IF You LIKE MY BLOG BOOKMARK IT! and PLEASE FOLLOW MY BLOG!!

DuDeZ

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Ring of Fire(NASA PUBLISH NEW IMAGES 2010)


Menkhib and the California Nebula

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, features one of the bright stars in the constellation Perseus, named Menkhib (at upper left near the red dust cloud), surrounded by the large star-forming California Nebula, running diagonally through the image. Menkhib is one of the hottest stars visible in the night sky; its surface temperature is about 37,000 Kelvin (about 66,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or more than six times hotter than the sun). Because of its high temperature, it appears blue-white to the human eye. It has about 40 times the mass of our sun and gives off 330,000 times the amount of light. Menkhib is a runaway star, and the fast stellar wind it blows is piling up in front of it to create a shock wave. This shock wave is heating up dust, which WISE sees as the red cloud in the upper left of the image. Menkhib and the California Nebula are about 1,800 light-years away from Earth and are located within the same spur of the Orion spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy as Earth. All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this image.

Assembly Line of Stars

The constellation Vulpecula is a veritable entire assembly line of newborn stars. The diffuse glow reveals the widespread cold reservoir of raw material that our Milky Way galaxy has in stock for building stars. Large-scale turbulence from the giant colliding galactic flows causes this material to condense into the web of filaments seen in this image. As the stellar material becomes colder and denser, gravitational forces take over and fragment these filaments into chains of stellar embryos that can finally collapse to form baby stars. These scientific results from the European Space Agency's Herschel infrared space observatory are revealing previously hidden details of star formation. New images show thousands of distant galaxies furiously building stars and beautiful star-forming clouds draped across the Milky Way. One image captures an ‘impossible’ star in the act of formation. Presented on May 6, 2010, during a major scientific symposium held at ESA, the results challenge old ideas of star birth, and open new roads for future research. Herschel’s observation of the star-formng cloud RCW 120 also revealed an embryonic star which may become one of the biggest and brightest stars in our galaxy within the next few hundred thousand years. The star already contains eight to ten times the mass of our sun and is still surrounded by an additional 2,000 solar masses of gas and dust from which it can feed.

Ring of Fire

This new image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) shows in great detail a solar prominence taken from a March 30, 2010 eruption. The twisting motion of the material is the most noticeable feature. Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. During its five-year mission, it will examine the sun's magnetic field and also provide a better understanding of the role the sun plays in Earth's atmospheric chemistry and climate. Since launch, engineers have been conducting testing and verification of the spacecraft’s components. Now fully operational, SDO will provide images with clarity 10 times better than high-definition television and will return more comprehensive science data faster than any other solar observing spacecraft.

Building Planets

This artist's animation illustrates a massive asteroid belt in orbit around a star the same age and size as our Sun. Asteroids are chunks of rock from "failed" planets, which never managed to coalesce into full-sized planets. Asteroid belts can be thought of as construction sites that accompany the building of rocky planets.

Announced on April 28, 2010, scientists using NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility have detected water-ice and carbon-based organic compounds on the surface of an asteroid. The cold hard facts of the discovery of the frosty mixture on one of the asteroid belt's largest occupants, suggests that some asteroids, along with their celestial brethren, comets, were the water carriers for a primordial Earth.


0 comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

 
Powered by Blogger
readbud - get paid to read and rate articles