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Starbirth in The Small Magellanic Cloud

NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Infrared light (red) shows cold dust; visible light (green) denotes glowing gas; and X-rays (blue) represent very warm gas. Ordinary stars appear as blue spots with white centers, while young stars enshrouded in dust appear as red spots with white centers.

Okay, after all the political excitement, let’s get back to some astronomy!

Here’s an example of something you might learn about in a planetarium. It’s a starbirth region in a neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way. The cloud, called NGC 346, shows up here in multiple wavelengths of light gathered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared light), the European Southern Observatory’s New Technology Telescope (visible light), and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope (x-ray).

What’s going on here? A phenomenon called “triggered star formation.” It is just like it sounds — star formation triggered by some exterior event. What’s the trigger? You need massive stars that are interacting with their environment. First, they give off huge amounts of radiation, which sends shock waves out through surrounding clouds of gas and dust. Those shock waves shove together clumps of gas and dust, and this creates new stars eventually. This compressed material is the arc-shaped orange-red filament. There are new stars inside the filament, hidden by the clouds of gas and dust that are giving them birth.

The second trigger comes when massive stars die. As they get older, these giants puff out clouds of material. t’s called “mass loss” and seeds nearby space with elements that will become other stars (or maybe even planets). See the pink blob of stars at the upper left. Their formation was triggered by winds from a massive star located to the left of it. It blew up in a supernova explosion 50,000 years ago. Before that cataclysmic event, the star’s winds pushed gas and dust together into new stars. The bubble that star created when it exploded is near the large, white spot with a blue halo at the upper left (this white spot is actually a collection of three stars).

This kind of exploration is fascinating. The more astronomers learn about distant areas of starbirth, the more they can explain about how our own region of the galaxy came to be populated with stars (and planets).

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(Note: U.S. citizens — have you registered to vote?)

Who Knew?!

Wow… it’s amazing just how much of a charlie-foxtrot John McCain created with his ill-timed and inaccurate attack against Senator Obama over the Adler Planetarium. Ever since he lobbed that attack from completely out in left field in last night’s debate, all of us planetarium supporters, workers, vendors, and friends have been rallying to the cause of some of the most under-funded yet FUN places to go in the world! (Alan Boyle of MSNBC has a good listing of blog entries you might find interesting, including mine!)

Of course you’ve read MY entries (some 700 of you in less than 24 hours), and loads of other people have leapt on the bandwagon. Which is great — planetariums have now become another “third rail” in this political race. I’m not saying that they are more important than things like the housing issues and social security and the financial crises and getting over the war in Iraq and other causes.

But, perhaps the attention paid to the Adler and other planetariums in the world will help people focus on the fact that science education — all education — is a bridge to the future. Planetariums are certainly doing their part to hold up that bridge. So, we should be supporting them and the educators who teach us about the cosmos. It’s way better than deriding planetariums and science education (by inference). Doing that is like… building a bridge to nowhere.

Update: Well, gosh darn it, the planetarium intrigues just keep growing. At CBS2Chicago, there’s more info about the planetarium funding shows up:

And despite McCain’s attack, records suggest the GOP nominee has voted for millions of dollars worth of similar earmarks himself, including a $200,000 education grant to the Adler Planetarium.

McCain’s vote came as part of a vote on appropriations for the FY06 Commerce/State/Justice appropriations bill.

Again I have to ask: why didn’t McCain’s aides know this? Or if they did, did they think it didn’t matter? That people are too stupid to look things up (Mark found that news as part of a Google search) and find out about his voting record as well as his opponent’s? If his campaign is getting this wrong, what else is it flubbing up?

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The Spacewriter's Ramblings

Your Astronomy Dollars At Work

Starbirth in The Small Magellanic Cloud

Exploring Science and the Cosmos