The constellation of Orion is easy to see in the night sky. But around it is the fainter Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.
Depth of Field
A 3D map of the Pillars of Creation has been made, and from it we know they will still be around for millions of years.
Green Goblins
Eight galaxies have been found with emission nebula much brighter than the central quasar, and might be due to binary black holes from a galactic merger.
Known Unknowns
The image above is a planetary nebula known as M2-9. It’s also known as the Butterfly nebula, but there are lots of other nebulae by that name. Planetary nebulae occur when red giant stars cast off their outer layers as they begin a transition toward becoming a white dwarf. The cast off material is caused to glow when the exposed interior of …
Act of Frustration
Imagine you’re an astronomer interested in comets. You scan the sky with a small telescope, looking for a faint fuzzy patch in the sky. Soon enough you find one. But as you watch it over the next few nights you notice it isn’t moving against the background stars. So it’s not a comet, but rather a nebula. Looking through the …
Cold Embers
The Boomerang Nebula is the coldest natural location in the universe. It has a temperature of 1 K, or just one degree above absolute zero. This is particularly interesting because the cosmic microwave background is about 3 K. That makes the nebula colder than empty space.
Dark Shadows
E. E. Barnard is an astronomer perhaps best known for measuring the proper motion of a faint red dwarf about six light years away, now known as Barnard’s star. But Barnard was also a pioneer of astrophotography, and he did a great deal of work studying dark nebulae.
More Echoes
With the discussion of light echoes today, here’s another interesting one. In 2002 the star v838 Monocerotis swiftly brightened to about a million times the brightness of the Sun before dimming down again. This burst of light then traveled outward from the star, illuminating the gas and dust surrounding the star. Because the light burst was relatively short, this meant that successive layers of the gas and dust were illuminated as the sphere of light expanded.
Pillars of Creation
The Pillars of Creation (seen above) is an image of a portion of the Eagle nebula (M16) taken by Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. It soon became one of the most iconic space images of all time. The Eagle nebula is a stellar nursery, with several regions of gas and dust where stars are actively forming, including the pillars.
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