☽Cosmic Butterfly☾

museumuesum: Erik Olson I Fucking Love Space, 2011 oil on...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:50:57 -0400

Erik Olson

I Fucking Love Space, 2011
oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches

Mercury, 2011
oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches

Venus, 2011
oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches

Earth, 2011
oil on canvas, 72 x 84 inches

Mars, Fear & Dread, 2011
oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches

Jupiter, 2011
oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches

Saturn, 2011
oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches

Uranus, 2011
oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches

Neptune, 2011
oil on panel, 48 x 36 inches

The Gateway (Hubble Deep Field), 2011
oil on canvas, 72 x 84 inches

ikenbot: Kilimanjaro Fireball While an electric-lighted line...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:42:20 -0400

ikenbot:

Kilimanjaro Fireball

While an electric-lighted line of mountain climbers snakes toward it, a dazzling fireball (bright meteor) streaks over Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro (the summit of Kibo at 5893 meters). — Kwon, O Chul

knowledgethroughscience: What were the first stars? Astronomers...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:23:29 -0400

knowledgethroughscience:

What were the first stars?

Astronomers now know that the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago. For the first few hundred million years, the entire Universe was too hot any stars to form. But then the Universe cooled down to the point that gravity could start pulling together the raw hydrogen and helium into the first ever stars.

The first generation of stars, which astronomers call Population III stars, would have lived short violent lives. They probably lasted just a million years or so, and then detonated as supernovae. But in their lives, these Population III stars would have created heavier and heavier elements at their cores, and in their violent deaths, they would have created the even more exotic heavier elements, like gold and uranium. It’s possible that the first stars went through a few quick cycles, pulling in material, detonating and seeing the region with heavier elements. Eventually the first long-term stars would have gotten going, stars with the amount of heavier elements we see today.

galaxyshmalaxy: M101 (Pinwheel Galaxy) - 10 May 13 (by Astro...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:22:20 -0400

galaxyshmalaxy:

M101 (Pinwheel Galaxy) - 10 May 13 (by Astro Steve)

astronomy-picture-of-the-day: Vela Supernova Remnant in Visible...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:13:40 -0400

astronomy-picture-of-the-day:

Vela Supernova Remnant in Visible Light

The explosion is over but the consequences continue. About eleven thousand years ago a star in the constellation of Vela could be seen to explode, creating a strange point of light briefly visible to humans living near the beginning of recorded history. The outer layers of the star crashed into the interstellar medium, driving a shock wave that is still visible today. A roughly spherical, expanding shock wave is visible in X-rays. The above image captures much of that filamentary and gigantic shock in visible light, spanning almost 100 light years and appearing twenty times the diameter of the full moon. As gas flies away from the detonated star, it decays and reacts with the interstellar medium, producing light in many different colors and energy bands. Remaining at the center of the Vela Supernova Remnant is a pulsar, a star as dense as nuclear matter that completely rotates more than ten times in a single second.

spaceplasma: An Expanding Bubble in Space A star 40 times more...

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:04:52 -0400

spaceplasma:

An Expanding Bubble in Space

A star 40 times more massive than our sun is blowing a giant bubble of material into space. In this colorful picture, the Hubble Telescope captured a glimpse of the expanding bubble, dubbed the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The beefy star [lower center] is embedded in the bright blue bubble. The stellar powerhouse is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space. The dense gas surrounding the star is shaping the castoff material into a bubble. The bubble’s surface is not smooth like a soap bubble’s. Its rippled appearance is due to encounters with gases of different thickness. The nebula is 6 light-years wide and is expanding at 4 million miles per hour (7 million kilometers per hour). The nebula is 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.

Image Credit: NASA, Donald Walter (South Carolina State University), Paul Scowen and Brian Moore (Arizona State University)

thenewenlightenmentage: What is a Magnetar? A magnetar is a...

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:16:52 -0400

thenewenlightenmentage:

What is a Magnetar?

A magnetar is a type of neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field, the decay of which powers the emission of high-energy electromagnetic radiation, particularly X-rays and gamma rays.¹

History

On March 5, 1979, several months after dropping probes into the toxic atmosphere of Venus, two Soviet spacecraft, Venera 11 and 12, were drifting through the inner solar system on an elliptical orbit. It had been an uneventful cruise. The radiation readings on board both probes hovered around a nominal 100 counts per second. But at 10:51AM EST, a pulse of gamma radiation hit them. Within a fraction of a millisecond, the radiation level shot above 200,000 counts per second and quickly went off scale.

Eleven seconds later gamma rays swamped the NASA space probe Helios 2, also orbiting the sun. A plane wave front of high-energy radiation was evidently sweeping through the solar system. It soon reached Venus and saturated the Pioneer Venus Orbiter’s detector. Within seconds the gamma rays reached Earth. They flooded detectors on three U.S. Department of Defense Vela satellites, the Soviet Prognoz 7 satellite, and the Einstein Observatory. Finally, on its way out of the solar system, the wave also blitzed the International Sun-Earth Explorer.

The pulse of highly energetic, or “hard,” gamma rays was 100 times as intense as any previous burst of gamma rays detected from beyond the solar system, and it lasted just two tenths of a second. At the time, nobody noticed; life continued calmly beneath our planet’s protective atmosphere. Fortunately, all 10 spacecraft survived the trauma without permanent damage. The hard pulse was followed by a fainter glow of lower-energy, or “soft,” gamma rays, as well as x-rays, which steadily faded over the subsequent three minutes. As it faded away, the signal oscillated gently, with a period of eight seconds. Fourteen and a half hours later, at 1:17AM on March 6, another, fainter burst of x-rays came from the same spot on the sky. Over the ensuing four years, Evgeny P. Mazets of the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and his collaborators detected 16 bursts coming from the same direction. They varied in intensity, but all were fainter and shorter than the March 5 burst.

Astronomers had never seen anything like this. For want of a better idea, they initially listed these bursts in catalogues alongside the better-known gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), even though they clearly differed in several ways. In the mid-1980s Kevin C. Hurley of the University of California at Berkeley realized that similar outbursts were coming from two other areas of the sky. Evidently these sources were all repeating unlike GRBs, which are one-shot events [see “The Brightest Explosions in the Universe,” by Neil Gehrels, Luigi Piro and Peter J. T. Leonard; Scientific American, December 2002]. At a July 1986 meeting in Toulouse, France, astronomers agreed on the approximate locations of the three sources and dubbed them “soft gamma repeaters” (SGRs). The alphabet soup of astronomy had gained a new ingredient.

Another seven years passed before two of us (Duncan and Thompson) devised an explanation for these strange objects, and only in 1998 did one of us (Kouveliotou) and her team find remains of a star that exploded 5,000 years ago. Unless this overlap was pure coincidence, it put the source 1,000 times as far away as theorists had thought—and thus made it a million times brighter than the Eddington limit. In 0.2 second the March 1979 event released as much energy as the sun radiates in roughly 10,000 years, and it concentrated that energy in gamma rays rather than spreading it across the electromagnetic spectrum.²

About 26 magnetars are known (see here).

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar

2 http://solomon.as.utexas.edu/~duncan/sciam.pdf

n-a-s-a: The Red Rectangle Nebula from Hubble Image Credit:...

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:57:17 -0400

n-a-s-a:

The Red Rectangle Nebula from Hubble

Image Credit: ESA, Hubble, NASA; Reprocessing: Steven Marx, Hubble Legacy Archive

n-a-s-a: Shapley1 in Norma Credit: Rainer Sparenberg, Stefan...

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:37:36 -0400

n-a-s-a:

Shapley1 in Norma

Credit: Rainer Sparenberg, Stefan Binnewies, Volker Robering

Photo

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:09:19 -0400

Photo

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:06:55 -0400

galactic-centre: Galaxy cluster RDCS1252.9-2927. Credit: NASA,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:49:44 -0400

galactic-centre:

Galaxy cluster RDCS1252.9-2927.

Credit:

NASA, ESA, J. Blakeslee (Johns Hopkins University), M. Postman ( Space Telescope Science Institute) and P. Rosati, Chris Lidman & Ricardo Demarco (European Southern Observatory) http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0313b/

Photo

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:06:32 -0400

Photo

Wed, 22 May 2013 05:04:34 -0400

NGC3584 (narrowband) in Carina. — Desert Hollow Observatory

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:00:11 -0400

NGC3584 (narrowband) in Carina. — Desert Hollow Observatory

sagansense: “A sense of wonder is not our only starting point....

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:01:55 -0400

sagansense:

“A sense of wonder is not our only starting point. It can also be our destination.”

Sharman Apt Russell | Anatomy of A Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers

scienceyoucanlove: Solar Storms, With a Chance of Proton...

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:26:01 -0400

scienceyoucanlove:

Solar Storms, With a Chance of Proton Showers

This large solar flare, produced by an active region of the sun (AR9077), triggered magnetic storms and knocked out satellites when it created a solar storm on July 14, 2000. Nicknamed the Bastille Day Event, it was the third largest storm of its kind in the past 30 years, and the biggest solar radiation event since 1989. The Slinky-like loops represent magnetic field lines.

The orbiting Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) satellite captured this close-up image after the flare erupted. Recorded in extreme ultraviolet light, it covers a 230,000-by-77,000 kilometer area on the sun’s surface and shows a one-million-degree solar plasma cooling down.

karrova: Peter Elson

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:38:54 -0400

karrova:

Peter Elson

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 18:36:06 -0400

Ultraviolet Saturn

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:00:45 -0400

Ultraviolet Saturn