A Sonata of Supernovae – Music of Stellar Explosions
Supernovae are the most powerful explosions in the universe this side of the Big Bang itself. There are a souple of different ways for stars to go supernova, but Type 1a Supernovae shine with a well-known brightness. Thanks to this characteristic, astronomers can use these explosions to measure the distances to their host galaxies, and [...]
Gazing into the Eye of a Cosmic Seagull
Stars form inside dense clouds of gas and dust. They start out as small eddies bound by mutual gravitation, and continue to grow more massive and hotter until, finally, a new star ignites: Is that beautiful or what? This is an image of Sharpless 2-292, a region of a larger complex called the Seagull Nebula. [...]
The deepest view of the universe: the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field
How deep into the universe have we looked? As of today, this deep: This is the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field, (XDF), and it’s a masterwork ten years in the making*. What you’re seeing is what you get when you take a very long exposure with two of Hubble’s best cameras of a region of the [...]
A sky full of awesome
I love looking up at the night sky. Whenever I’m outside at night, the first thing I do is look up. How can I not? But there’s always something marring my view – light pollution, clouds, the moon, treetops, and, oh yeah, the Earth itself! I’ve often thought how great it would be if the [...]
The Milky Way’s hot halo
It’s easy to think about our Milky Way galaxy all by itself out in space, surrounded by a halo of globular star clusters, some small satellite galaxies, and that nothing else except for its neighbors millions of light-years away. But the reality is likely quite different. Our home galaxy may be surrounded by an extended halo [...]
Crowdfunding a space science startup
It doesn’t appear that our investment in NASA is going to change anytime soon, and that’s a shame because about 10% of NASA’s budget goes to funding research and education. In other words only about 0.05% of the entire federal budget goes towards actually funding the research that leads to scientific and engineering breakthroughs or [...]
An award-winning Whirlpool
M51, aka the Whirlpool Galaxy, is a favorite target for professional and amateur astronomers alike. It’s a relatively nearby pair of galaxies that are interacting with one another. M51 is the large spiral, seen nearly face-on to us, and its arms are bursting with new star formation. This of course is due to the tidal interaction [...]
A slightly warped edge-on spiral galaxy
Hot on the heels of another beautiful Hubble image of an edge-on spiral galaxy is a Hubble image of NGC 4634. What makes this image so interesting is the slight warp in the disk. If you look closely, you’ll see that the disk is tilted upright on the right hand side of the image and [...]
The coolest Curiosity descent video you will ever see
By now you’ve probably seen several of the videos of MSL Curiosity’s descent to the surface of Mars, but I betcha haven’t seen it like this: Is that incredible or what? This video is brought to us not by NASA, but by Bard Canning, an “amateur” video engineer who obviously put a lot of work [...]
First light in the hunt for Dark Energy
Dark Energy is a bit of a problem in Cosmology. It makes up 75% of the universe, it’s speeding up the expansion of the universe, and we don’t have any idea what it is. In order to get a handle on what Dark Energy really is, we need to get a detailed survey of phenomena [...]
