Category Archives: starbirth

astronomy art, Orion Nebula, starbirth

The Glorious Belt

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Orions Belt, by SkyFactory.org.
Orion's Belt, by SkyFactory.org -- fantastic images!

I am always amazed at the artistry that astronomers bring to their imaging. While browsing the Astronomy Picture of the Day archives I ran across this image of the three belt stars in Orion (one of my favorite constellations). IMHO, Davide De Martin has created a masterpiece!

Of course, I’m a huge fan of nebulae. Just as I like Mars for its stark beauty and promise of future exploration, I find starbirth nebulae to be … ah… pregnant with stellar promise. Fecund with the bounty of future stars to come!

Why is this? I don’t know, exactly. Maybe it has something to do with the idea that starbirth was one of those last frontier subjects that we could only speculate about for so long, until we had the means to peer deep inside the nurseries and see what was happening with young stellar objects and such. For decades nebulae were “mysterious” and “impenetrable.” No longer, not with the advent of infrared-sensitive instruments that could can cut through the veil hiding the secret birth places of stars.

Not that the Belt Stars are hidden. But the region they front for is a cauldron of stellar creation, and the more we look into this area, the more we find. It’s fascinating and awe-inspiring.

So, if you’re in the mood to see some hot starbirth action, go out and find the Belt Stars of Orion and then check out the greyish-green fog of light just beneath them… the Orion Nebula. It’s a hotbed of young stars newly emerged from their birth cocoons. Beautiful, but hardly mysterious anymore.

AAS meeting stories, astronomy news, starbirth

Hubble Finds Infant Stars: AAS Story

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Today’s the last day of the AAS meeting, and things are winding down. Yesterday was a busy one—I gave a poster presentation about using arts, poetry, literature, music, and science to teach astronomy in planetarium shows, and spent about 6 hours standing there talking with astronomers interested in how we do what we do. (If you want to read the paper, you can find it at Adventures in the Dome Trade on our Loch Ness Productions web site (it’s a PDF file)). Lots of good interactions and I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of colleagues from my days in the research world and several planetarians who stopped by!

Courtesy Hubblesite.org
Courtesy Hubblesite.org

One of the stories released at this meeting is about this lovely star birth region in one of the Milky Way Galaxy’s neighboring galaxies—the Small Magellanic Cloud. The view is so sharp that you can see this small population of infant stars perhaps only a few million years old, from a distance of 210,000 light-years! If you want to read more about it, click on the link above.
There was also a flurry of news about the recently launched SWIFT mission, which is out there observing gamma ray bursts, those mysterious pinpoint brightenings in gamma rays that are second only to the Big Bang in total energy output. They last a few milliseconds and likely are signals from the birth of another black hole in the distant reaches of the cosmos. For more information you can browse over to the Swift web page.
If you want to see more astronomy stories from this meeting, click on over to this page o’ links.