View allAll Photos Tagged DECam
Arp 72 (Hubble) est un groupe de galaxies très sélectif qui ne comprend que deux galaxies spirales barrées en interaction : la grande galaxie NGC 5996 et sa plus petite compagne NGC 5994 (en bas à gauche). Ces deux galaxies se situent à environ 160 millions d'années-lumière de la Terre, dans la constellation de la Tête du Serpent (Serpens Caput). Leurs noyaux sont séparés l'un de l'autre par une distance d'environ 67 000 années-lumière. De plus, la distance entre les galaxies à leurs points les plus proches est encore plus faible, environ 40 000 années-lumière. Si cela peut paraître énorme, en termes de séparation galactique, c'est pourtant en réalité très proche ! À titre de comparaison, la distance entre la Voie lactée et sa voisine galactique la plus proche, Andromède, est d'environ 2,5 millions d'années-lumière.
Alternativement, la distance entre la Voie lactée et sa galaxie satellite la plus grande et la plus brillante, le Grand Nuage de Magellan (les galaxies satellites étant des galaxies en orbite autour d'une autre galaxie), est d'environ 162 000 années-lumière. Compte tenu de ce fait et que NGC 5996 est à peu près comparable en taille à la Voie lactée, il n'est pas surprenant que NGC 5996 et NGC 5994 interagissent. Cette interaction pourrait d'ailleurs être à l'origine de la déformation de la spirale barrée de NGC 5996, apparemment attirée vers NGC 5994. Elle a également provoqué la formation de la très longue et faible queue d'étoiles et de gaz s'éloignant de NGC 5996, jusqu'en haut à droite de l'image. Cette "queue de marée" est un phénomène courant qui apparaît lorsque des galaxies se rapprochent (cf. texte : Agence spatiale européenne ESA, image : ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Galbany, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey / DOE / FNAL / DECam / CTIO / NOIRLab / NSF/ AURA).
Description de l'image
La grande galaxie spirale barrée, large et déformée avec de la poussière colorée, voisine avec une galaxie plus petite se trouvant à proximité, à l'extrémité d'un bras spiral de sa compagne, en bas à gauche. Une longue et faible traînée d'étoiles s'élève du côté droit de la galaxie spirale barrée jusqu'en haut de l'image. Plusieurs petites galaxies lointaines sont visibles à l'arrière-plan, ainsi qu'une étoile brillante au premier plan.
Pour situer la paire de galaxies Arp 72 (Hubble) dans la constellation de la Tête du Serpent (Serpens Caput) :
À l’aide de la remarquable caméra à énergie sombre (DECam) de 570 mégapixels , les astronomes ont réalisé une image de 1,3 gigapixels du fantomatique Vela Supernova Remnant. L'image, détaillée et colorée est la plus grande image DECam jamais réalisée avec 35 786 x 35 881 pixels, faisant honte même aux appareils photo à objectifs interchangeables moyen format de la plus haute résolution !
…
Using the remarkable 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam), astronomers have made a 1.3-gigapixel image of the ghostly Vela Supernova Remnant. The beautiful, detailed, and colorful image is the largest DECam image ever at 35,786 by 35,881 pixels, putting even the highest-resolution medium-format interchangeable lens cameras to shame !
________PdF_____________________________________
This panoramic view was captured during an observing run of the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco Telescope (left) located at Cerro Tololo Observatory in the Chilean Andes. This telescope (funded by NSF 's NOIRLab) has helped astronomers to prove the acceleration of the cosmic expansion in 1998 by looking at distant supernovae!
💡Now, the Blanco telescope is studying the population of thousand of galaxies in the Universe and especially how dark energy is influencing them. For that mission, it is equipped with an astonishingly resolved CCD camera of 570 megapixels! A single 90 seconds photograph, that covers a region of the sky as wide as 8 full moons, can reveal up to 150,000 galaxies! This high-end imaging instrument is called #DECam - Dark Energy Camera - and was used during 758 nights between 2013 and 2019 as part of the Dark Energy Survey.
I took this photo in August 2018, when the survey was still being completed.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
📷 Canon Rebel T5i + Sigma Art 18-35mm f/1.8 lens + Star Adventurer Mini tracking mount
→ 9 stitched pictures taken in landscape mode
→ Single 30 seconds exposure
→ ISO 3200
→ 18 mm
→ f/1.8
Softwares: Dxo Optics pro 9 for noise reduction / Lightroom for all the edits / Microsoft ICE for the final stitching.
The two interacting galaxies making up the pair known as Arp-Madore 608-333 seem to float side by side in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Though they appear serene and unperturbed, the two are subtly warping one another through a mutual gravitational interaction that is disrupting and distorting both galaxies. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys captured this drawn-out galactic interaction.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/Department of Energy/Fermilab/Dark Energy Camera (DECam)/Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab/AURA
#NASA #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #ESA #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astrophysics #galaxy
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two of the galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248 — also known as Wild's Triplet — which lies around 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The two large spiral galaxies visible in this image — which flank a smaller, unrelated background spiral galaxy — seem to be connected by a luminous bridge. This elongated stream of stars and interstellar dust is known as a tidal tail, and it was formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of the two foreground galaxies.
This observation comes from a project which delves into two rogues’ galleries of weird and wonderful galaxies: A Catalogue Of Southern Peculiar Galaxies And Associations, compiled by astronomers Halton Arp and Barry Madore, and the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by Halton Arp. Each collection contains a menagerie of spectacularly peculiar galaxies, including interacting galaxies such as Arp 248, as well as one- or three-armed spiral galaxies, galaxies with shell-like structures, and a variety of other space oddities.
Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys to scour this menagerie of eccentric galaxies in search of promising candidates for future observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and Hubble itself. With such a wealth of astronomical objects to study in the night sky, projects such as this, which guide future observations, are a valuable investment of observing time. As well as the scientific merits of observing these weird and wonderful galaxies, they were also — very unusually — selected as Hubble targets because of their visual appeal to the general public!
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton; CC BY 4.0
[Image description: Two spiral galaxies are viewed almost face-on; they are a mix of pale blue and yellow in colour, crossed by strands of dark red dust. They lie in the upper-left and lower-right corners. A long, faint streak of pale blue joins them, extending from an arm of one galaxy and crossing the field diagonally. A small spiral galaxy, orange in colour, is visible edge-on, left of the lower galaxy.]
The peculiar spiral galaxy ESO 415-19, which lies around 450 million light-years away, stretches lazily across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While the centre of this object resembles a regular spiral galaxy, long streams of stars stretch out from the galactic core like bizarrely elongated spiral arms. These are tidal streams caused by some chance interaction in the galaxy’s past, and give ESO 415-19 a distinctly peculiar appearance.
ESO 415-19’s peculiarity made it a great target for Hubble. This observation comes from an ongoing campaign to explore the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a menagerie of some of the weirdest and most wonderful galaxies that the Universe has to offer. These galaxies range from bizarre lonesome galaxies to spectacularly interacting galaxy pairs, triplets, and even quintets. These space oddities are spread throughout the night sky, which means that Hubble can spare a moment to observe them as it moves between other observational targets.
This particular observation lies in a part of the night sky contained by the Fornax constellation. This constellation was also the site of a particularly important Hubble observation; the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Creating the Ultra Deep Field required almost a million seconds of Hubble time, and captured nearly 10,000 galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. Just as climate scientists can recreate the planet’s atmospheric history from ice cores, astronomers can use deep field observations to explore slices of the Universe’s history from the present all the way to when the Universe was only 800 million years old!
[Image description: A spiral galaxy. It has a bright core with patches of dark dust, and fuzzier, dimmer spiral arms in cooler colours, with spots of bright blue. Long, faint tidal streams stretch from the galaxy’s arms: one up to the top of the frame, one curving down to the bottom-left corner. In the top-right there is a smaller, orange elliptical galaxy. The background is studded with many tiny stars and galaxies.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; CC BY 4.0
The two interacting galaxies making up the pair known as Arp-Madore 608-333 seem to float side by side in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Though they appear serene and unperturbed, the two are subtly warping one another through a mutual gravitational interaction that is disrupting and distorting both galaxies. This drawn-out galactic interaction was captured by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.
The interacting galaxies in Arp-Madore 608-333 were captured as part of an effort to build up an archive of interesting targets for more detailed future study with Hubble, ground-based telescopes, and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. To build up this archive, astronomers scoured existing astronomical catalogues for a list of targets spread throughout the night sky. By so doing, they hoped to include objects that had already been identified as interesting and that would be easy for Hubble to observe no matter which direction it was pointing.
Deciding how to award Hubble observing time is a drawn-out, competitive and difficult process, and the observations are allocated so as to use every last second of Hubble time available. However, there is a small but persistent fraction of time — around 2–3% — that goes unused as Hubble turns to point at new targets. Snapshot programmes, such as the one which captured Arp-Madore 608-333, exist to fill this gap and take advantage of the moments between longer observations. As well as creating beautiful images such as this, these snapshot programs enable astronomers to gather as much data as possible with Hubble.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton; CC BY 4.0
The subject of this image is a group of three galaxies, collectively known as NGC 7764A. They were imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, using both its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The two galaxies in the upper right of the image appear to be interacting with one another — indeed, the long trails of stars and gas extending from them both give the impression that they have both just been struck at great speed, thrown into disarray by the bowling-ball-shaped galaxy to the lower left of the image. In reality, however, interactions between galaxies happen over very long time periods, and galaxies rarely collide head-on with one another. It is also unclear whether the galaxy to the lower left is actually interacting with the other two, although they are so relatively close in space that it seems possible that they are. By happy coincidence, the collective interaction between these galaxies have caused the two on the upper right to form a shape, which from our Solar System's perspective, ressembles the starship known as the USS Enterprise from Star Trek!
NGC 7764A, which lies about 425 million light years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, is a fascinating example of just how awkward astronomical nomenclature can be. The three galaxies are individually referred to as NGC 7764A1, NGC 7764A2 and NGC 7764A3, and just to be really difficult, an entirely separate galaxy, named NGC 7764, sits in the skies about a Moon’s distance (as seen from Earth) away. This rather haphazard naming makes more sense when we consider that many of the catalogues for keeping track of celestial bodies were compiled well over 100 years ago, long before modern technology made standardising scientific terminology much easier. As it is, many astronomical objects have several different names, or might have names that are so similar to other objects’ names that they cause confusion.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL, DECam, CTIO, NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, ESO; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt
The galaxy merger Arp-Madore 417-391 steals the spotlight in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Arp-Madore catalogue is a collection of particularly peculiar galaxies spread throughout the southern sky, and includes a collection of subtly interacting galaxies as well as more spectacular colliding galaxies. Arp-Madore 417-391, which lies around 670 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere, is one such galactic collision. The two galaxies have been distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving the cores of the two galaxies nestled side by side.
Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to capture this scene — the instrument is optimised to hunt for galaxies and galaxy clusters in the ancient Universe. Hubble’s ACS has been contributing to scientific discovery for 20 years, and throughout its lifetime it has been involved in everything from mapping the distribution of dark matter to studying the evolution of galaxy clusters.
This image comes from a selection of Hubble observations designed to create a list of intriguing targets for follow-up observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, as well as other ground-based telescopes. Astronomers chose a list of previously unobserved galaxies for Hubble to inspect between other scheduled observations. Over time, this lets astronomers build up a menagerie of interesting galaxies while using Hubble’s limited observing time as fully as possible.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton; CC BY 4.0
The subject of this image is a group of three galaxies, collectively known as NGC 7764A. They were imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, using both its Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. The two galaxies in the upper right of the image appear to be interacting with one another. The long trails of stars and gas extending from them give the impression that they have both just been struck at great speed, thrown into disarray by the bowling-ball-shaped galaxy to the lower left of the image. In reality, interactions between galaxies happen over very long time periods, and galaxies rarely collide head-on with one another. It is also unclear whether the galaxy to the lower left is interacting with the other two, although they are so relatively close in space that it seems possible that they are. By happy coincidence, the collective interaction between these galaxies has caused the two on the upper right to form a shape, which from our solar system's perspective, resembles the starship known as the USS Enterprise from Star Trek!
NGC 7764A, which lies about 425 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, is a fascinating example of just how awkward astronomical nomenclature can be. The three galaxies are individually referred as NGC 7764A1, NGC 7764A2, and NGC 7764A3. This rather haphazard naming makes more sense when we consider that many astronomical catalogs were compiled well over 100 years ago, long before modern technology made standardizing scientific terminology much easier. As it is, many astronomical objects have several different names, or might have names that are so similar to other objects’ names that they cause confusion.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Fermilab (FNAL), Dark Energy Survey Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, European Southern Observatory (ESO); Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
#NASA #NASAMarshall #Hubble #galaxy #galaxy
The twin galaxies NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B dominate the frame in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Both galaxies lie in the constellation Virgo, but despite appearing side-by-side in this image they are at vastly different distances from both Earth and one another. NGC 4496A is 47 million light-years from Earth while NGC 4496B is 212 million light-years away. The enormous distances between the two galaxies mean that the two are not interacting, and only appear to overlap because of a chance alignment.
Chance galactic alignments such as this provide astronomers with the opportunity to delve into the distribution of dust in these galaxies. Galactic dust – the dark tendrils threading through both NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B – adds to the beauty of astronomical images, but it also complicates astronomers’ observations. Dust in the universe tends to scatter and absorb blue light, making stars seem dimmer and redder in a process called “reddening.” Reddening due to dust is different from redshift, which is due to the expansion of space itself. By carefully measuring how dust in the foreground galaxy affects starlight from the background galaxy, astronomers can map the dust in the foreground galaxy’s spiral arms. The resulting “dust maps” help astronomers calibrate measurements of everything from cosmological distances to the types of stars populating these galaxies.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Boeker, B. Holwerda, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab/Dark Energy Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab/National Science Foundation/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: R. Colombari
#NASA #NASAMarshall #Hubble #nebula #star
It is now widely accepted amongst astronomers that an important aspect of how galaxies evolve is the way they interact with one another. Galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past one another — each of which has a significant impact on their shapes and structures. As common as these interactions are thought to be in the Universe, it is rare to capture an image of two galaxies interacting in such a visibly dynamic way. This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, feels incredibly three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery.
The subject of this image is named Arp 282, an interacting galaxy pair that is composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 (bottom) and the galaxy IC 1559 (top). If you’re interested in learning more about Seyfert galaxies, you can read about the Seyfert galaxy NGC 5728 here. Interestingly, both of the galaxies comprising Arp 282 have monumentally energetic cores, known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), although it is difficult to tell that from this image. This is actually rather fortunate, because if the full emission of two AGNs was visible in this image, then it would probably obscure the beautifully detailed tidal interactions occurring between NGC 169 and IC 1559. Tidal forces occur when an object’s gravity causes another object to distort or stretch. The direction of the tidal forces will be away from the lower-mass object and towards the higher mass object. When two galaxies interact, gas, dust and even entire solar systems will be drawn away from one galaxy towards the other by these tidal forces. This process can actually be seen in action in this image — delicate streams of matter have formed, visibly linking the two galaxies.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL/DECam, CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt
For my last night under the Chilean starry sky, I had decided to turn my creativity on and test everything I could think of. This photo was part of this. Despite its gigantic height, the 4-meter-Blanco telescope is still a dust compared to the vastness of the Universe. Here, the milky way is like a border we can’t cross, a horizon we can’t reach. Also, the bright orange dot, planet Mars was the objective of the picture too, almost perfectly aligned with 47 Tucanae, the Small and Large Magellanic clouds. Notice the pretty intense airglow activity which gives an overall orange veil in the sky. The reflection of the galactic bulge and mars can be seen onto the dome of the observatory.
The picture was taken from CTIO (AURA/NSF), and is a 14-stitched-picture panorama. Single 15 seconds exposure without star tracker.
The total resolution of this image is 110 Megapixels (not visible on this version)
The Blanco telescope was the first 4-meter telescope ever built in Chile (1974). It is part of the larger Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, located atop a 2700-meter mountain and owned by AURA institution. Still today, this big optical monster makes great strides in astronomy, and is not hiding in the shadow of its other friends (or enemies). Currently, the Blanco telescope is well known for 2 of its most powerful instruments:
- a 520 Megapixels camera (DECAM) aimed at studying how the dark energy interacts with deep space.
- a multi-object spectrograph enabling to analyse the chemical composition of several stars simultaneously.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
📷 Canon Rebel T5i + Sigma Art 18-35mm f/1.8 lens + Standard Tripod
→ 14 stitched pictures to build this panoramic view.
→ Single 15 seconds exposure
→ ISO 3200
→ 18 mm
→ f/1.8
Softwares: Dxo Optics pro 9 for noise reduction / Lightroom for all the edits / Microsoft ICE for the final stitching.
The mass of dust and bright swirls of stars in this image are the distant galaxy merger IC 2431, which lies 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured what appears to be a triple galaxy merger in progress, as well as a tumultuous mixture of star formation and tidal distortions caused by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio. A thick cloud of dust obscures the center of this image – though light from a background galaxy is piercing its outer extremities. This image is from a series of Hubble observations investigating weird and wonderful galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab, Dark Energy Survey Camera, (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
#NASA #NASAMarshall #Hubble #HST #galaxy
The mass of dust and bright swirls of stars in this image are the distant galaxy merger IC 2431, which lies 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured what appears to be a triple galaxy merger in progress, as well as a tumultuous mixture of star formation and tidal distortions caused by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio. The centre of this image is obscured by a thick cloud of dust — though light from a background galaxy can be seen piercing its outer extremities.
This image is from a series of Hubble observations investigating weird and wonderful galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project. Using Hubble’s powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), astronomers took a closer look at some of the more unusual galaxies that volunteers had identified. The original Galaxy Zoo project was the largest galaxy census ever carried out, and relied on crowdsourcing time from more than 100 000 volunteers to classify 900 000 unexamined galaxies. The project achieved what would have been years of work for a professional astronomer in only 175 days, and has led to a steady stream of similar astronomical citizen science projects. Later Galaxy Zoo projects have included the largest ever studies of galaxy mergers and tidal dwarf galaxies, as well as the discovery of entirely new types of compact star-forming galaxies.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL, DECam, CTIO, NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt
The twin galaxies NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B dominate the frame in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Both galaxies lie in the constellation Virgo, but despite appearing side-by-side in this image they are at vastly different distances from both Earth and one another. NGC 4496A is 47 million light-years from Earth while NGC 4496B is 212 million light-years away. The enormous distances between the two galaxies mean that the two cannot interact, and they only appear to overlap owing to a chance alignment.
Chance galactic alignments such as this provide astronomers with the opportunity to delve into the distribution of dust in these galaxies. Galactic dust adds to the beauty of astronomical images — it can be seen in this image as the dark tendrils threading through both NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B — but it also complicates astronomers’ observations. Dust absorbs starlight, making stars seem dimmer and shifting their light towards longer wavelengths, a process that astronomers refer to as “reddening” (not the same thing as redshift). By carefully measuring how starlight from background galaxies is affected by dust in intervening galaxies, astronomers can map out where the dust is in the foreground galaxy’s spiral arms. The resulting “dust maps” help astronomers calibrate measurements of everything from cosmological distances to the types of stars populating galaxies.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Boeker, B. Holwerda, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL/DECam, CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: R. Colombari
Right in the middle of this image, nestled amongst a smattering of distant stars and even more distant galaxies, lies the newly discovered dwarf galaxy known as Donatiello II. If you cannot quite distinguish the clump of faint stars that is all we can see of Donatiello II in this image, then you are in good company. Donatiello II is one of three newly discovered galaxies that were so difficult to spot that they were all missed by an algorithm designed to search astronomical data for potential galaxy candidates. Even the best algorithms have their limitations when it comes to distinguishing very faint galaxies from individual stars and background noise. In these most challenging identification cases, discovery has to be done the old-fashioned way — by a dedicated human trawling through the data themselves.
The data that enabled these discoveries was collected by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), an intense observation effort that spanned six years, and was carried out using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-metre Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. As is the case for most major telescopes that receive public funding, the DES data were made available to the public. That is when the experienced amateur astronomer Giuseppe Donatiello stepped in. He laboriously processed and analysed chunks of the DES data, and made his discovery — three very faint galaxies, now named Donatiello II, III and IV respectively. All three are satellites of the well known Sculptor galaxy (otherwise known as NGC 253), meaning that they are all bound gravitationally to their much more massive companion.
This image comes from an observing programme from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Based on their own independent search, a team led by Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil used Hubble to obtain long-exposure images of several faint galaxies, including Donatiello II. With the Hubble images, they were able to confirm their target galaxies’ association with NGC 253 — thereby providing both an independent confirmation of Donatiello’s discovery, and this new Picture of the Week.
[Image description: A black, mostly empty field with a variety of stars and galaxies spread across it. Most are very small. A couple of galaxies and stars are larger with visible details. In the centre is a relatively small, irregularly-shaped galaxy; it is formed of many very small stars and a few slightly larger, bright stars, all surrounded by a very faint glow that marks the borders of the galaxy.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Mutlu-Pakdil; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: G. Donatiello
Feast your eyes on this image of remnant from earliest recorded supernova
Dark Energy Camera captures rare view of RCW 86, remnant of supernova recorded in 185 CE.
In early December 185 CE, Chinese astronomers recorded a bright "guest star" in the night sky that shone for eight months in the direction of Alpha Centauri before fading away—most likely the earliest recorded supernova in the historical record. The image above gives us a rare glimpse of the entire tattered remnant of that long-ago explosion, as captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the four-meter telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Andes in Chile. DECam has been operating since 2012, and while it was originally designed to be part of the ongoing Dark Energy Survey, it's also available for other astronomers to use in their research. This new wide-view perspective of the remains of SN 185 should help astronomers learn even more about stellar evolution.
As we've written previously, there are two types of known supernovas, depending on the mass of the original star. An iron-core collapse supernova occurs with massive stars (greater than 10 solar masses), which collapse so violently that it causes a huge, catastrophic explosion. The temperatures and pressures become so high that the carbon in the star's core fuses. This halts the core's collapse, at least temporarily, and this process continues, over and over, with progressively heavier atomic nuclei. When the fuel finally runs out entirely, the (by then) iron core collapses into a black hole or a neutron star.
Then there is a Type Ia supernova. Smaller stars (up to about eight solar masses) gradually cool to become dense cores of ash known as white dwarfs. If a white dwarf that has run out of nuclear fuel is part of a binary system, it can siphon off matter from its partner, adding to its mass until its core reaches high enough temperatures for carbon fusion to occur. These are the brightest supernovae, and they also shine with a remarkably consistent peak luminosity, making them invaluable "standard candles" for astronomers to determine cosmic distances.
There are precious few details about SN185 provided in the Book of Later Han, other than it was the "size of a bamboo mat," and "displayed various colors, both pleasing and otherwise." Astronomers suspected there might be a link between SN 185 and the remnant structure dubbed RCW 86, but for a long time, they assumed the event that formed RCW 86 had been a core-collapse supernova, which would require some 10,000 years for the remnant structure to achieve its present form.
In 2006, new X-ray data gathered by the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Observatory and NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory demonstrated that RCW 86 is much younger than previously thought: about 2,000 years old. The authors were able to calculate how quickly the shockwave within RCW 86 was expanding. They found that there are denser spots where the shockwave is expanding more slowly, misleading astronomers into thinking the remnant was older than it is. But there are other regions where the shockwave is still inside the bubble—and still expanding rapidly—that provide a more accurate estimate of RCW 86's age.
The new age estimate significantly strengthened the case that RCW 86 is the remnant of SN 185. In that case, SN 185 was probably a Type Ia supernova, a conclusion based in part on the discovery that there is a large amount of iron present in the remnant. A white dwarf star devouring its partner in a binary system produced high-velocity winds, pushing gas and dust outward and creating a cavity before the white dwarf exploded. That enabled all that debris to expand outward very rapidly to create the impressive tattered structure that exists today.
View Article Comments →
Revisiting our old friend IC 5063, this time with a bit of color, clearly revealing the emission line features emerging nearly perpendicular from the crepuscular rays. These features, in cyan, are most easily viewed zoomed in on the nucleus. They are thought to be formed by the actively accreting supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. In this case, the black hole may have a dark "donut" of dust around its equatorial axis, and the extremely bright light creates ionizing cones and jets of material out of the polar axis.
The processing here is not only extreme, but also a combination of data from two separate HST snapshot proposals, and the wondrous Legacy Survey DR9 release. I used my hacky Photoshop subtraction model to clearly reveal the center of the galaxy in the Hubble data, while the outer parts are partially filled using the LS DR9 imagery, more smoothly and confidently illustrating the galaxy's outer tidal structures.
Hubble image coverage is incomplete; some sections contain only one filter/color.
Attribution: NASA / ESA / Aaron Barth / Julianne Dalcanton / DECaM Legacy Survey / Judy Schmidt
Data from the following proposals comprise this image:
An ACS Schedule Gap Imaging Survey of Nearby Active Galaxies
Establishing HST's Low Redshift Archive of Interacting Systems
Hubble data:
Red: ACS/WFC F814W
Green: Pseudo
Blue: ACS/WFC F606W
Legacy Survey data:
Red: DECam z (near-infrared)
Green: DECam r (visible red)
Blue: DECam g (visible green)
The pixel scale for the original size PNG image is 0.03962" per pixel.
North is 3.29° clockwise from up.
Researchers have found a galaxy cluster acting like a passenger on what astronomers are calling an "intergalactic highway." The cluster is known as the "Northern Clump" and is located about 690 million light years from Earth. These images show X-ray data from ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, along with optical and infrared data (orange, green, blue), and radio data from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe survey made by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder telescope.
Image credit: X-ray: (Chandra: NASA/CXC/Univ. Bonn/A. Veronica et al; XMM-Newton: ESA/XMM-Newton); Optical: DES/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Radio: CSIRO/ASKAP/EMU
#NASA #MarshallSpaceFlightCenter #MSFC #Marshall #ChandraXrayObservatory #cxo #supernova #supernovaremnant #galaxy #galaxycluster #XMMNewton
NGC 3109
Credit: DESI LIS, Giuseppe Donatiello
NGC 3109 is an irregular dwarf galaxy at 1.33 Mpc (4.3 milion light years) in Hydra. This puts it at the very outskirts of the Local Group.
Acknowledgment
Data from DECam Legacy Survey (g, r, z filters) obtained at the Blanco Telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab.
Acknowledgments: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)
Edited NOIRLab image (reduced in size to get Flickr to upload it) of the Vela supernova remnant.
Original caption: This colorful web of wispy gas filaments is the Vela Supernova Remnant, an expanding nebula of cosmic debris left over from a massive star that exploded about 11,000 years ago. This image was taken with the Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the US National Science Foundation's Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. The striking reds, yellows, and blues in this image were achieved through the use of three DECam filters that each collect a specific color of light. Separate images were taken in each filter and then stacked on top of each other to produce this high-resolution image that contains 1.3 gigapixels and showcases the intricate web-like filaments snaking throughout the expanding cloud of gas.
The Cerro Tololo Observatory is located at the edge of the Atacama desert, at 2,200 meters altitude, in the world's first International Dark Sky sanctuary.
It is home to the NSF NOIRLab's Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope which is currently looking for Dark energy interactions between distant galaxies by capturing wide and highly-resolved images of our Universe with a 570 megapixels camera called DECam!
I captured this image during a memorable clear night in winter atop the Cerro Tololo mountain. The milky way was shining so bright I was able to find my way on the starlit ground without use of any headlight!
The orange dot is planet Mars, just under the galactic bulge.
The dome at the center is hiding the 1.5-meter SMARTS–GSU
telescope operated by the Georgia State University. The reflective dome to the right is the so-called Victor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope.
As an optical instrumentation engineer and astronomy lover, I will always be impressed not only by the design, assembly and performances of such pioneer optical instruments - CTIO is the first 4-meter class observatory ever built in Chile, in the 1970's - but also by the staff who has been operating/maintaining them on a daily basis to keep them to their finest performance level, even after decades of services brought to the international astronomical community!
TECHNICAL DETAILS
📷 Canon 700D + Sigma Art 18-35mm F/1.8 lens + Standard tripod
→ 20 stitched pictures
→ Single 15 seconds exposure
→ ISO 3200
→ 18 mm
→ f/1.8
Date: August 2018
Location: Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Cerro Tololo, Coquimbo Region, Chile.
Softwares: Dxo Optics pro 9 for noise reduction / Lightroom for all the edits / Auto Pano Giga for the final stitching.
NGC 253
Credit: DESI LIS, Giuseppe Donatiello
NGC 253 (also known as C 65) is a large spiral galaxy in the constellation of the Sculptor and is the main member of a large group. It is one of the so-called starburst galaxies, ie where star formation is intense.
Acknowledgement
Data from DECam Legacy Survey (g,r,z filters) obtained at the Blanco Telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab.
Acknowledgments: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)
This image features Arp 72, a very selective galaxy group that only includes two interacting galaxies: NGC 5996 (the large spiral galaxy) and NGC 5994 (its smaller companion, in the lower left of the image). Both galaxies lie approximately 160 million light-years from Earth, and their cores are separated from each other by a distance of around 67 thousand light-years. Moreover, the distance between the galaxies at their closest points is even smaller, closer to 40 thousand light-years. Whilst this might still sound vast, in galactic separation terms it is really very cosy! For comparison, the distance between the Milky Way and its nearest independent galactic neighbour Andromeda is around 2.5 million light-years. Alternatively, the distance between the Milky Way and its largest and brightest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (satellite galaxies are galaxies that are bound in orbit around another galaxy), is about 162 thousand light-years.
Given this, coupled with the fact that NGC 5996 is roughly comparable in size to the Milky Way, it is not surprising that NGC 5996 and NGC 5994 — apparently separated by only 40 thousand light-years or so — are interacting with one another. In fact, the interaction might be what has caused the spiral shape of NGC 5996 to distort and apparently be drawn in the direction of NGC 5994. It also prompted the formation of the very long and faint tail of stars and gas curving away from NGC 5996, up to the top right of the image. This ‘tidal tail’ is a common phenomenon that appears when galaxies get in close together, as can be seen in several Hubble images.
[Image Description: A large spiral galaxy with a smaller neighbouring galaxy. The spiral galaxy is wide and distorted, with colourful dust. Its companion lies close by it at the end of a spiral arm, to the lower left. A long, faint tail of stars reaches up from the right side of the spiral galaxy to the top of the image. Several small, distant galaxies can be seen in the background, as well as one bright star in the foreground.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Galbany, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; CC BY 4.0
Messier 33
Credit: DESI LIS, Giuseppe Donatiello
(J2000) RA: 01h 33m 50.02s Dec: +30° 39′ 36.7″
Messier 33 is a low-luminosity flocculent spiral galaxy at 3 million light-years in Triangulum. It is catalogued also as NGC 598 and known as Triangulum Galaxy. The galaxy is the smallest spiral galaxy in the Local Group and it is believed to be a big satellite of the Andromeda Galaxy.
M33 has two asymmetric faint arms, and an interstellar medium rich in gaseous filaments that extends for about 7 kpc. Although the inner disk is relatively undisturbed, the northern arm is less regular in shape than the southern one. M33, is a bulge-free galaxy with only two optically luminous dwarf galaxies believed to be its satellites: AndXXII (McConnachie et al., 2009; Martin et al., 2016) and Pisces VII (Martínez-Delgado et al., 2022), discovered by me in 2020. However, given its mass, ΛCDM cosmological simulations predict that M33 should host a larger number of satellites, at least 10.
The neutral hydrogen (HI) disk is three times larger than the star-forming disk and is clearly warped. The outer disk has the same inclination as the inner one with respect to our line of sight but the position angle of the major axis changes by about 30 degrees compared to the inner disk and is more aligned with the M31 direction. While M33's undisturbed inner disk indicates that no major collisions between M31 and M33 or between M33 and a satellite have occurred in the past, the distortion could be the result of a flyby about 9 billion years ago. Timing assessments make this scenario unlikely and favor the hypothesis of a first fall of M33 in the region of influence of M31.
This is a 50% of the original raw version. Some data gaps in the filters have been surrogated with Sdss and Pan-STARRS data.
Acknowledgment
Data from DECam Legacy Survey (g, r, z filters) obtained at the Blanco Telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab.
Acknowledgments: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute)
Galaxy with tidal stellar stream (demo)
Credit: DESI LIS, David Martínez-Delgado, Giuseppe Donatiello
Acknowledgment:
Data from DECam Legacy Survey (g, r, z filters) obtained at the Blanco Telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab.
Image used here:
satlantis.com/arrakihs-surpasses-the-payload-phase-a-in-r...
www.cefca.es/noticias/mostrar/267
www.ucm.es/mision-arrakihs-supera-fase-a-carga-util
ifca.unican.es/es-es/news/Paginas/ARRAKIHS-supera-tiempo-...
elseptimocielo.fundaciondescubre.es/noticias/la-mision-ar...
A full sky panorama at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. 48 frames, taken with the Canon 6D, Samyang 24mm 1.4 and processing with Adobe Photoshop and Hugin.
The subject of this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is the spiral galaxy IC 4633, located 100 million light-years away from us in the constellation Apus. IC 4633 is a galaxy rich in star-forming activity and also hosts an active galactic nucleus at its core. From our point of view, the galaxy is tilted mostly towards us, giving astronomers a fairly good view of its billions of stars.
However, we can’t fully appreciate the features of this galaxy — at least in visible light — because it’s partially concealed by a stretch of dark dust (lower-right third of the image). This dark nebula is part of the Chamaeleon star-forming region, itself located only around 500 light-years from us, in a nearby part of our Milky Way galaxy. The dark clouds in the Chamaeleon region occupy a large area of the southern sky, covering their namesake constellation but also encroaching on nearby constellations, like Apus. The cloud is well-studied for its treasury of young stars, particularly the cloud Cha I, which both Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have imaged.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
#NASA #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #ESA #galaxy
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features Arp 72, a very selective galaxy group that only includes two galaxies interacting due to gravity: NGC 5996 (the large spiral galaxy) and NGC 5994 (its smaller companion, in the lower left of the image). Both galaxies lie approximately 160 million light-years from Earth, and their cores are separated from each other by a distance of about 67,000 light-years. The distance between the galaxies at their closest points is even smaller, closer to 40,000 light-years. While this might sound vast, in galactic separation terms it is really quite close. For comparison, the distance between the Milky Way and its nearest independent galactic neighbor Andromeda is around 2.5 million light-years. Alternatively, the distance between the Milky Way and its largest and brightest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (satellite galaxies orbit around another galaxy), is about 162,000 light-years.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Galbany, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
#NASA #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #ESA #galaxy
Credit:CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Matsopoulos
This drone photo was taken as part of the recent NOIRLab 2022 Photo Expedition to all the NOIRLab sites.
noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw2327a/
The Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope has pristine access to wide open skies of the Chilean Andes from its perch at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. To the upper left of the telescope is the ‘evening star’, actually the planet Venus. Below on the left are the SMARTS 1.5-meter Telescope and SMARTS 0.9-meter Telescope (furthest back). Housed within the silver dome of the Blanco Telescope is the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted at the prime (first) focus near the top of the white Serrurier truss. The blue U-shaped structure holding the truss is the large bearing that sweeps the telescope around to a designated position for observing. DECam saw first light on 12 September 2012 and in its more than 10 years of operation it has contributed greatly to the field of astronomy. It was designed specifically for the Dark Energy Survey, operated by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2019. During this time, DECam cataloged nearly 1 billion objects, helping to construct the largest ever map of the night sky.
The Blanco 4m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory is seen here profiled on the center of the Milky Way. CTIO is at the top of Cerro Tololo, a 2300m peak in the Chilean Andes.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features Arp 122, a peculiar galaxy that in fact comprises two galaxies – NGC 6040, the tilted, warped spiral galaxy and LEDA 59642, the round, face-on spiral – that are in the midst of a collision. This dramatic cosmic encounter is located at the very safe distance of roughly 570 million light-years from Earth. Peeking in at the lower-left corner is the elliptical galaxy NGC 6041, a central member of the galaxy cluster that Arp 122 resides in, but otherwise not participating in this monster merger.
Galactic collisions and mergers are monumentally energetic and dramatic events, but they take place on a very slow timescale. For example, the Milky Way is on track to collide with its nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), but these two galaxies have a good four billion years to go before they actually meet. The process of colliding and merging will not be a quick one either: it might take hundreds of millions of years to unfold. These collisions take so long because of the truly massive distances involved.
Video credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
#NASA #STScI #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #galaxy #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #galaxy
The galaxy merger Arp-Madore 417-391 steals the spotlight in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Arp-Madore catalog is a collection of particularly peculiar galaxies spread throughout the southern sky, and includes a collection of subtly interacting galaxies as well as more spectacular colliding galaxies. Arp-Madore 417-391, which lies around 670 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere, is one such galactic collision. The two galaxies were distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving their cores nestled side by side.
Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to capture this scene – the instrument is optimized to hunt for galaxies and galaxy clusters in the ancient universe. Hubble’s ACS has been contributing to scientific discovery for 20 years, and throughout its lifetime it has been involved in everything from mapping the distribution of dark matter to studying the evolution of galaxy clusters.
This image comes from a selection of Hubble observations designed to create a list of intriguing targets for follow-up observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, as well as other ground-based telescopes. Astronomers chose a list of previously unobserved galaxies for Hubble to inspect between other scheduled observations. Over time, this lets astronomers build up a menagerie of interesting galaxies while using Hubble’s limited observing time as efficiently as possible.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-hunts-an-u...
The two interacting galaxies making up the pair known as Arp-Madore 608-333 seem to float side by side in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Though they appear serene and unperturbed, the two are subtly warping one another through a mutual gravitational interaction that is disrupting and distorting both galaxies. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys captured this drawn-out galactic interaction.
The interacting galaxies in Arp-Madore 608-333 are part of an effort to build up an archive of interesting targets for more detailed future study with Hubble, ground-based telescopes, and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. To build up this archive, astronomers scoured existing astronomical catalogues for a list of targets spread throughout the night sky. They hoped to include objects already identified as interesting and that would be easy for Hubble to observe no matter which direction it was pointing.
Deciding how to award Hubble observing time is a drawn-out, competitive, and difficult process, and the observations are allocated to use every last second of Hubble time available. However, there is a small but persistent fraction of time – around 2-3 percent – that goes unused as Hubble turns to point at new targets. Snapshot programs, such as the one which captured Arp-Madore 608-333, exist to fill this gap and take advantage of the moments between longer observations. Snapshot programs not only produce beautiful images, they enable astronomers to gather as much data as possible with Hubble.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/Department of Energy/Fermilab/Dark Energy Camera (DECam)/Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab/AURA
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-snaps-a-pa...
Pulsar wind nebulas like MSH 15-52 are clouds of energetic particles, producing X-rays, that are driven away from dead collapsed stars. X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (gold and blue); infrared from the Dark Energy Camera KPNO Blanco 4.0m (red and blue)
In this composite image, a pulsar, a pulsar wind nebula, and a low energy X-ray cloud combine to create an uncanny scene of a skeletal hand preparing to grab a glowing ember. The hand reaches up from the bottom of the image, the ghostly blue flesh and white bones representing pulsar wind nebula X-rays observed by Chandra. A bright white spot in the wrist is the pulsar itself. Just beyond the hand’s fingertips, near our upper right, is a mottled yellow and orange shape that appears to glow from within. This is the low energy X-ray cloud observed by Chandra.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NOIRLab/DECam; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASAChandra #NASA #nebula
The subject of this image is a group of three galaxies, collectively known as NGC 7764A. They were imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, using both its Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3. The two galaxies in the upper right of the image appear to be interacting with one another. The long trails of stars and gas extending from them give the impression that they have both just been struck at great speed, thrown into disarray by the bowling-ball-shaped galaxy to the lower left of the image. In reality, interactions between galaxies happen over very long time periods, and galaxies rarely collide head-on with one another. It is also unclear whether the galaxy to the lower left is interacting with the other two, although they are so relatively close in space that it seems possible that they are. By happy coincidence, the collective interaction between these galaxies has caused the two on the upper right to form a shape, which from our solar system's perspective, resembles the starship known as the USS Enterprise from Star Trek!
NGC 7764A, which lies about 425 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, is a fascinating example of just how awkward astronomical nomenclature can be. The three galaxies are individually referred as NGC 7764A1, NGC 7764A2, and NGC 7764A3. This rather haphazard naming makes more sense when we consider that many astronomical catalogs were compiled well over 100 years ago, long before modern technology made standardizing scientific terminology much easier. As it is, many astronomical objects have several different names, or might have names that are so similar to other objects’ names that they cause confusion.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Fermilab (FNAL), Dark Energy Survey Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, European Southern Observatory (ESO); Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-spots-a-st...
The old way, somehow. Here, at Blanco, state of the art technology was making sure that my science was getting the best data while I was temporarily enjoying being with the giant telescope. At Cerro Tololo, Chile.
This Hubble Picture of the Week features Arp 122, a peculiar galaxy that in fact comprises two galaxies — NGC 6040, the tilted, warped spiral galaxy and LEDA 59642, the round, face-on spiral — that are in the midst of a collision. This dramatic cosmic encounter is located at the very safe distance of roughly 570 million light-years from Earth. Peeking in at the corner is the elliptical galaxy NGC 6041, a central member of the galaxy cluster that Arp 122 resides in, but otherwise not participating in this monster merger.
Galactic collisions and mergers are monumentally energetic and dramatic events, but they take place on a very slow timescale. For example, the Milky Way is on track to collide with its nearest galactic neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), but these two galaxies have a good four billion years to go before they actually meet. The process of colliding and merging will not be a quick one either: it might take hundreds of millions of years to unfold. These collisions take so long because of the truly massive distances involved.
Galaxies are composed of stars and their solar systems, dust and gas. In galactic collisions, therefore, these constituent components may experience enormous changes in the gravitational forces acting on them. In time, this completely changes the structure of the two (or more) colliding galaxies, and sometimes ultimately results in a single, merged galaxy. That may well be what results from the collision pictured in this image. Galaxies that result from mergers are thought to have a regular or elliptical structure, as the merging process disrupts more complex structures (such as those observed in spiral galaxies). It would be fascinating to know what Arp 122 will look like once this collision is complete . . . but that will not happen for a long, long time.
[Image Description: Two spiral galaxies are merging together at the right side of the image. One is seen face-on and is circular in shape. The other seems to lie in front of the first one. This galaxy is seen as a disc tilted away from the viewer and it is partially warped. In the lower-left corner, cut off by the frame, a large elliptical galaxy appears as light radiating from a point. Various small galaxies cover the background.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
The twin galaxies NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B dominate the frame in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Both galaxies lie in the constellation Virgo, but despite appearing side-by-side in this image they are at vastly different distances from both Earth and one another. NGC 4496A is 47 million light-years from Earth while NGC 4496B is 212 million light-years away. The enormous distances between the two galaxies mean that the two are not interacting, and only appear to overlap because of a chance alignment.
Chance galactic alignments such as this provide astronomers with the opportunity to delve into the distribution of dust in these galaxies. Galactic dust – the dark tendrils threading through both NGC 4496A and NGC 4496B – adds to the beauty of astronomical images, but it also complicates astronomers’ observations. Dust in the universe tends to scatter and absorb blue light, making stars seem dimmer and redder in a process called “reddening.” Reddening due to dust is different from redshift, which is due to the expansion of space itself. By carefully measuring how dust in the foreground galaxy affects starlight from the background galaxy, astronomers can map the dust in the foreground galaxy’s spiral arms. The resulting “dust maps” help astronomers calibrate measurements of everything from cosmological distances to the types of stars populating these galaxies.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Boeker, B. Holwerda, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab/Dark Energy Camera (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab/National Science Foundation/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: R. Colombari
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-observes-a...
The mass of dust and bright swirls of stars in this image are the distant galaxy merger IC 2431, which lies 681 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cancer. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured what appears to be a triple galaxy merger in progress, as well as a tumultuous mixture of star formation and tidal distortions caused by the gravitational interactions of this galactic trio. A thick cloud of dust obscures the center of this image – though light from a background galaxy is piercing its outer extremities.
This image is from a series of Hubble observations investigating weird and wonderful galaxies found by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project. Using Hubble’s powerful Advanced Camera for Surveys, astronomers took a closer look at some of the more unusual galaxies that volunteers identified. The original Galaxy Zoo project was the largest galaxy census ever carried out and relied on crowdsourcing time from more than 100,000 volunteers to classify 900,000 unexamined galaxies. The project achieved what would have been years of work for a professional astronomer in only 175 days and has led to a steady stream of similar astronomical citizen science projects. Later Galaxy Zoo projects have included the largest ever studies of galaxy mergers and tidal dwarf galaxies, as well as the discovery of entirely new types of compact star-forming galaxies.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Keel, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy, Fermilab, Dark Energy Survey Camera, (DECam), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NoirLab/National Science Foundation/AURA, Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2002/hubble-captures-s...
The subject of this week’s Picture of the Week from Hubble is the spiral galaxy IC 4633, located 100 million light-years away from us in the constellation Apus. IC 4633 is a galaxy rich in star-forming activity, as well as hosting an active galactic nucleus at its core. From our point of view, the galaxy is tilted mostly towards us, giving astronomers a fairly good view of its billions of stars.
However, we can’t fully appreciate the features of this galaxy — at least in visible light — because it’s partially concealed by a stretch of dark dust. This dark nebula is part of the Chamaeleon star-forming region, itself located only around 500 light-years from us, in a nearby part of the Milky Way galaxy. The dark clouds in the Chamaeleon region occupy a large area of the southern sky, covering their namesake constellation but also encroaching on nearby constellations, like Apus. The cloud is well-studied for its treasury of young stars, particularly the cloud Cha I, which has been imaged by Hubble and also by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
The cloud overlapping IC 4633 lies east of the well-known Cha I, II and III, and has been called MW9 or the South Celestial Serpent. A vast, narrow trail of faint gas that snakes over the southern celestial pole, it’s much more subdued-looking than its neighbours. It’s classified as an integrated flux nebula (IFN) — a cloud of gas and dust in the Milky Way galaxy that’s not near to any single star, and is only faintly lit by the total light of all the galaxy’s stars. Hubble has no problem making out the South Celestial Serpent, though this image captures only a tiny part of it. For a showy astronomical object like IC 4633, among the South Celestial Serpent’s coils clearly isn’t a bad place to hide.
[Image Description: A spiral galaxy seen nearly face-on. The disc is made up of many tightly wound spiral arms. They contain small strands of reddish dust, near the centre. On the left side, the disc features glowing patches of star formation. The whole right side, and part of the centre, is obscured by a large cloud of dark grey gas which crosses the image.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
Preziosa e Italo ( mamma e papa' ) a Decamerè
Decamerè è una città dell'Eritrea, a sud-est di Asmara, detta anche Dekemhare, situata a 2060 metri sul livello del mare . Fiorente centro industriale durante la colonizzazione italiana e nota per i suoi vigneti in virtù del clima mite dovuto all'altitudine e alla piovosità annua di 570 mm, subì notevoli devastazioni durante la guerra d'indipendenza eritrea (1961-1991).
CERRO TOLOLO OBSERVATORY AND STAR TRAILS.
Stars over the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile uses the new Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on a telescope there to find the distant dwarf planet 2012 VP 113.
For more information or additional images, please contact 202-586-5251.
It is now widely accepted among astronomers that an important aspect of how galaxies evolve is the way they interact with one another. Galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past one another — each of which has a significant impact on their shapes and structures. As common as these interactions are thought to be in the universe, it is rare to capture an image of two galaxies interacting in such a visibly dynamic way. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope feels incredibly three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery. The subject of this image is Arp 282, an interacting galaxy pair that is composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 (bottom) and the galaxy IC 1559 (top).
Tidal interactions are occurring between NGC 169 and IC 1559. Tidal forces occur when an object’s gravity causes another object to distort or stretch. The direction of the tidal forces will be away from the lower-mass object and towards the higher mass object. When two galaxies interact, gas, dust and even entire solar systems will be drawn away from one galaxy towards the other by these tidal forces. This process can actually be seen in action in this image — delicate streams of matter have formed, visibly linking the two galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL/DECam, CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS
Acknowledgement: J. Schmidt
For more information, visit: esahubble.org/images/potw2206a/
The two interacting galaxies making up the pair known as Arp-Madore 608-333 seem to float side by side in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Though they appear serene and unperturbed, the two are subtly warping one another through a mutual gravitational interaction that is disrupting and distorting both galaxies.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton
For more information, visit: esahubble.org/images/potw2240a/
NGC 247
Credit: DESI LIS, Giuseppe Donatiello
NGC 247 ( also PGC 2758) is a dwarf spiral galaxy at 3.3 Mpc (11.1 Mly) in Cetus. It is a member of the Sculptor Group, the nearest groups of galaxies to the Milky Way, and it has got 70,000 light years in diameter.
Acknowledgement
Data from DECam Legacy Survey (g,r,z filters) obtained at the Blanco Telescope, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, NSF’s NOIRLab.
Full-res: 5000x7500pixel cutout of a large mosaic.
Also here: astrob.in/vv7eq7/0/