i can’t bREATH
Saturday Apr 4 @ 07:44pmThis wide-field view of the Orion Nebula (Messier 42), lying about 1350 light-years from Earth, was taken with the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The new telescope’s huge field of view allows the whole nebula and its surroundings to be imaged in a single picture and its infrared vision also means that it can peer deep into the normally hidden dusty regions and reveal the curious antics of the very active young stars buried there.
This image was created from images taken through Z, J and Ks filters in the near-infrared part of the spectrum. The exposure times were ten minutes per filter. The image covers a region of sky about one degree by 1.5 degrees.
(via ESO - eso1006a - VISTA’s infrared view of the Orion Nebula*)
Tuesday Mar 3 @ 01:07pmCarl Sagan Yearbook (c. 1954)
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
Saturday Mar 3 @ 06:56pmGalactic Pile-Up Leaves Behind Mysterious Dark Matter Core
Astronomers have found an enormous and strange clump of dark matter left behind following a violent collision of galaxy clusters.
The clump is located in the Abell 520 cluster, a diffuse collection of galaxies located 2.4 billion light-years away in the constellation Orion. The celestial object, sometimes called the Train Wreck cluster, is thought to be the remnant of a chaotic crash between several galaxy clusters.
Galaxy clusters are massive collections containing tens or even thousands of galaxies gravitationally bound together. They contain large amounts of dark matter — a strange form of matter that interacts through gravity but gives off no light — which is thought to provide an anchor attracting visible matter to a specific spot.
A 2007 study of Abell 520 showed that it was mostly typical: Wherever astronomers saw visible matter, they found a large clump of dark matter. But there was one gigantic and perplexing “dark core” that should have attracted large amounts of visible matter yet contained almost no galaxies.
