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Space images thread

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Abell 7 is a very faint planetary nebula of ~ 8 ly across, located some 1800 ly away from us in the southern constellation of Lepus. It's estimated to be 20000 years old. Its central star is seen here as a fading white dwarf some 10 billion years old.



Double lobe radio galaxy NGC 5972



NGC 5963, NGC 5965, NGC 5969, NGC 5971 in Draco

NGC 5963 (upper left corner)
NGC 5965 (lower left corner)
NGC 5969 (upper right corner)
NGC 5971 (right edge)
 

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fantastic pics again Dude, keep em coming.

:toast:


.
 
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Sculptor, [NGC 253] a disk-shape galaxy currently undergoing intense starburst, is located ~ 11.5 million ly from us.
The red region is the lower density CO gas surrounding higher density star-forming regions in yellow.



Globular cluster Palomar 12 was ripped from its initial home, Sagittarius dwarf irregular galaxy [SagDIG] ~ 1.7 billion years ago via tidal interactions between its former home and our galaxy. Palomar 12 currently lies on the outskirts of the Milky Way's halo and it appears to be ~ 30% younger than other Milky Way globulars.



SagDIG is a satellite galaxy to ours, and closely orbits around us - even occasionally passing through the plane of our galaxy. In fact, it is being slowly torn apart and consumed by the Milky Way.

 
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Some far-infrared sexy space



A far-infrared image of the cold pre-stellar cloud L1544 (lower left, with other clouds of gas and dust nearby). The cloud is ~ 450 ly from us.



XDCPJ0044.0-2033 is a massive galaxy cluster with an estimated mass of about 400 trillion times that of our Sun. It lies at a redshift of almost 1.6, meaning that we see it as it was 9.6 billion years ago.



Located at a distance of ~ 1500 ly, the IC 5146 complex belongs to the Gould Belt, a giant ring of stars and star-forming clouds in the vicinity of the Sun.
 
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Nebula NGC 6826 is 2200 ly away in the constellation Cygnus




Gigantic nebula Gum 56, illuminated by the hot bright young stars that were born within it. For millions of years stars have been created out of the gas in this nebula, material which is later returned to the stellar nursery when the aging stars either expel their material gently into space or eject it more dramatically as supernova explosions.

Gum 56 has a diameter of ~ 250 ly and is at a distance of ~ 6000 ly from Earth.

 
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NGC 3521, a flocculent spiral galaxy located ~ 35 million ly away in the constellation of Leo. Spanning ~ 50 000 ly, this spectacular object has a bright and compact nucleus, surrounded by richly detailed spiral structure. The most distinctive features of the bright galaxy NGC 3521 are its long fluffy spiral arms that are dotted with star-forming regions and interspersed with veins of dust.
 

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I had another spacegasm

High resolution image of M43 taken with the 6.5 meter Magellan telescope in Chile and the MMIRS, which sees into the near-infrared spectrum.



Some good old pics by 2MASS



 
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This is a stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the barred spiral galaxy NGC 7469, a luminous infrared source with a powerful starburst deeply embedded into its circumnuclear region, and its smaller companion IC 5283. This system is located ~ 200 million ly away from us in the constellation of Pegasus.
 

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The most distant galaxy in the universe is 13.2 billion light-years away and was formed just 600 million years after the Big Bang, it has been revealed.

A team of Caltech researchers that has spent years searching for the earliest objects in the universe has unveiled their latest find.

Researchers say a galaxy called EGS8p7 that is more than 13.2 billion years old, while the universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old.




Astronomers say the discovery provides them with a rare opportunity to see how galaxies began to take shape when the universe was still extremely young.

In an article published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, Adi Zitrin, a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Scholar in Astronomy, and Richard Ellis--who recently retired after 15 years on the Caltech faculty and is now a professor of astrophysics at University College, London describe evidence for a galaxy called EGS8p7.
Earlier this year, EGS8p7 had been identified as a candidate for further investigation based on data gathered by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Using the multi-object spectrometer for infrared exploration (MOSFIRE) at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the researchers performed a spectrographic analysis of the galaxy to determine its redshift.
Redshift results from the Doppler effect, the same phenomenon that causes the siren on a fire truck to drop in pitch as the truck passes.
With celestial objects, however, it is light that is being 'stretched' rather than sound; instead of an audible drop in tone, there is a shift from the actual color to redder wavelengths.
Redshift is traditionally used to measure distance to galaxies, but is difficult to determine when looking at the universe's most distant -and thus earliest -objects.
Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was a soup of charged particles--electrons and protons--and light (photons).

Because these photons were scattered by free electrons, the early universe could not transmit light.

By 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe had cooled enough for free electrons and protons to combine into neutral hydrogen atoms that filled the universe, allowing light to travel through the cosmos.

Then, when the universe was just a half-billion to a billion years old, the first galaxies turned on and reionized the neutral gas.

The universe remains ionized today.

Prior to reionization, however, clouds of neutral hydrogen atoms would have absorbed certain radiation emitted by young, newly forming galaxies, including the so-called Lyman-alpha line, the spectral signature of hot hydrogen gas that has been heated by ultraviolet emission from new stars, and a commonly used indicator of star formation.

Because of this absorption, it should not, in theory, have been possible to observe a Lyman-alpha line from EGS8p7.

'If you look at the galaxies in the early universe, there is a lot of neutral hydrogen that is not transparent to this emission,' says Zitrin.

'We expect that most of the radiation from this galaxy would be absorbed by the hydrogen in the intervening space. 'Yet still we see Lyman-alpha from this galaxy.'

They detected it using the MOSFIRE spectrometer, which captures the chemical signatures of everything from stars to the distant galaxies at near-infrared wavelengths (0.97-2.45 microns, or millionths of a meter).

'The surprising aspect about the present discovery is that we have detected this Lyman-alpha line in an apparently faint galaxy at a redshift of 8.68, corresponding to a time when the universe should be full of absorbing hydrogen clouds,' Ellis says.

Prior to their discovery, the farthest detected galaxy had a redshift of 7.73.

One possible reason the object may be visible despite the hydrogen-absorbing clouds, the researchers say, is that hydrogen reionization did not occur in a uniform manner.

'Evidence from several observations indicate that the reionization process probably is patchy,' Zitrin says.

'Some objects are so bright that they form a bubble of ionized hydrogen. But the process is not coherent in all directions.'

'The galaxy we have observed, EGS8p7, which is unusually luminous, may be powered by a population of unusually hot stars, and it may have special properties that enabled it to create a large bubble of ionized hydrogen much earlier than is possible for more typical galaxies at these times,' says Sirio Belli, a Caltech graduate student who worked on the project.

'We are currently calculating more thoroughly the exact chances of finding this galaxy and seeing this emission from it, and to understand whether we need to revise the timeline of the reionization, which is one of the major key questions to answer in our understanding of the evolution of the universe,' Zitrin says.


Although the galaxy had previously been found by Nasa’s Hubble and Spitzer telescope, its distance has only now been confirmed. This was done using the W. M. Keck Obseratory’s 33ft (ten metres) telescope in Hawaii, pictured here with its shutter open
 
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NGC 7129 is a star-forming region and reflection nebula in the constellation of Cepheus. It is ~ 3000 ly away from us. The stars in this nebula are very young, only about a million years old.



The open cluster NGC 2437,8 (M46) is ~ 5000 ly distant, in the northern part of the constellation of Puppis.

 

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Astronaut captures incredible images of Earth, moon AND Venus from onboard the ISS


Posting the images to Twitter, astronaut Scott Kelly wrote: 'Day 166. #Venus photobombed the #Moon tonight. Good night from @space_station! #YearInSpace.' This image shows the curvature Earth, the moon and Venus behind it as well as part of the International Space Station in the foreground



The second image was posted this morning and said: 'Good morning Texas! Great view of you, the moon, and Venus this morning.' Texas is seen to the right of the ISS, the moon and Venus are pictured bottom left

Venus was particularly visible overnight because of its 'high albedo'.

Albedo is the amount of light the planet reflects back into space and comes from the permanent cloud layer that surrounds it.

These clouds reflect around 75 per cent of the sunlight they receive back toward Earth, and this reflected light explains why the planet appears so bright in Mr Kelly's images.

The moon looks equally bright because of reflected sunlight, and also looks larger due to its proximity to the station. In reality, the moon has a radius that is three-and-a-half times smaller than Venus.

In fact, the moon is the only object in the night sky brighter than Venus.
 
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Another barred spiral galaxy NGC 3893 (in the constellation of Ursa Major).



NGC 3921 in the constellation of Ursa Major - is an interacting pair of disc galaxies. You can see clearly in this image the disturbed morphology, tails and loops characteristic of a post-merger.
 

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ESO's Very Large Telescope has been used to create the first ever map of the weather on the surface of the nearest brown dwarf to Earth.



An internationalteam has made a chart of the dark and light features on WISE J104915.57-531906.1B, which is informally known as Luhman 16B and is one of two recently discovered brown dwarfs forming a pair only six light-years from the Sun. The figure shows the object at sixteen equally-spaced times as it rotates once on its axis.

Brown Dwarf Binary CFBDSIR 1458+10

This image of the brown dwarf binary CFBDSIR 1458+10 was obtained using the Laser Guide Star (LGS) Adaptive Optics system on the Keck II Telescope in Hawaii.This is the coolest pair of brown dwarfs found so far—the colder and dimmer of the two components is a candidate for the brown dwarf with the lowest temperature ever found
 
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NGC 6090 is a beautiful pair of spiral galaxies with an overlapping central region and two long tidal tails formed from material ripped out of the galaxies by gravitational interaction. The two visible cores are ~ 10000 ly apart, suggesting that the two galaxies are at an intermediate stage in the merging process. The Hubble image reveals bright knots of newborn stars in the region where the two galaxies overlap. NGC 6090 is located in the constellation of Draco, ~ 400 million ly away from us.




Sculptor Dwarf Elliptical is one of the 14 known satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. This galaxy is located in the southern constellation of Sculptor and lies ~ 280000 ly away from us.
 
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NGC 6820 [Sh 2-86] is an emission nebula in a star forming region ~ 6000 ly away in the constellation of Vulpecula. It surrounds the relatively young open cluster of stars, NGC 6823. The most striking feature is the trunk-like pillar of dust and gas protruding from the east side of the nebula towards the open cluster, NGC 6823 in the west.
 
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Bubble Galaxy (NGC 3521) is a flocculent galaxy. In flocculent spirals, fluffy patches of stars and dust show up here and there throughout their discs.
30% of galaxies share NGC 3521's patchiness, while 10% have their star-forming regions wound into grand design spirals.
 
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At left is the galaxy J0702+5002, which isn't an X-shaped galaxy whose form is caused by a merger. At right is the galaxy J1043+3131, which is a "true" candidate for a merged system. Source



The galaxies at the top and bottom of the frame are named PGC 37639 and PGC 101374 respectively. A smaller and relatively intact spiral galaxy, known as SDSSCGB 19.4, can be seen to the right of the merging duo. This trio of galaxies comprises Arp 194, a galaxy group just under 600 million ly away from us in the constellation of Cepheus. The blue stream is thought to have formed through the turbulent gravitational interactions occurring at the top of the frame. The stream is some 100000 ly long, and made up of gas, dust and many millions of newborn stars. These stars, which are clumped together to form star clusters, which in turn later accumulate as superclusters, are responsible for the striking blue hue visible here. They are mostly young, hot and massive, a combination that causes them to emit blue light. Source
 
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