A Seagull (or is it a Lizard?) in Space

WISE Studies a Nebula

The Seagull Nebula as seen by the WISE spacecraft. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

I’ve talked about star formation many times in this blog. It’s a fascinating topic and there are many, many star-forming regions in our galaxy (and others) for astronomers to study!  The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) released a very cool infrared image of a star-forming cloud near the constellations of Monoceros and Canis Major called IC 2177, nicknamed the Seagull Nebula. The image is a mosaic — meaning that it’s made from several smaller images.  Now, if this doesn’t look like a seagull, look at another orientation of the image.

Re-oriented to show the seagull.

Now, see the seagull? It’s a somewhat  fanciful vision of a very complex place where stars are forming as we speak. And, the infrared view reveals the sites of the stellar nurseries. For example, astronomers can tell that the pink, oval-shaped region near the seagull’s eye (or lizard’s hip) is one such nursery. It’s called NGC 2327, and it contains a cluster of stars born about 1.5 million years ago. The center of the eye is the brightest and hottest of the newborn stars in the entire nebula. Its intense heat and radiation are warming the dust in the surrounding cloud and causing it to glow in infrared light. Infrared light is not blocked by dust or gas, which makes it a very useful tool for peeking into starbirth nurseries to understand the processes by which all stars — including our Sun — come into being.

Soaring to the Stars

Anybody Can Do It

I spent last weekend in Los Angeles, celebrating the 75th birthday of Griffith Observatory AND going to the big open house weekend at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. It was a fine weekend for geeking out and appreciating space “stuff.”  One of the keynote speakers at the Griffith birthday celebration was Edward James Olmos, a gifted actor who we’ve seen in many different venues from film to TV.  He exhorted us all to support Griffith’s outreach program, which brings children from across LA to the observatory for field trips to the stars. I liked his passion and wished that more folks would reach out as he did to let us know what a field trip to the observatory meant to HIM when he was a child.  LA’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa also told the assembled masses about HIS first trip to the observatory when he was a kid, and throughout the night, I heard other men and women — all members of Friends of the Observatory – sharing their view of this remarkable place and how it inspired them to achieve something in their lives.

JPL open house crowds to see Mars missions. Image by Carolyn Collins Petersen, copyright 2010.

The next day I went to JPL to see the exhibits that I worked on for NASA during the past few months. The JPL Open House always attracts thousands of people to visit the place where planetary and space exploration gets started. It was a fun time and I was quite gratified to see all the many families coming in to learn more about our wonderful space program

Visitors to JPL's von Karman Visitor Center enjoy the new exhibits. Copyright 2010 Carolyn Collins Petersenful space program.

You never know when a visit to JPL or a public observatory or your local planetarium will help someone soar to the stars. Many people who work in space, or in space-related jobs talk about their first visits to the planetarium in their town, or a special teacher who turned them on to space and astronomy as the spur that got them into their current jobs.

But, an interest in the stars doesn’t have to take you to space — look at the actor and mayor — they got turned on to the cosmos at an early age, and they used those experiences to motivate themselves in their lives.   A trip to the stars may not always GET you to the stars. But it can spur you onwards to accomplish things, to a sense of doing what you want to do, perhaps by serving others, or taking on the study of science, or getting ahead in education and just simply being good at what you do.  It sure as heck beats sitting around not using one’s brain, doesn’t it?  Knowledge and rational studies of science beat out superstition, fear, ignorance and hatred in my book. So, let’s hear it for the transformative power of space and the stars. They show us what’s possible; they challenge us to find something inside ourselves that helps us achieve greatness!

Earth as a Planet

What We See Teaches Something About our Planet…

and Ourselves

Earth is one of NASA’s prime areas of study.  The same goes for the European Space Agency and its satellites. Other countries also study Earth from space. What does this tell us? That our home planet is something we are seeking to understand from afar.  It makes sense. There are certain ways to study Earth that can’t be done from the surface. It helps to study the atmosphere from space, to see it as a “whole” instead of a “column” of air that we look at from the ground up.  The same goes for studies of the ocean and large-scale land features. It’s a systems approach that gives us the “Big Picture” of our home planet.

The picture below is from the International Space Station. It shows the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the catastrophic failure of a deep-sea oil well.  It took millions of years of geologic action to form (an oil reserve) beneath the ocean.  Humans want that oil, but in the process, are now destroying ecosystems and coastal areas that also took millions and billions of years to form. Think about that.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill slick is spreading. Courtesy NASA.