Posts Tagged ‘supernova’

Baubles and Flowers

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al & ESA/XMM-Newton; Opti­cal: AURA/NOAO/CTIO/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al

A glow­ing bauble high­lights a star-forming flower in this image from NASA’s Chan­dra X-ray Obser­va­tory.

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Growing, glowing spider

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/L.Townsley et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/PSU/L.Townsley et al.

A glow­ing spi­der is grows inside this mas­sive star-forming region known as the Taran­tula Nebula.

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Jellyfish Supernova

Credit: NASA/CXC/UCSC/L. Lopez et al.

Tucked away in the con­stel­la­tion Cen­tau­rus, a col­or­ful bub­ble of gas and dust resem­bling a jel­ly­fish, is all that remains of a great star.

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Fireworks in D

Credit: NASA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

The let­ter D is out­lined in this celes­tial fire­works dis­play. The col­or­ful fil­a­ments seen in this NASA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope image of N49 are all that’s left of a super­nova explo­sion that took place thou­sands of years ago in the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud. This super­nova rem­nant is called N 49, or DEM L 190. Inside these sheets of glow­ing star debris lies a pow­er­ful, spin­ning neu­tron star called a pul­sar. Pul­sars give off reg­u­lar pulses of energy like the tick­ing of a very pre­cise clock. After the super­nova blows off the outer lay­ers of the star, it col­lapses under its own grav­ity. The star col­lapses so much that the pro­tons and elec­trons spin­ning around the atoms of the star com­bine to form neu­trons. A neu­tron star is very dense. Imag­ine our entire Sun packed into an area of just 20 kilo­me­ters (12 miles) in diam­e­ter! Grav­ity is very strong on a neu­tron star. On Earth, a spoon­ful of neu­tron star mate­r­ial would weigh bil­lions of tons. The mag­netic field of N 49 is super strong, tril­lions of times stronger than Earth’s, putting it in spe­cial class of bizarre celes­tial objects called magnetars.

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Curling C

NASA, ESA, the Hub­ble Her­itage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Col­lab­o­ra­tion, and A. Evans (Uni­ver­sity of Vir­ginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University)

Galaxy inter­ac­tions cre­ate all sorts of curls and odd shapes. In this NASA Hub­ble Space Tele­scope image of UGC 4881, the let­ter ‘C’ spi­rals out in deep space.

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Welcome

The ancient peo­ples saw pic­tures in the sky. From those pat­terns in the heav­ens, ancient sto­ry­tellers cre­ated leg­ends about heroes, maid­ens, drag­ons, bears, cen­taurs, dogs and myth­i­cal crea­tures…
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