News of the Cosmos

Orion from HST

As I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for the Orion Nebula. For me, nothing was sweeter than to see the latest HST image of this starbirth region unveiled on Wednesday before a packed press room. It’s stunning and the small version I’ve put up here doesn’t do it justice. To get the real scoop on this lovely image, you should click here and download the biggest copy of it your computer can handle. It’s THAT good.

I flew home on Wednesday night because I’m teaching a four-week class on communicating astronomy at Williams College and I needed to be back for Thursday’s class. The students and I spent part of our class time yesterday going through some of the many press releases I gathered at the AAS meeting. It gave them valuable insight into what science stories look like when they come out of the research fire hose, before they get into the press. Here’s a sampling for you to browse through—and I’ll post more in the next few days.

Astronomers Discover Fastest-Spinning Pulsar

NASA’s Spitzer Finds Possible Comet Dust Around Dead Star

Are Diamonds Responsible for Mysterious Red Light in the Galaxy?

Huge Superbubble of Gas Blowing Out of the Milky Way

Astronomers Spot the Orion Nebula’s Successor

Monster Black Holes Grow After Galactic Mergers

Happy Reading for now!

Exploring our Own Galaxy

Milky Way, Spitzer-style

One of the most fascinating aspects of this year’s meeting (for me anyway) is the continued exploration of the center of the Milky Way. I’m interested because right now I’m working on some material for the Griffith Observatory exhibits that tells people about our home galaxy. Of particular interest is the center of the galaxy, where we know there’s a supermassive black hole. But, it also turns out there is a whole lot of other activity happening there, making the core of the Milky Way one of the great “rediscoveries” of current astronomy.

Today (January 10) Spitzer Space Telescope unveiled a beautiful image of the central 900 light-years of the Milky Way, and the view gives us a peek at throngs of old stars, hot young stars, and clouds of gas that are lit by the glow from the nearby stellar youngsters.

The new stars are a bit of a surprise. For a long time, astronomers assumed that no new stars would form at the galactic center because it’s not a place where you would think the clouds of gas that coalesce into stars could “get it together” to make stars. It turns out that these massive young stars probably formed elsewhere and are spiraling into the center of the galaxy, their orbits warped by the gravitational force of the black hole. And, the image also shows newborn stars and the heavy clouds that give birth to stars, all lying more distant from the black hole.

The beauty of the Spitzer image is that it lets us look through the clouds of dust that hide the core of the Milky Way from our optical telescopes. Infrared light just cuts right through the dust, lifting the veil on the action at the heart of the galaxy.

Click on the link above to read more about the center of our galaxy, and view a larger version of the image above. It’s really quite beautiful!

Astronomy’s Outpouring

Imagine that our Milky Way Galaxy is being warped by the action of a neighboring galaxy. Or that the steady North Star Polaris (the one we’ve all been taught as our navigational guide in the sky) has a companion so small that it was only recently we could see it through the powerful eye of Hubble Space Telescope. Or that a small galaxy is slowly being gobbled up by our own galaxy? Or that astronomers can now “see” down to within a few light-years of a supermassive black hole at the heart of another galaxy? Or that, if you have a little extra duty cycle left on your home computer, you can help astronomers find interstellar dust grains?

All this, and a whole lot more is pouring out of the informational firehouse at the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week in Washington, D.C. More than 3,000 of the world’s astronomers (about a third of the astronomy community) is convening here and it is my pleasure to be attending as well. There are more papers and talks than you can shake a stick at. I am sitting here in the press room surrounded by some of the best science writers and reporters in the business — in fact, I’m parked next to Phil Plait, the bad boy behind the The Bad Astronomy web page and blog. His viewpoint on all things astronomy is always a little bit hip and ironic (okay, a LOT hip and ironic).

There are a record 11 press conferences at this meeting, and I’m going to be at all but one of them (have to leave early to go home and teach (more on THAT in another entry)).

So, if you’ve been looking at the paper or perusing CNN.com, you’ve likely seen the stories about the death spiral of material into the heart of a galaxy, and the story about the companion to Polaris. So, what else is there? I’ll be presenting a few of the cooler papers here in the next few days, and I want to start with a pretty picture.

Starbirth in the Magellanic Clouds

This is a lovely image released by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory of glowing clouds of gas in a starbirth region in the Magellanic Clouds. Astronomers have assembled a huge mosaic of images of this region, which you can see and read about at their website (click on the link under the picture for more of the story and more pictures). Imaging and studying such regions help astronomers understand the mechanics of star formation — one of the most fascinating topics in astronomy.

Okay, I’ll be back later with more goodies. For now, it’s time to go to a press conference!