energy and can be expelled," said study leader Barbara Pichardo, an astrophysicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. more here

Universe - The Final Frontier

 Credits : Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. (David Kirkby/University of California at Irvine/SDSS)

Scientist, with the help of the SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY,  designed the most detailed map of a quarter of the known universe. It is the most detailed yet done. 

Each green dot is a galaxy.

 NASA/ESA/the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

This bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, looks like a celestial snow angel. 

It is nearly 2,000 light-years from Earth. 

A massive, young star, IRS 4 is in the middle of the formation. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from it.  from here

White Dwarf Bursts into a Supernova Type 1a

Images from the Hubble Space Telescope reveal the birth of a Type 1a supernova, a "standard candle" for measuring the expansion of the universe. Nicknamed SN Primo, this supernova is the most distant of its type ever discovered. Image: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University), and S. Rodney (The Johns Hopkins University)

Astronomers have found the most distant Type 1a supernova, a kind of star explosion that should help scientists better understand the ever-expanding universe and the nature of dark energy, the strange force accelerating that expansion.

Bursting into existence 9 billion years ago, the supernova (nicknamed SN Primo) was born from the violent death of a shrunken, super-dense star called a white dwarf. 

Light from such explosions falls within a very narrow range, which is why astronomers call them "standard candles." As the light travels toward Earth, astronomers can measure how it is stretched by the expansion of the universe.

"If we look into the early universe and measure a drop in the supernovae, then it could be that it takes a long time to make Type 1a supernovae," said Steve Rodney, also of Johns Hopkins. more here

Stars - The formation of Red Giants

Size of the Sun now compared to how big it will expand to as a red giant. 
Credit: Wikipedia User:Mysid, User:Mrsanitazier.

Stars like our Sun run on hydrogen. When a star runs out of hydrogen, it is forced to burn other fuels. This switch triggers a change in the star. The core of the star collapses as the outer region expands and cools, creating a type of star known as a red giant.

We know that the angular momentum of the star must be conserved, so we also know that the core of the star that collapses must be spinning faster than the surface of the red giant. So far, though, our understanding of exactly how a star’s angular momentum changes as the star evolves is not especially good. more here

New "Deep Fried" Planets Found — Survivors of Star Death

An artist's impression of planets orbiting close to a hot subdwarf star.

Illustration courtesy S. Charpinet

Two newfound Earth-size planets are probably the charred survivors of a near-death encounter with their fading parent star, scientists say.

The planetary pair, discovered using NASA's Kepler space telescope, are about 0.76 and 0.87 times Earth's radius, making the alien worlds the smallest planets detected so far around an active star, other than our sun.

But the planets didn't start small—astronomers think the worlds were once gas giants, akin to Jupiter or Saturn, that were stripped down after being swallowed by their swollen, aging parent. more here

Gama Ray Burst - The Power of a Colapsing Star

Whenever STARS perish or collide and black holes form, there's an enormous amont of energy reliased in the atmosphere. That energy, is called Game Ray Burst and it's one of the most powerful forces of the universe. Cientists have been studying it for some time, focusing satelites to every eminent colliding stars trying to understand the impact which such explotions would have on our Gallaxy. If something like this happened not very far from our gallaxy, the ozone layer would be destroyed so as life on Earth.