This week, the organization released images of a spectacular rose-colored star goring on Messier 17, taken with its Very Large Telescope. #stars #rosenebula #messier17 - http://clapway.com/2015/09/24/birth-of-stars-messier-17213/

A Rose Nebula

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an organization for astronomic research that is supported by 16 nations; it leads several programs that focus on the design, construction and operation of observing facilities, which enable astronomers to make ground-breaking discoveries. Moreover, the ESO currently owns the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes, and will soon design “world’s biggest eye on the sky” (the largest telescope in the world).

See For Yourself!

This week, the organization released images of a spectacular rose-colored star goring on Messier 17, taken with its Very Large Telescope in the Cerro Paranal, Chile. It’s one of the sharpest images of this nebula to date and showcases the fine details of its cosmic landscape.

Messier 17, located about 5,500 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Sagittarius, has many names: the Omega Nebula, Swan Nebula, Checkmark Nebula, Horseshoe Nebula and Lobster Nebula.

The gas and dust clouds in the nebula run about 15 light years across and fuel the creation of new stars. The combined mass of the area is estimated to be over 30,000 times the mass of the Sun. It contains an open star cluster, comprised of 35 stars, known as NGC 6618; there’s also over 800 stars in the center of the nebula, and dozens more being created in the nebula’s outer regions.

The Details

The picture reveals the nebula as a reddish-pink structure, caused by the ultraviolet light transmitted by the blue stars in the region, which makes the gas glow brightly. Some parts, as can be seen, even appear white – the result of the hot gas mixing with starlight reflected by the stardust.

The images are beautiful and revealing: they showcase how the cosmos look like when a new star is born and how the objects around the birth site react as this happens. The nebula, named after French astronomer, Charles Messier, is only a glance at many more images the ESO will soon bring.

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Witness Birth Of Stars In New Image Of Messier 17

This #GammaRay burst is outsizing reality and turning toward the #SciFi of the video game world. - http://clapway.com/2015/08/05/halo-the-cosmos-evolved-for-master-chief-253/

Our children may never know the revolutionary pleasure the video game Halo: Combat Evolved was when it appeared with a story, plot and overall entertainment value that put everything else to shame. But the universe won’t. We found Halo. In a manner of speaking. Astronomers and the general public have been inspired by the amalgam of structures discovered in deep space, however, today they announced the existence of an unimaginably massive structure composed of a loose ellipse of galaxies, roughly 5 billion light years in diameter.

EVEN MASTER CHIEF CAN’T LAP THIS HALO

This intergalactic halo was limned indirectly by 9 observed gamma-ray bursts, and has been triangulated at about 7 billion light years’ distance. From the ground, the ring spans a distance that’s 70 times the diameter of a full moon.

WHAT ARE GAMMA-RAY BURSTS?

When a super-massive star runs out of hydrogen, instead of just expanding and eventually releasing its outer layers in a relatively calm exhalation (like our sun will), it violently implodes, moving into itself so rapidly that the curvature of space time itself cannot keep up with the increasing gravity well, and a black hole forms. When it’s born, the black hole releases spectacular beams of energy coming out at a normal angle with respect to the black hole’s rotation. If earth is lucky (or unlucky) enough to be aligned with these beams, a climactic signal registers on scientists’ equipment, and with the information contained in the signal (e.g., direction, magnitude, dissipation), astronomers are able to ascertain the distance and location of the gamma-ray burst.

You can actually look up all observed gamma-ray bursts to date on the Gamma Ray Burst Online Index, which catalogues each and every gamma-ray burst’s position, so you can see where we fit into the big black picture. Gulp.

BUT WHAT ABOUT HALO?

The thing is that these 9 gamma-ray bursts, or rather black holes, must be somehow interacting, related, connected, since they are a similar distance from earth. The researchers involved have shared that there is actually a 1 in 20,000 chance that gamma-ray bursts would be distributed in such a way so closely resembling the Halo of science fiction. This actually means that this impossibly macro-geometry is actually a very likely phenomenon.

But latest cosmological models preclude the very possibility of such cosmic structures.

COSMIC CONTRADICTIONS

Currently, cosmology (the study of the cosmos), holds that the universe ought to have a fairly uniform distribution of matter and energy on macro scales. This is actually a precept of the science, called the “Cosmological Principle,” and it’s already found ground in the form of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and Europe’s Planck Space Telescope, both of which catalogue cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation.

Until recently, the upper-limit for cosmic structures was 1.2 billion light-years across, but this gamma-ray burst halo is 5 times the size of that limit. That’s a theoretical discrepancy no trade could ignore. What’s more, another structure of gamma-ray bursts was discovered, spanning a distance of 10 billion light-years.

What madness is responsible for this super-geometry? Some macro-cosmology holds that there are areas of our universe which clump together in web-like strands that flow for billions of light-years, creating “holes” in the universe, where little to no matter or energy is present. But presently, this newest structure creates a super-void that puts even the most superlative absences to shame.

“If we are right, this structure contradicts the current models of the universe. It was a huge surprise to find something this big — and we still don’t quite understand how it came to exist at all,” exclaimed Balazs to the Royal Astronomical Society.

Originally reported by the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Halo: The Cosmos Evolved For Master Chief

#ALMA has given us the ability to peer #BackInTime and learn about the #origins of the #universe. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/22/galaxies-800-million-years-after-big-bang-limned-by-alma-112/

We all know about the Big Bang, but the formation of the first galaxies has always been a mystery to scientists, until now. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, scientists have gained the ability to peer into the depths of foggy beginnings, when hydrogen gas was just starting to collect and condense into galaxies, in the first several hundred million years following the Big Bang.

ALMA TELESCOPE IS NOT A TIME MACHINE

The thing about light is that it doesn’t travel instantaneously. Travelling at about 300 million meters per second, even the darkest patches of the sky are filled with light that’s travelled so far that it actually outlived the object it originated from. This scientific fact is why the Sun as we know it from the Earth’s surface is actually the Sun as it appeared approximately 8 minutes ago.

ALMA TELESCOPE IS A TIME MACHINE

Recently, astronomers using ALMA peered far enough back in time that they were able to view galaxies existing 800 million years after the Big Bang. Ironically, this was only made possible by the light of glowing ionized carbon, emitted from the gaseous clouds giving birth to stars.

One of these early galaxies named BDF 3299 was specifically recognized by the clear signal of glowing carbon emitting from one side of the ancient galaxy.

QUALIFYING ALMA’S FINDINGS

“This is the most distant detection ever of this kind of emission from a ‘normal galaxy (sic), seen less than one billion years after the Big Bang,” exclaimed Andrea Ferrara, co-author of these new findings. “It gives us the opportunity to watch the build-up of the first galaxies. For the first time we are seeing early galaxies not merely as tiny blobs, but as objects with internal structure!”

The reason for the above mentioned galaxies’ glowing side is that the normally brighter central clouds are being disrupted by the chaotic environment surrounding freshly born stars. Additionally, the carbon’s glow is actually tracing new, cold gas on its way into the stars from intergalactic space, and then the light is sent back out on its long journey to the ALMA’s dishes.

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS

Ferrara explains further, “We have been trying to understand the interstellar medium and the formation of the re-ionization sources for many years…[f]inally to be able to test predictions and hypotheses on real data from ALMA is an exciting moment and opens up a new set of questions. This type of observation will clarify many of the thorny problems we have with the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the universe.”

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Galaxies 800 Million Years After Big Bang Limned By ALMA