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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Feb 28

Cosmic colors at sunrise; never get tired of seeing what the new day brings

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Feb 11

Clearest image ever taken of Pluto

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Feb 9

Stunning: NGC 2264 and the Christmas Tree cluster

(Credit: ESO)

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 21

Lagoon Nebula (Visible-light View)

This colorful image, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, celebrates the Earth-orbiting observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction.

At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust.

This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core.

The giant star, called Herschel 36, is bursting out of its natal cocoon of material, unleashing blistering radiation and torrential stellar winds (streams of subatomic particles) that push dust away in curtain-like sheets. This action resembles the Sun bursting through the clouds at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm that showers sheets of rainfall.

Herschel 36’s violent activity has blasted holes in the bubble-shaped cloud, allowing astronomers to study this action-packed stellar breeding ground.

The hefty star is 32 times more massive and eight times hotter than our Sun. It is nearly nine times our Sun’s diameter. Herschel 36 is still very active because it is young by a star’s standards, only 1 million years old. Based on its mass, it will live for another 5 million years. In comparison, our smaller Sun is 5 billion years old and will live another 5 billion years.

This region epitomizes a typical, raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction. The clouds may look majestic and peaceful, but they are in a constant state of flux from the star’s torrent of searing radiation and high-speed particles from stellar winds. As the monster star throws off its natal cocoon of material with its powerful energy, it is suppressing star formation around it.

However, at the dark edges of this …

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 15

A Flash of Life

Credit:ESA/Hubble & NASA

Located around 5000 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan), Abell 78 is an unusual type of planetary nebula.

After exhausting the nuclear fuel in their cores, stars with a mass of around 0.8 to 8 times the mass of our Sun collapse to form dense and hot white dwarf stars. As this process occurs, the dying star will throw off its outer layers of material, forming an elaborate cloud of gas and dust known as a planetary nebula. This phenomenon is not uncommon, and planetary nebulae are a popular focus for astrophotographers because of their often beautiful and complex shapes. However, a few like Abell 78 are the result of a so-called “born again” star.

Although the core of the star has stopped burning hydrogen and helium, a thermonuclear runaway at its surface ejects material at high speeds. This ejecta shocks and sweeps up the material of the old nebula, producing the filaments and irregular shell around the central star seen in this Picture of the Week, which features data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and PANSTARSS.

Credit:ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Guerrero
Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 9

One of the most reproduced images in history - The Blue Marble

CREDIT:NASA 1972

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 6

A Whirlpool Galaxy |NASA|

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 6

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 2

A breathtaking view of the Vela Supernova Remnant, a vibrant nebula of gas filaments from a star explosion about 11,000 years ago!

(Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA / T.A. Rector, M. Zamani & D. de Martin)

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 2

spiral galaxy by nasa

The Whirlpool Galaxy is a spiral galaxy located 31 million light-years away. Also known as M51, it highlights the attributes of a typical spiral galaxy, including graceful, curving arms, pink star-forming regions, and brilliant blue strands of star clusters.

Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 2

Crisscrossing Dust Devil Tracks Across the Surface of Mars

Dust Devils on Mars - NASA/JPL-Caltech/

An incredible image of Mars has been released that captures the relentless activity of dust devils, swirling across the planet’s surface. These Martian whirlwinds form, move across the surface and dissipate before others take their place. The image was taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in September 2022 and shows part of the Haldane Crater, where dust devils have left their mark on the landscape. Scientists study the image tracks and the rate at which dust accumulates on Mars, helping them better understand the planet’s atmospheric processes.

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Jan 1

Shoot for the stars ✨

While aboard the @Space_Station earlier this year, @Astro_Jeanette captured the perfect shot: a long-exposure photo showcasing streaks of city lights across Western Australia, with swirls of stars glittering above Earth’s golden-red atmosphere

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 31

Auroras are one of the most beautiful and dramatic spectacles we can see on Earth—and you may have the chance to spot them after the recent solar flares.

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 31

Astronomers using Hubble have discovered that the blowtorch-like jet blasting from a supermassive black hole at the core of galaxy M87 (left) seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory (right)

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 31

When the James Webb Space Telescope observed the Horsehead Nebula in infrared light earlier this year, it took this sharp image of the top of the horse’s “mane,” a distinctive dust and gas structure.
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA.

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 31

These stars have a lot of energy to let loose!
The two stars at the center of this James Webb Space Telescope image appear as an orange-white splotch. They are ingesting and ejecting gas and dust … over and over. Millions of years from now, they’ll clear the scene.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA.

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 31

Two features of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A show the power of the James Webb Space Telescope’s resolving power. The colorful inner shell shows tiny knots of gas and the smoky outer layer is where ejected matter rammed into the surrounding material.

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 31

RCW 49, located in the Milky Way, is a bustling star-forming region 13,700 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus.

Its glowing hydrogen gas and dark molecular clouds are sculpted by intense stellar winds from newly formed massive stars. This nebula is home to over 2,200 young stars, many hidden within its dense dust clouds. It provides crucial insights into the birth and early evolution of stars.

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 31

Stunning view from the Red Planet|NASA|

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 30

Hubble's sharpest view of the Orion Nebula

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 29

The new year is even more important than we thought:

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 29

Do you think you're sitting still right now?

- You're on a planet that orbitis a star at 30km/s

- That star is orbiting the center of a galaxy at 230km/s

- That galaxy is moving trough the universe at 600km/s.

Since you started reading this, you have traveled about 3000km.

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 28

The Universe doesn't care

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 28

Hubble Refines Distance to the Pleiades Star Cluster

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have helped settle a mystery that has puzzled scientists concerning the exact distance to the famous nearby star cluster known as the Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters. The Pleiades cluster, named by the ancient Greeks, is easily seen as a small grouping of stars lying near the shoulder of Taurus, the Bull, in the winter sky. Although it might be expected that the distance to this well-studied cluster would be well established, there has been an ongoing controversy among astronomers about its distance for the past seven years.

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Astronomy pictures @astronomers.bsky.social · Dec 28

Milky Way near zenith, posed on top of a pillar of zodiacal light along the ecliptic plane.

Credit: Copyright Josh Calcino

The bright light at the end of this country road is a close conjunction of two Venus and Jupiter from August 27, 2016. This vertical panorama shows the central Milky Way near zenith, posed on top of a pillar of zodiacal light along the ecliptic plane.
Credit: Copyright Josh Calcino

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