Posts Tagged ‘Milky Way’
Black Hole Destroying Matter Photos Videos
Phenomenon that is causing awe and least understood is Black Hole.
It is said to be so dense that it does not allow even the light rays to escape and its presence is inferred.
They swallow matter.
A rare photo of Black hole destroying matter is captured.
Here they are:
A Radio-Optical View of the Galaxy Hercules A
Artist’s illustraton of the disk around a giant black hole. Image credit: A. Hobart, CXC
Probable Black Hole Destroys Star, Puttenham & NASA’s Artists Compar
Cosmic Journeys : The Largest Black Holes in the Universe
Black holes may be the most ironic objects in the Universe. They are objects with gravity so fierce that if you venture too close, literally no force in the Universe can prevent you from falling in. Not even light can escape, which is why we call them what we do.
Yet they also power the brightest objects in the Universe. As matter falls in, it forms a diskjust outside the black hole that gets infernally hot, blasting out radiation bright enough that it can be seen across the Universe. Not only that, due to forces in the disk like friction and magnetism ramped up to mind-numbing intensities, this disk can focus and blast out two incredibly powerful beams of matter and energy which scream out into space, forming structures both vast and beautiful … like the ones seen in the galaxy Hercules A:
eriously, grab the embiggened version of that. It’s stunning. I’m using it as my computer’s desktop image, in fact. There’s also an incredible 5000 x 3500 pixel version.
In the heart of the galaxy Hercules A is a monster black hole: It’s about 600 times as massive as the black hole in the center of our Milky Way, making it about 2.5 billion times the Sun’s mass. It’s one of the largest known black holes in the Universe, so big we call it “supermassive.”
And it’s hungry. Material is actively funneling down into the maw of that beast, forming a huge disk and blasting out those jets of material you can see in the picture (which is a combination of visible light seen by the Hubble Space Telescope and radio waves—colored pink in the image—detected by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array). Focused tightly, those jets march across space at ridiculously high speed, slamming into material around them. Eventually they lose enough energy that they slow and puff outward, forming those twin lobes. When this happens, the material emits light in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The lobes of Herc A make it one of the brightest sources of radio waves in the entire sky.
The scale of this will turn your brain into goo: Those lobes are well over 1.5 million light years across from tip to tip, 15 times the size of our entire galaxy! And they’re powerful, emitting a billion times the energy our Sun does at radio wavelengths. The energy flowing out of Hercules A is simply insane. In X-rays alone it blasts out 100 billion times as much energy as our Sun does in all wavelengths of light. Replace our Sun with an object that bright and the Earth would vaporize.
Milky Way Rushing Hurtling for Collision Images,Video
On the one hand the Space is reported to be expanding and on the other hand the objects in the Universe are heading for collision by pulling each other because of their Gravitational pull.
Universe expands t the level of Space and the Objects are converging, becoming larger and thus relatively less in number.
Again new Stars are being born, thus increasing the numbers.
Totally contradicting in Nature for us to understand.
I am reminded of the Upanishad‘s Statements on Reality.
‘It is neither big nor small,It is neither tall nor short,It is everywhere, yet nowhere’
Sounded to me confusing.
What can I comprehend about these astronomical findings!
Only that Human mind can not comprehend Nature/Reality.
[sli
deshow]“
NASA astronomers announced Thursday they can now predict with certainty the next major cosmic event to affect our galaxy, sun, and solar system: the titanic collision of our Milky Way galaxy with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.
The Milky Way is destined to get a major makeover during the encounter, which is predicted to happen four billion years from now. It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy, but our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed.
“Our findings are statistically consistent with a head-on collision between the Andromeda galaxy and our Milky Way galaxy,” said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.
The solution came through painstaking NASA Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the motion of Andromeda, which also is known as M31. The galaxy is now 2.5 million light-years away, but it is inexorably falling toward the Milky Way under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies and the invisible dark matter that surrounds them both.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html
Hurtling Galaxies by Hubble Space Telescope.
Andromeda Galaxy Resembles Vishnu’s Disqus Slide show.
Explanation: A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy really is just next door as large galaxies go. So close, and spanning some 260,000 light-years, it took 11 different image fields from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite’s telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light. While its spiral arms stand out in visible light images of Andromeda (also known as M31), the arms look more like rings in the GALEX ultraviolet view, dominated by hot, young, massive stars. As sites of intense star formation, the rings have been interpreted as evidence Andromeda collided with its smaller neighboring elliptical galaxy M32 more than 200 million years ago. The large Andromeda galaxy and our own Milky Way are the dominant members of the local galaxy group.
: Rising as the Sun sets, tonight’s Full Moon could be hard to miss. Remarkably, its exact full phase (May 6 03:36 UT) will occur less than two minutes after it reaches perigee, the closest point to Earth in the Moon’s orbit, making it the largest Full Moon of 2012. The Full Perigee Moon will appear to be some 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than a Full Moon near apogee, the most distant point in the elliptical lunar orbit. In comparison, though, it will appear less than 1 percent larger and almost as bright as April’s Full Moon, captured in this telephoto image rising over suburban Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. For that lunation, Full Moon and perigee were about 21 hours apart. Of course, if you manage to miss May’s Full Perigee Moon, make a note on your calendar. Your next chance to see a Full Moon close to perigee, will be next year on June 23.
http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/apod_2012_may_18_galex_the_andromeda_galaxy
Galaxy with ‘Split Personality Found’
Now it is the turn of the galaxy to have Split Personality!
Spitzer Space Telescope Sudies.
“RELEASE : 12-130
WASHINGTON — While some galaxies are rotund and others are slender disks like our spiral Milky Way, new observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope show that the Sombrero galaxy is both. The galaxy, which is a round, elliptical with a thin disk embedded inside, is one of the first known to exhibit characteristics of the two different types. The findings will lead to a better understanding of galaxy evolution, a topic still poorly understood.“The Sombrero is more complex than previously thought,” said Dimitri Gadotti of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “The only way to understand all we know about this galaxy is to think of it as two galaxies, one inside the other.”
The Sombrero galaxy, also known as NGC 4594, is located 28 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. From our viewpoint on Earth, we can see the thin edge of its flat disk and a central bulge of stars, making it resemble a wide-brimmed hat. Astronomers do not know whether the Sombrero’s disk is shaped like a ring or a spiral, but agree it belongs to the disk class.
“Spitzer is helping to unravel secrets behind an object that has been imaged thousands of times,” said Sean Carey of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.. “It is intriguing Spitzer can read the fossil record of events that occurred billions of years ago within this beautiful and archetypal galaxy.”
Spitzer captures a different view of the galaxy than visible-light telescopes. In visible views, the galaxy appears to be immersed in a glowing halo, which scientists had thought was relatively light and small. With Spitzer’s infrared vision, a different view emerges. Spitzer sees old stars through the dust and reveals the halo has the right size and mass to be a giant elliptical galaxy.
While it is tempting to think the giant elliptical swallowed a spiral disk, astronomers say this is highly unlikely because that process would have destroyed the disk structure. Instead, one scenario they propose is that a giant elliptical galaxy was inundated with gas more than nine billion years ago. Early in our universe, networks of gas clouds were common, and they sometimes fed growing galaxies, causing them to bulk up. The gas would have been pulled into the galaxy by gravity, falling into orbit around the center and spinning out into a flat disk. Stars would have formed from the gas in the disk.
“This poses all sorts of questions,” said Rubén Sánchez-Janssen from the European Southern Observatory, co-author of the study. “How did such a large disk take shape and survive inside such a massive elliptical? How unusual is such a formation process?”
Researchers say the answers could help them piece together how other galaxies evolve. Another galaxy, called Centaurus A, appears also to be an elliptical galaxy with a disk inside it. But its disk does not contain many stars. Astronomers speculate that Centaurus A could be at an earlier stage of evolution than the Sombrero and might eventually look similar.
The findings also answer a mystery about the number of globular clusters in the Sombrero galaxy. Globular clusters are spherical nuggets of old stars. Ellipticals typically have a few thousand, while spirals contain a few hundred. The Sombrero has almost 2,000, a number that makes sense now but had puzzled astronomers when they thought it was only a disk galaxy. ‘
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2012/apr/HQ12-130_Spitzer_Sombrero.html
Related articles
infrared image of Sombrero galaxy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
- Spitzer Spots Two Galaxies in One (universetoday.com)
NASA Unveils Night-Sky Unpolluted.
NASA has rereleased detailed images of the Night-sky ,unpolluted by earthly Lights.
The images were taken with the help of WISE(unmanned Satellite)
WISE is a NASA-funded Explorer mission that will provide a vast storehouse of knowledge about the solar system, the Milky Way, and the Universe. Among the objects WISE will study are asteroids, the coolest and dimmest stars, and the most luminous galaxies.
WISE is an unmanned satellite carrying an infrared-sensitive telescope that will image the entire sky. Since objects around room temperature emit infrared radiation, the WISE telescope and detectors are kept very cold (below -430° F /15 Kelvins, which is only 15° Centigrade above absolute zero) by a cryostat — like an ice chest but filled with solid hydrogen instead of ice.
You can also create your own Wise Model.
Read the WISE mission Fact Sheet PDF (1.7 MB).
Read the WISE Launch Press Kit PDF (2.0 MB).WISE in a box: Create your own 3-D model of the WISE spacecraft.
http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/mission.html
“Today, WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community,” said Edward Wright, WISE principal investigator at UCLA, who first began working on the mission with other team members in 1998.
WISE launched Dec. 14, 2009, and mapped the entire sky in 2010 with vastly better sensitivity than its predecessors. It collected more than 2.7 million images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light, capturing everything from nearby asteroids to distant galaxies. Since then, the team has been processing more than 15 trillion bytes of returned data. A preliminary release of WISE data, covering the first half of the sky surveyed, was made last April.
The WISE catalog of the entire sky meets the mission’s fundamental objective. The individual WISE exposures have been combined into an atlas of more than 18,000 images covering the sky and a catalog listing the infrared properties of more than 560 million individual objects found in the images. Most of the objects are stars and galaxies, with roughly equal numbers of each. Many of them have never been seen before.
WISE observations have led to numerous discoveries, including the elusive, coolest class of stars. Astronomers hunted for these failed stars, called “Y-dwarfs,” for more than a decade. Because they have been cooling since their formation, they don’t shine in visible light and could not be spotted until WISE mapped the sky with its infrared vision.
WISE also took a poll of near-Earth asteroids, finding there are significantly fewer mid-size objects than previously thought. It also determined NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids.
http://digg.com/newsbar/topnews/the_whole_universe_from_one_satellite_s_eyes
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- Galactic Views (31) (theneteconomy.wordpress.com)
