Category Archives: astronomy news

astronomy news, european southern observatory, star formation, VISTA survey

Adventures Beyond Imagination?

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How About “Adventures Beyond Our Galaxy”

Think about the term “Beyond Imagination!”  Marketing people like to use it to sell media “experiences”.  I always wonder “If it’s beyond imagination, than how can we conceive of it, much less market it?”   Yeah, the term is a bit of hyperbole used to amp up excitement about something that the marketing folk think needs it.  Seems to me that if you need to amp up excitement, you’d better rethink your product.  But hey, that’s just me.

Astronomy is one of those subjects that I don’t think really needs any amping up. It gives you a free show ever night, and if you love the subject, gorgeous pictures and information about distant stars and galaxies is usually only a mouseclick away.

Astronomy is a science that brings its own adventure to you just by showing you how grand the cosmos is.  With that in mind, I’ve got something for you that’s not only well within our collective imagination — it’s fascinating, beautiful, and stunning.  You don’t have to tak my word for it — just look at the picture fr yourself, provided by the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA survey:

The Tarantula Nebula, with the 30 Doradus star-forming region (top) in all its celestial glory, as seen by the European Southern Observatory's VISTA survey telescope. Courtesy ESO. You MUST click to embiggenate.

What is it?  It’s a star-forming nebula that lies about 170,000 light-years away from us in a companion galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud.  This region is called the Tarantula Nebula and it has attracted astronomers to study it like moths are attracted to a light bulb.

This nebula, also called 30 Doradus, hosts the spectacular R 136 starbirth crêche at its heart.  Nothing here is beyond imagination, especially now that astronomers have a decent idea of the process of star formation.

It used to be (back in the early days of modern astronomy, say back in the late 1800s and the first part of the 1900s) that the births of stars was shrouded in mis-information and not a whole lot of understanding. This is because the details are hidden, veiled from us in a cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the nursery where stellar babies are coming to life. So, until astronomers of the last century could build telescopes with the right instruments (such as IRAS and HST and Spitzer) to peer through the clouds of and dust to send to space, or equip ground-based telescopes with the proper near-infrared instruments to do the same thing from Earth, plus ways to “get past” our atmosphere using adaptive optics, the details of star birth remained a secret. But, NOT beyond imagination. Astronomers had a pretty good theoretical idea of how it happened — they just needed good observational data to help cement the process of star birth together. And, studying places like R136 here in the Tarantula Nebula is one of the ways they get a chance to study more regions of star birth, to trace the progression from cloud of gas and dust to brilliantly shining star.  The more examples they study, the more astronomers understand how it works.  And, that makes the study of places like the Tarantula an adventure beyond our galaxy, but not beyond our understanding. I’d LOVE to turn it into a made-for-TV (or museum or fulldome planetarium) movie.  It would be cosmic adventure on a massive scale.

Any takers?

astronomy, astronomy news, star death, starbirth, stars, stellar ages, stellar evolution, stellar winds

Exploring Cosmic Clouds of Light

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Carina’s Starry Nebulous Beauty

The hot Wolf-Rayet star WR 22, part of the Carina Nebula's population of hot, massive stars. MPG/ESO La Silla.

Astronomers have their favorite places to study in the cosmos — places they return to again and again.  They do this not just because the places look pretty or are easy to spot.  Some places in the cosmos just command our attention because they have SO much going on and can teach us a great deal about processes like starbirth and star death.

Such is the case with the Carina Nebula. It lies a few thousand light-years from Earth and contains regions of starbirth, one very eye-catching example of incipient star death, and a lot of gorgeous clouds of gas and dust that are stellar nurseries.  Astronomers used the European Southern Observatory’s Wide-Field Imager to zero in on a very bright, very unusual star called WR 22.  It’s a Wolf-Rayet star, a rare and very massive (some 70 times the mass of the Sun) object that is shedding its atmosphere into surrounding space — contributing to the rich collection of recyclable star materials in the Carina Nebula. WR 22 is actually one member of a double star stystem.

WR 22 fronts a backdrop of glowing hydrogen and other gases. Heat and intense ultraviolet radiation from stars such as this one causes those clouds to light up. If the radiation is intense enough, it can eat away at the clouds.   This leaves less material to create new stars, resulting in a sort of cosmic cannibalism by the massive stars already in existence.  In the not-too-distant future, WR 22 will probably evolve to become what’s called a luminous blue variable star, and then spend much of its remaining time going through different phases of hydrogen and helium burning before dying as a Type Ic supernova.  Their future is a pretty standard one for stars of their mass and type.  But, since there are only a few hundred known Wolf-Rayet stars such as WR 22, they are objects that astronomers watch as much as possible, returning to them often to chart their progress down their evolutionary sequences.  For the rest of us, we get to peer over the shoulders of astronomers who study these babies — and we get to marvel at the gorgeous scenes in which these stars appear.