One of the real pleasures of modern living is the ability to take sightseeing trips to completely inaccessible places. Thanks to Google, you can climb up Mt Everest without donning a single crampon, and thanks to NASA, you can speed through the birthplace of stars some 1,350 light-years away, all without having to leave your seat or even install Flash.
The Orion Nebula, which lurks just off the tip of the Hunter’s sword in the famous constellation, is a star nursery. It might look like a blur in the sky next to fully-formed stars, but it’s the place that new baby stars take their first steps into the world. Thanks to a new NASA video, you can get an up-close look at what you might see if you somehow flew a spacecraft through the Orion Nebula.
The video combines visible-light imagery from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, and infrared data from the Spitzer space telescope to create a mixed-spectrum image of what you might see with the naked eye if you managed to make it 1,350 light-years across the galaxy. Much of the majesty of a nebula happens in light spectra not visible to the naked eye, so the video toggles between visible-light and infrared imagery to give an accurate view of the formation. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]The Moon is our closest neighbor and we’ve learned a lot about it over the past century or so. We’ve studied it, mapped it, and even visited it on more than one occasion, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a few surprises in store for us. A new research effort has uncovered one of those mysteries in the form of large holes in the lunar surface near the Moon’s north pole, and scientists believe they might hint at a huge subsurface tunnel network.
The bizarre holes were spotted by researchers working with the SETI Institute and Mars Institute, both of which used imagery from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to identify the gaps in the Moon’s dusty surface.
Before you go dreaming of little green men living in the Moon’s underground you should know that scientists obviously don’t think the tunnels were created by aliens at all. The tunnels are thought to be the remains of ancient lava tubes where liquid rock once flowed beneath the Moon’s surface. Over time, the magma flow ceased and large hollow tubes are all that remains. – READ MORE
[divider][/divider]We’ve all felt the pressure that builds up in our stomach after a can of carbonated cola or a particularly filling meal, and no matter how polite of a person you are, you no doubt let a nice healthy burp fly every now and then. As it turns out, black holes have a similar habit, and astronomers have just captured photo evidence of one of the universe’s most destructive entities burping not once, but twice in quick succession.
Scientists using some of mankind’s most powerful space observation tools — the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes — have observed the black hole at the center of a far-off galaxy spewing hot gas in two separate events. The galaxy, called SDSS J1354+1327 (catchy name, huh?) is some 800 million light-years from Earth, but that’s still close enough for astronomers to detect its foul behavior.
“Black holes are voracious eaters, but it also turns out they don’t have very good table manners,” Comerford said. “We know a lot of examples of black holes with single burps emanating out, but we discovered a galaxy with a supermassive black hole that has not one but two burps.”
The “burps” appear as colorful explosions of gas emitting from the center of the galaxy. In the clearest photo of the event, the beginning of a massive burp is seen shooting out of the upper left of the black hole, while the remnants of an older burp can be spotted still dissipating below it. While these two events are thought to have happened some 100,000 years apart, that’s actually an incredibly short period of time when we’re talking about black hole activity. – READ MORE
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