Making the Hippo Dance

The folks over at Radiolab do a really excellent job of making science accessible for a broad audience. In between seasons of their show, they put out shorter pieces on their web page. In this great piece, they talk about the craft of taking the big, heavy ideas of science (the aforementioned hippo) and making them light and interesting and engaging (i.e. the dancing).


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The Cat's Eye Nebula

By Matt Bishop and Sandra Llewellyn

There's more than meets the eye in The Cat's eye Nebula

The Eagle Nebula

Andrew Katzman & Liz Brown
Let the Eagle Soar!
The Eagle Nebula is a stunning object in our galaxy. Too bad it no longer exits...

Eta Carinae

Eta Carinae: One of the galaxy’s most massive stars.

By Kalei and Devon

Death (and Life) in 30 Doradus

By Ricardo Bilton & Gann Monroe


When stars go "boom!" babies cry, too.

The Future of Our Solar System as told by the Helix Nebula

by Ben Goldsmith and Claire Fratoni.


Enjoy!

Globular Clusters and Omega Centauri

3:30 minutes long, our podcast on Globular Clusters; enjoy.

30 Doradus

This is an image of 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula. With a span of over 1000 light years, it is the largest star forming region in the local galazy. It gets its name from spider-web like appearance of its tendrils of gas and dust. The Tarantula Nebula is found in the Large Megellanic cloud, and despite of its distance from Earth--about 170.00 light years away--it is still bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. 30 Doradus gets its brilliant brightness from the many hot, bright stars that make up a significant portion of its stellar population. Most of these stars are located in the central cluster.

The image was made with the intention of staying true to the original data. The colors were selected with careful attention to the color of the image filters, with some tweaks to bring out detail and make the image more pleasing to the eye. This image also has some adjustments to level, saturation, and constrast to make the gaseous tendrils of the "spider web" pop out against the black sky.

V838 Monocerotis

V838 Monocerotis- a star in our Milky Way galaxy that seemed to be a nova after it flared up in 2002, but which defied expectations by exploding again a month later, and then a third time after another month. Theories to explain this phenomenon include a three part planetary collision, a smaller star crashing into V838 in a three part impact, and simply an abnormal, extra dramatic nova. After the collisions these beautiful rings appeared around the star. They are a light echo: the light caused by the explosions rippling through surrounding dust, illuminating the debris as it moves through.

Astronomical photographs are generally taken with colored filters to allow the human eye to detect subtleties and colors in the sky impossible to see otherwise through the telescope; the light is too weak this far away. The filters allow only a certain wavelength to be captured, but in greater detail. In this image we have taken "red", "blue", and "green" wavelength photographs and layered them together, creating a full spectrum false-colored image of the light echo emitted after V838's explosions. Here we can see everything clearly and beautifully, from the 'blue' stars, to the 'green' dust swirling around the hot 'red' star.

The Eagle Nebula

The Eagle Nebula, also known as Messier 16 (M16), can be found in our own Milky Way galaxy in the Serpens constellation. It was a cluster of stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen gas and dust. It was a cluster, as opposed to is, because the nebula was actually destroyed by a supernova approximately 6,000 years ago. Since the light from the supernova will take some time to reach Earth, one can still view the Eagle Nebula through a telescope. However, the nebula will only be visible for another 1,000 years before it disappears forever. Before its unfortunate demise, the Eagle Nebula was a breeding ground for new stars. These new stars would form out of the clouds of dust and gas and begin its life as a young member of the stellar cluster. Over time, the stars age and must eventually die. The region where the Eagle Nebula was located is surrounded by these much older stars on the brink of their own destruction. If a star is big enough, when it dies out it will do so in the form of a massive explosion, known as a supernova. It was indeed one of these stars that spelled doom for the Eagle Nebula.

In the above image, the color appears through a process of creating a false-color image. This certainly makes the image more pleasing to the eye, but also gives insight to properties of the nebula. By colorizing the image, one can see more definite features of the nebula that cannot normally be seen with the human eye. The blue area of the image is the core of the gaseous clouds, with young stars surrounding it. The blue fades into a deep red/black as the clouds are much more stretched and thinned out. As a whole, the Eagle Nebula was a striking feature. So enjoy the view while it lasts!

The Cat's Eye Nebula

This is an image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, found in the constellation Draco. It is a planetary nebula, a celestial event that occurs at the end of the life of smaller stars. Essentially, shells of gas and remnants of the outer layers of a star are expelled outwards, until there is nothing left. The Cat’s Eye Nebula is somewhat different from other planetary nebulae, as one can see that it isn’t a typical ring- or spherical shape; it seems to have multiple layers, and beautiful twists and turns in its architecture. This doesn’t mean that it is made of anything different; it is similar in composition to most astronomical objects, containing mostly hydrogen and helium: Just like our sun!

What you see here is what is known as a false-color image. If one were to look at it directly through a powerful telescope, it would appear to be grayish-white in color. This is because its light is too weak to stimulate color-sensing receptors in the human eye. Sometimes an object such as the Cat’s Eye Nebula can be more clearly seen in parts of the spectrum where we cannot perceive color. The image seen here is actually a composite of five images, each taken in a different part of the spectrum. The outer green rings represent bubbles of mass pulsations that preceded formation of the core. The red areas on the ends are the "tail" ends of bubbles formed via Interacting stellar winds. The bright yellow/orange in the center represents massive x-ray emissions from the core. Add them together and what we get is the stunning picture you see before you!