Starship Asterisk*

Image Credit: ESO/Babak Tafreshi (TWAN)

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This seldom-seen perspective offers a true insider’s view of one of ESO’s world-leading telescopes: the VLT Survey Telescope, or VST.

The VST is installed at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. It is the largest telescope surveying the sky in light visible to humans and its cutting-edge design makes it a powerful tool for studying the Universe. From this viewpoint the OmegaCAM instrument — a camera with a large field of view — can be seen front and centre, nestled inside its stabilising control structure.

When night falls the telescope’s dome opens and the VST gets to work. The high altitude and arid conditions of the Atacama Desert provide the perfect conditions for astronomical observing, delivering cloud-free skies and very low light pollution for the vast majority of the year. This allows for truly spectacular views of the Milky Way overhead, complete with its array of striking colours, streaks of dark interstellar dust, and bright foreground stars — as seen here.

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Stapelfeldt

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Within a galaxy hosting around 300 billion stars, here the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a mere handful or two — just about enough to form a single football team. These stellar “teammates” play under the banner of NGC 1333, the cloud of gas and dust which formed them and that they continue to call home.

NGC 1333 is located about 1000 light-years away in the constellation of Perseus (The Hero). The cool gas and dust concentrated in this region is generating new stars whose light is then reflecting off the surrounding material, lighting it up and making this object’s lingering presence known to us. NGC 1333 is accordingly classified as a reflection nebula.

This image shows just a single region of NGC 1333. Hubble has imaged NGC 1333 more widely before, revealing that the smattering of stars seen here has ample company. Seen in a broader context, this team of stars is but one gathering amongst many in NGC 1333’s celestial Champions League.

bystander wrote: ↑Mon Nov 04, 2019 5:28 pm Champions League
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2019 Nov 04

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Stapelfeldt

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Within a galaxy hosting around 300 billion stars, here the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a mere handful or two — just about enough to form a single football team. These stellar “teammates” play under the banner of NGC 1333, the cloud of gas and dust which formed them and that they continue to call home.

NGC 1333 is located about 1000 light-years away in the constellation of Perseus (The Hero). The cool gas and dust concentrated in this region is generating new stars whose light is then reflecting off the surrounding material, lighting it up and making this object’s lingering presence known to us. NGC 1333 is accordingly classified as a reflection nebula.

This image shows just a single region of NGC 1333. Hubble has imaged NGC 1333 more widely before, revealing that the smattering of stars seen here has ample company. Seen in a broader context, this team of stars is but one gathering amongst many in NGC 1333’s celestial Champions League.

Susanna Kohler wrote:

Overlay of ALMA CO(2−1) emission (red) on MUSE Hα emission (green) and the HST WFPC3 image of ESO 137-001 (blue: F275W; green: F475W; red: F814W) with Chandra X-ray contours on top. (P. Jachym et al, 2019 ApJ)

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Feeling jelly? This detailed image reveals the molecular gas in the long tail of the jellyfish galaxy ESO 137-001. In this image, red emission is molecular gas newly detected with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), green shows MUSE Hα emission, and the background image (blue, green, and red) shows the galaxy as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. This jellyfish galaxy is located 220 million light-years away in the Norma galaxy cluster, and its tail is caused by ram pressure stripping — the stripping of its gas as the galaxy falls through the surrounding intracluster medium, the material that lies in the space between galaxies. In a new publication led by Pavel Jáchym (Astronomical Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences), astronomers present ALMA’s unprecedented high-resolution maps of this jellyfish galaxy’s molecular-gas tail and show how this helps us to understand star formation in these dynamic, intense environments. To learn more about star formation in cosmic jellyfish (and to view the full original image), check out the article below.

• Astrophysical Journal 883(2):145 (2019 Oct 01) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab3e6c
• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1905.13249 > 30 May 2019

starsurfer wrote: ↑Wed Nov 06, 2019 10:50 am M89 and M90
https://www.hansonastronomy.com/m89m90-mosaic
Copyright: Mark Hanson
M89-90.jpg
You can find more information about the ionized outflow associated with M90 here.

Credit: ESO/Babak Tafreshi (TWAN)

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The telescopes at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile are on a mission to observe and understand the vast Universe — but there are plenty of interesting natural phenomena far closer to home. One such example is this angelic 22-degree halo. This photo was taken high up in the remote Atacama Desert, but such a sight is visible year-round all over the world.

These haloes are formed when light from the Sun or Moon passes through cirrus clouds high up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The tiny ice crystals that make up these clouds act as miniature prisms, changing the direction of the light that passes through them (something known as refraction). Light rays that do this tend to “bunch up” at the angle that represents the least amount of deviation from their original path. For the particular shape of ice crystal lurking within the cirrus clouds, this minimum deviation angle happens to be around 22 degrees, which is why we see this concentrated halo of light at a distance corresponding to 22 degrees from the moon.

ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope provides an appropriate foreground to the angelic scene — this telescope hosts the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) instrument. HARPS was one of two ESO instruments that in 2016 detected the Earth-mass world Proxima b, which orbits around the closest known star to the Sun.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Seth et al

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The Universe is simply so vast that it can be difficult to maintain a sense of scale. Many galaxies we see through telescopes such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the source of this beautiful Picture of the Week, look relatively similar: spiralling arms, a glowing centre, and a mixture of bright specks of star formation and dark ripples of cosmic dust weaving throughout.

This galaxy, a spiral galaxy named NGC 772, is no exception. It actually has much in common with our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Each boasts a few satellite galaxies, small galaxies that closely orbit and are gravitationally bound to their parent galaxies. One of NGC 772’s spiral arms has been distorted and disrupted by one of these satellites (NGC 770 — not visible in the image here), leaving it elongated and asymmetrical.

However, the two are also different in a few key ways. For one, NGC 772 is both a peculiar and an unbarred spiral galaxy; respectively, this means that it is somewhat odd in size, shape, or composition, and that it lacks a central feature known as a bar, which we see in many galaxies throughout the cosmos — including the Milky Way. These bars are built of gas and stars, and are thought to funnel and transport material through the galactic core, possibly fueling and igniting various processes such as star formation.