Astrosciencechick

NGC 7129 - Reflection Nebula: 3000LY Away

The Aurora and the Sunrise : Auroras are one of the many Earthly phenomena the crew of the International Space Station observe from their perch high above the planet. (via NASA)

As of right now (November 2, 9:21 UTC), the International Space Station has been continuously staffed for 18 years!

That means that if you’re not legally an adult, there’s been humans living & working in space for your entire life!  That’s WILD

“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.”

— Isaac Newton

'Space Butterfly' Is Home to Hundreds of Baby Stars

What looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from our Spitzer Space Telescope. Officially named Westerhout 40 (W40), the butterfly is a nebula — a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form. The butterfly’s two “wings” are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in this region.

Besides being beautiful, W40 exemplifies how the formation of stars results in the destruction of the very clouds that helped create them. Inside giant clouds of gas and dust in space, the force of gravity pulls material together into dense clumps. Sometimes these clumps reach a critical density that allows stars to form at their cores. Radiation and winds coming from the most massive stars in those clouds — combined with the material spewed into space when those stars eventually explode — sometimes form bubbles like those in W40. But these processes also disperse the gas and dust, breaking up dense clumps and reducing or halting new star formation.

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🎃👻🕷️  Black Widow In Space … Black Widow Nebula 🎃👻🕷️

🎃 Part Of Spinning Blue Ball’s Five Days of Halloween!! 🎃

On Thursday a rocket failed. Three humans remain on the ISS. What’s next?

NASA officials seemed pretty chill at today's news conference.

I won’t be able to do a full write-up of this, as I’ll be out most of this evening, but this article does a great job at answering a lot of questions about today’s launch failure.

The Crab Pulsar (PSR B0531+21) is a relatively young neutron star. The star is the central star in the Crab Nebula, a remnant of the supernova SN 1054, which was widely observed on Earth in the year 1054. Discovered in 1968, the pulsar was the first to be connected with a supernova remnant.

The Crab Pulsar is one of very few pulsars to be identified optically. The optical pulsar is roughly 20 kilometres (12 mi) in diameter and the pulsar “beams” rotate once every 33 milliseconds, or 30 times each second.

The outflowing relativistic wind from the neutron star generates synchrotron emission, which produces the bulk of the emission from the nebula, seen from radio wavesthrough to gamma rays. The most dynamic feature in the inner part of the nebula is the point where the pulsar’s equatorial wind slams into the surrounding nebula, forming a termination shock.

The shape and position of this feature shifts rapidly, with the equatorial wind appearing as a series of wisp-like features that steepen, brighten, then fade as they move away from the pulsar into the main body of the nebula. The period of the pulsar’s rotation is slowing by 38 nanoseconds per day due to the large amounts of energy carried away in the pulsar wind.

The Crab Nebula is often used as a calibration source in X-ray astronomy. It is very bright in X-rays and the flux density and spectrum are known to be constant, with the exception of the pulsar itself.

source | A History of the Crab Nebula

images: NASA/ESA, Hubble, Cambridge University Lucky Imaging Group,  NASA/CXC/ASU/J.Hester et al.

Bow Tie Moon and Star Trails : On January 31, a leisurely lunar eclipse was enjoyed from all over the night side of planet Earth, the first of three consecutive total eclipses of the Moon. This dramatic time-lapse image followed the celestial performance for over three hours in a combined series of exposures from Hebei Province in Northern China. Fixed to a tripod, the camera records the Full Moon sliding through a clear night sky. Too bright just before and after the eclipse, the Moon’s bow tie-shaped trail grows narrow and red during the darker total eclipse phase that lasted an hour and 16 minutes. In the distant background are the colorful trails of stars in concentric arcs above and below the celestial equator. via NASA