View allAll Photos Tagged DwarfGalaxy
The Milky Way setting over Sisters Beach, North West Tasmania. Jupiter and Saturn above the galaxy. Around 02:40 hrs and an excellent early morning to be on the beach with clear skies and noctilucient clouds over the hills at the far end of the beach.
Haven't had a good run with the weather or commitments so far this winter. If I've had the time it's been cloudy or too much moon, if I've had other things to be done it's been clear.
Had to go back into last year's archive to revisit a 7 frame Milky Way stitch to keep on top of processing. Have previously posted a wider version of the view - this one is a little tighter and an entire reprocess - to remind myself what to do.
Nikon Z6, Nikkor Z 20mm f/1.8 S, 7 x 20 secs at 3200
Thanks to Dolly and Kenny for the title :-)
The arc of the Milky Way hanging over the rocky outcrop of Sisters Island from Sisters Beach.
I tend to focus more on the other end of the MW to the south but with the band hanging out over Bass Strait and an expanse of flat, wet sand in front I had a crack at it from this angle.
Nikon Z6, Nikkor 14-30/4, two frame blend - 239 secs at f/4, ISO 1000 for the beach and the island and 25 secs at f/4, ISO 12800 for the sky FL ~14mm.
Even though I had the tracker with me I didn't set it up. Possibly should have done for this frame!
Milky Way Core setting over Sisters Beach and Rocky Cape National Park, Tasmania.
The view is pretty much SE to NW. In addition to the MWC, at left we have the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. These dwarf galaxies are ~166 - 200 LY from us and likely to to collide with us at some point. Just above the SMC is Canopus and below the LMC is Achernar (just made the crop!)
Above the core itself are Jupiter and Saturn and tucked away above the far end of the beach are some pretty cool noctilucient clouds I didn't actually notice until editing the frames. Finally Rocky Cape at extreme right where the lighthouse is just out of shot but the lume can be made out clearly.
Nikon Z6, Nikkor Z 20/1.8 S, 12 portrait frame stitch at 20 secs, f/2.2, ISO 3200. Manual WB at 3800K. 02:40 Hrs 2020/07/23
Sisters Beach has a tide of around 8' rise and fall and I was hoping for a lot less water on the generally flat beach in order to pick up heaps of reflections but was not to be - it was about 1/2 tide on the flood...
Press "L" on your keyboard for maximum impact :-)
At a distance of just 200,000 light years, the Small Magellanic Cloud is one of the most distant objects we can see with the naked eye (from the southern hemisphere). SMC is home to several hundred million stars including some of the closest neighbors to our Milky Way Galaxy. It's thought to have had a barred spiral shape in the past but that was disrupted by our own Milky Way Galaxy - giving us the dwarf irregular galaxy we see today.
I captured this image (from my home in Colorado) using iTelescope.net's T8 telescope based in their Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, New South Wales in Australia. I captured 42 images over 2 nights (in a 2x1 mosaic) and processed them with Astro Pixel Processor and Photoshop.
The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is an irregular galaxy, the closest neighbouring galaxy to the Earth's location in the Milky Way, being located about 25,000 light-years (236,000,000,000,000,000 km) away from the Solar System.
NGC 147 (right) and NGC 185 (center) are two dwarf satellite galaxies of the Great Andromeda galaxy. Both are approximately 250 Kly from Andromeda. For comparison, the Magellanic Clouds, our most prominent satellite galixes, are 160 & 200 Kly away (LMC and SMC, respectively) from earth.
At an approximate distance of 2.1 and 2.5 Mly from earth, for NGC 185 and 147, respectively, both posses low surface brightness.
The brighter of the two, NGC 185, can be observed using a 10 in. Newtonia under moderately light polluted suburban skies.
20171117 - Newtown, PA
Nikon D5500
300mm ED f4.5, f/5.6
40x30s, 3200 iso
iOptron SkyTracker Pro
Regim Sig18 stack w/darks & flats
Affinity Photo
cropped - 50% reduction
NGC185-Sig18apTifap_crop50r85q
The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is an irregular galaxy, the closest neighbouring galaxy to the Earth's location in the Milky Way, being located about 25,000 light-years (236,000,000,000,000,000 km) away from the Solar System.
The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is an irregular galaxy, the closest neighbouring galaxy to the Earth's location in the Milky Way, being located about 25,000 light-years (236,000,000,000,000,000 km) away from the Solar System.
Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31)
Credit: Giuseppe Donatiello
(J2000) RA: 00h 42m 44.3s Dec: +41° 16′ 9″ (core)
The Andromeda Galaxy, or Messier 31 (M31) and NGC 224, is a spiral galaxy approximately at 780 kiloparsecs (2.5 million light-years). It is the largest menber of the Local Group of galaxies, which also contains the Milky Way, the Triangulum Galaxy, and other smaller galaxies.
This image offers a good overview of the main structures on the disc and the outer stellar halo of Andromeda (M31).
The disc appears quite regular and there is an abundant presence of young stars, gases and dusts. The bulge is dominated by an older population. The external halo presents various irregularities and thickenings that we can consider as vestiges of dwarf galaxies incorporated progressively by the greater galaxy, as foreseen by the growth models.
M31 is thought to have assimilated a hundred small galaxies or globular clusters. This process is still ongoing.
Stack of images collected over the last 5 years, primarily with the array of telephoto lenses made up of two 300mm f/4.5, one 110/250mm (f2.2) and two 200mm. That's about 250 hours of total exposure from an SQM 21.8 mountain sky using DSLRs at 3200/6400 ISO.
Full resolution 13K px image is obtainable only upon reasonable request.
Updated July 27, 2024
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This image is distributed as CC0 but for its use please refer to what is indicated in the info here: www.flickr.com/people/133259498@N05/
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Nighttime forest bathing with the Milky Way Core hanging over the deep Tasmanian rainforest.
Planet Jupiter in the top right. Just a bit fuzzy as a faint dew had settled on the lens - pointing straight up as it was.
I didn't light the trees - that's either starlight or the light from my LCD screen on the back of the camera - pretty impressed with the shadow noise handling of the Z6 as a result of this frame.
Cradle Mountain - Lake St Clair National Park.
Nikon Z6, Nikkor Z 20/1.8 S, 20 secs, f/2, ISO 3200. Manual WB at 3800K. 22:15 Hrs 2020/07/25
Regulus and Leo I dwarf (UGC 5470)
Credit: Giuseppe Donatiello
RA 10h 08m 22.311s Dec +11° 58′ 01.95″
Regulus , α Leonis (α Leo), is the brightest star in Leo and one of the brightest in the night sky, lying approximately 79 light-years from the Sun.
RA: 10h 08m 27.4s Dec: +12° 18′ 27″
Leo I is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy in Leo at 820,000 light-years. It is part of the Local Group of galaxies as satellite of our Milky Way (properly, Galaxy) . It was discovered in 1950 by Albert George Wilson on photographic plates of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS). The proximity of Regulus (Alfa Leo) and the low brightness make it very difficult to observe it.
With Tair-3S 300mm f/4.5 telephoto array + EOS 4000D - 2h total exposure on Avalon M-zero observatory EQ mount)
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy and one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors, lying only about 200,000 light-years from Earth. It makes a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud, and both objects are best seen from the Southern Hemisphere, but are visible from some northern latitudes as well.
The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but this image focuses on just a small fraction of them. These stars comprise the open cluster NGC 376, which has a total mass only about 3,400 times that of the Sun. Open clusters, as the name suggests, are loosely bound and sparsely populated. This distinguishes open clusters from globular clusters, which generally appear as a continuous blur of starlight at their centers because they are so crammed with stars. In the case of NGC 376, individual stars are clearly discernable even in the most densely populated parts of this image.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Nota, G. De Marchi
#NASA #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #ESA #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astrophysics #galaxy #SmallMagellanicCloud #dwarfgalaxy
Black holes are often described as the monsters of the universe—tearing apart stars, consuming anything that comes too close, and holding light captive. Detailed evidence from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, however, shows a black hole in a new light: fostering, rather than suppressing, star formation. Hubble imaging and spectroscopy of the dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 clearly show a gas outflow stretching from the black hole to a bright star birth region like an umbilical cord, triggering the already dense cloud into forming clusters of stars. Astronomers have previously debated that a dwarf galaxy could have a black hole analogous to the supermassive black holes in larger galaxies. Further study of dwarf galaxies, which have remained small over cosmic time, may shed light on the question of how the first seeds of supermassive black holes formed and evolved over the history of the universe.
This dwarf starburst galaxy Henize 2-10 sparkles with young stars in this Hubble visible-light image. The bright region at the center, surrounded by pink clouds and dark dust lanes, indicates the location of the galaxy's massive black hole and active stellar nurseries.
Credits: NASA, ESA, Z. Schutte (XGI), A. Reines (XGI), A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0
The Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) taken over 2 nights on the 26th and 27th February 2020. Also visible is NGC 5474 a dwarf galaxy in the bottom left and NGC5477 up and left of the pinwheel.
120 3-minute subs giving 6 hours of exposure with darks, flats and bias
ISO: 400.
Camera: - Nikon D3100.
Wireless Remote: PIXEL TW-283 DC2 2.4G.
Telescope: - Skywatcher 130PDS Newtonian.
Mount: - Skywatcher EQ6R.
Guiding: Skywatcher EvoGuide 50ED & ZWO ASI120MM-Mini.
Processing Software: Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and edited in Star Tools.
Other Software: Stellarium Scope, Stellarium, All Sky Plate Solver, EQMOD, Poth Hub and PHD Guiding 2.
Moon: - New on day 1 and a slither on day 2.
Light Pollution and Location: - Bortle 8 in Davyhulme, Manchester.
Seeing: - Very good (At least comparatively to the last 6 months in Manchester which could be, for all I know, OK)
We had booked of 2 days to go on a city break however this had been curtailed due to the pandemic. Fortunately for the first time in a long time we have had an extended run of fine weather and stargazing. I am finally getting used to the equipment, on both nights I set up in the day, quickly did a polar alignment, quickly got things in focus, did some plate solving, started the guiding and set up the wireless remote to get going. Normally I’m faffing for most of the night, it is weird just being inside waiting for things to happen. The subs I was taking at 1.30am when the object was at the zenith were far superior than the ones taken before midnight. I’d be tempted to reprocess with just these at some point.
I’m still getting to grips with the processing side of things having obsessed over this image over the whole weekend. It would be great to get rid of all the noise but for now I’m giving it a rest.
Would welcome any feedback, good and/or constructive criticism!
“Quietness is the beginning of virtue. To be silent is to be beautiful. Stars do not make a noise.”
James Stephens, Irish poet, 1880–1950.
It was easy not to make a noise as I stood here at the Cuttagee bridge on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, looking at the stars in April this year. Nature was providing a wonderful soundscape already and did not need any effort on my part. To my left was the repeating thud as waves flopped onto the beach at the edge of the Tasman Sea while soothing bubbling and gurgling calls issued from the hasteless flow of Cuttagee Creek as it passed under the old bridge to join that same watery expanse.
Augmenting the aural beauty was the scene in the sky, with starry points of light, a star cluster or two, and the powder-puff wisps of the Magellanic Clouds wordlessly telling of their wonders to all who would hear.
I created this image by shooting two overlapping photos and stitching them together. Both frames were shot with a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/1.8, using an exposure time of 10 seconds @ ISO 6400.
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have come up with what they say is some of their best evidence yet for the presence of a rare class of intermediate-sized black holes, having found a strong candidate lurking at the heart of the closest globular star cluster to Earth, located 6000 light-years away.
Like intense gravitational potholes in the fabric of space, virtually all black holes seem to come in two sizes: small and humongous. It’s estimated that our galaxy is littered with 100 million small black holes (several times the mass of our Sun) created from exploded stars. The universe at large is flooded with supermassive black holes, weighing millions or billions of times our Sun’s mass and found in the centres of galaxies.
A long-sought missing link is an intermediate-mass black hole, weighing roughly 100 to 100,000 times our Sun's mass. How would they form, where would they hang out, and why do they seem to be so rare?
Astronomers have identified other possible intermediate-mass black holes using a variety of observational techniques. Two of the best candidates — 3XMM J215022.4-055108, which Hubble helped discover in 2020, and HLX-1, identified in 2009 — reside in the outskirts of other galaxies. Each of these possible black holes has the mass of tens of thousands of suns, and may have once been at the centres of dwarf galaxies.
Looking much closer to home, there have been a number of suspected intermediate-mass black holes detected in dense globular star clusters orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. For example, in 2008, Hubble astronomers announced the suspected presence of an intermediate-mass black hole in the globular cluster Omega Centauri. For a number of reasons, including the need for more data, these and other intermediate-mass black hole findings still remain inconclusive and do not rule out alternative theories.
Hubble’s unique capabilities have now been used to zero-in on the core of the globular star cluster Messier 4 (M4) to go black-hole hunting with higher precision than in previous searches. “You can’t do this kind of science without Hubble,” said Eduardo Vitral of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and formerly of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP, Sorbonne University) in Paris, France, lead author on a paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Vitral’s team has detected a possible intermediate-mass black hole of roughly 800 solar masses. The suspected object can’t be seen, but its mass is calculated by studying the motion of stars caught in its gravitational field, like bees swarming around a hive. Measuring their motion takes time, and a lot of precision. This is where Hubble accomplishes what no other present-day telescope can do. Astronomers looked at 12 years’ worth of M4 observations from Hubble, and resolved pinpoint stars.
ESA’s Gaia spacecraft also contributed to this result with scans of over 6000 stars that constrained the global shape of the cluster and its mass. Hubble’s data tend to rule out alternative theories for this object, such as a compact central cluster of unresolved stellar remnants like neutron stars, or smaller black holes swirling around each other.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA; CC BY 4.0
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
The bright streak of glowing gas and stars in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is known as PGC 51017, or SBSG 1415+437. It is type of galaxy known as a blue compact dwarf.
This particular dwarf is well studied and has an interesting star formation history. Astronomers initially thought that SBS 1415+437 was a very young galaxy currently undergoing its very first burst of star formation, but more recent studies have suggested that the galaxy is in fact a little older, containing stars over 1.3 billion years old.
Starbursts are an area of ongoing research for astronomers — short-lived and intense periods of star formation, during which huge amounts of gas within a galaxy are hungrily used up to form newborn stars.
They have been seen in gas-rich disc galaxies, and in some lower-mass dwarfs. However, it is still unclear whether all dwarf galaxies experience starbursts as part of their evolution. It is possible that dwarf galaxies undergo a star formation cycle, with bursts occurring repeatedly over time.
SBS 1415+437 is an interesting target for another reason. Dwarf galaxies like this are thought to have formed early in the Universe, producing some of the very first stars before merging together to create more massive galaxies. Dwarf galaxies which contain very few of the heavier elements formed from having several generations of stars, like SBS 1415+437, remain some of the best places to study star-forming processes similar to those thought to occur in the early Universe. However, it seems that our nearby patch of the Universe may not contain any galaxies that are currently undergoing their first burst of star formation.
A version of this image was entered into the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Nick Rose.
This Picture of the Week shows a dwarf galaxy named UGC 685. Such galaxies are small and contain just a tiny fraction of the number of stars in a galaxy like the Milky Way. Dwarf galaxies often show a hazy structure, an ill-defined shape, and an appearance somewhat akin to a swarm or cloud of stars — and UGC 685 is no exception to this. Classified as an SAm galaxy — a type of unbarred spiral galaxy — it is located about 15 million light-years from Earth.
These data were gathered under the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s LEGUS (Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey) Program, the sharpest and most comprehensive ultraviolet survey of star-forming galaxies in the nearby Universe.
LEGUS is imaging 50 spiral and dwarf galaxies in our cosmic neighbourhood in multiple colours using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. The survey is picking apart the structures of these galaxies and resolving their constituent stars, clusters, groups, and other stellar associations. Star formation plays a huge role in shaping its host galaxy; by exploring these targets in detail via both new observations and archival Hubble data, LEGUS will shed light on how stars form and cluster together, how these clusters evolve, how a star’s formation affects its surroundings, and how stars explode at the end of their lives.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA; the LEGUS team, B. Tully, D. Calzetti Acknowledgement(s): Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla); CC BY 4.0
The Andromeda Galaxy (M31)is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth and the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. The galaxy's name stems from the area of Earth's sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda.
The mass of the Andromeda Galaxy is of the same order of magnitude as that of the Milky Way, at 1 trillion solar masses and it has a diameter of about 220,000 light years.
The number of stars contained in the Andromeda Galaxy is estimated at one trillion, or roughly twice the number estimated for the Milky Way.
The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are expected to collide in around 4.5 billion years, merging to form a giant elliptical galaxy or a large lenticular galaxy.
Also visible in this shot are two satellite dwarf galaxies, M32 and M110 (the two other fuzzy star formations to the left and just below Andromeda).
ASI 2600MC Pro cooled to 0degC. William Optics GT 81, Flat 6AIII, ASIAir Pro, HEQ5 Pro guided, 15 x 90s lights, 45 180s lights, 40 flats, 80 bias at gain 100. Bortle 2 skies.
Stacked in DSS and processed in PS and LR.
Pretty pleased with this. First light with the ASI 2600MC Pro, second time out for the GT81 and my first attempt at Andromeda since I took up astro about 6 months ago. Got some elliptical stars in the corners but I'll work on that with the flattener adjustment.
Once my tracking was steady I couldn't resist a portrait of the LMC and the SMC side by side. Thin clouds crossed the frames but it didn't do too much harm to the overall image.
NGC 6822 or Barnard's Galaxy is a dwarf irregular galaxy that is part of our Local Group. It is located in the constellation of Sagittarius and at a distance of 1.6 million light years. Dwarf galaxies like this one provide interesting regions for star formation studies.
This image uses data provided by Dr. Philip Massey as distributed by the NOAO Science Archive. NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Observers: K. Olsen, C. Smith
Data for this image was obtained with the Blanco 4-m Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and is publicly available from the NOAO Science Archive.
The 4-m telescope is able to resolve individual stars. Please zoom in for an up close look!
This image is a blend of narrow band data gathered with Ha, SII and OIII filters. Each of the original frames was a 2x4 mosaic with a total of 8675x8775 pixels. The view presented here is a crop of the full frame that has been reduced to half the original resolution. Still the largest image provided here is 3200x2400 pixels and it shows lots of detail.
At first glance this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image seems to show an array of different cosmic objects, but the speckling of stars shown here actually forms a single body — a nearby dwarf galaxy known as Leo A. Its few million stars are so sparsely distributed that some distant background galaxies are visible through it. Leo A itself is at a distance of about 2.5 million light-years from Earth and a member of the Local Group of galaxies; a group that includes the Milky Way and the well-known Andromeda galaxy.
Astronomers study dwarf galaxies because they are very numerous and are simpler in structure than their giant cousins. However, their small size makes them difficult to study at great distances. As a result, the dwarf galaxies of the Local Group are of particular interest, as they are close enough to study in detail.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla)
Read more about this image here.
The 2002 Chandra image of NGC 1569, a dwarf galaxy 7 million light years from Earth, shows large hot bubbles, or lobes extending above and below a disk of gas along the equator of the galaxy. The 27-hour observation allowed scientists to measure for the first time the concentration of oxygen, neon, magnesium, and silicon in the bubbles and the disk. They found that bubbles contain oxygen equal to the oxygen contained in 3 million suns.
For the last 10 million to 20 million years NGC 1569 has been undergoing a burst of star formation and supernova explosions, perhaps triggered by a collision with a massive gas cloud. The supernovas eject oxygen and other heavy elements at high velocity into the gas in the galaxy, heating it to millions of degrees. Hot gas boils off the gaseous disk of the galaxy to form the bubbles, which expand out of the galaxy at speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles per hour.
Dwarf galaxies are much smaller than ordinary galaxies like our Milky Way. Because of their size, they have relatively low gravity and matter can escape from them more easily. This property, combined with the fact that dwarf galaxies are the most common type of galaxy in the universe, makes them very important in understanding how the universe was seeded with various elements billions of years ago, when galaxies were forming.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/UCSB/C.Martin et al.
#NASA #MarshallSpaceFlightCenter #MSFC #Marshall #chandraxrayobservatory #ChandraXRay #cxo #chandra #astronomy #space #astrophysics #nasamarshallspaceflightcenter #solarsystemandbeyond #galaxy #dwarfgalaxy
Taken on the night of 2023-11-11 from my Bortle 8/9 backyard in Long Beach, CA
Celestron Edge HD 925 at 1530 mm focal length (0.87"/pixel scale) with an Atik 414-EX camera and Optolong LRGB filters.
L: 55 30 s exposures
R: 14 120 s exposures
G: 14 120 s exposures
B: 15 120 s exposures
Data acquisition done with N.I.N.A.
Preprocessing in Nebulosity; registration, stacking, channel combination, and initial processing in PixInsight; final touches in GIMP.
M32 is a dwarf satellite galaxy of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Portions of the disk of M31 are visible in the lower right portion of the image. I also wanted to get the luminosity data to have a comparison frame for looking for novae associated with this galaxy.
The South Celestial Pole (SCP) photographed from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). 1,042 thirty-sec exposures spanning more than 8.5 hours and showing Earth's rotation. Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile, 24-25 Aug 2009 (Nikon D700).
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
See the resulting video, meteor shot, Milky Way shot, Magellanic Clouds shot
Explore #4 on 16 Dec 2009
FROM THE FILM: SIDEREAL MOTION
1,159 thirty-sec exposures spanning more than 10.5 hours. The irregular galaxies Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC, respectively) are visible towards the middle of the time-lapse sequence. Very Large Telescope, Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile, 23-24 Aug 2009 (Nikon D700).
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
26 Nov 09: Explore #2
07 Dec 09: 5,000+ views
10 Dec 09: 10,000+ views
14 Dec 09: 25,000+ views
29 Dec 09: 50,000+ views
11 Feb 11: 69,000+ views
12 Feb 11: 123,000+ views
13 Feb 11: 149,000+ views
05 Sep 11: 177,000 views
Nikon D5 + 14-24mm f/2.8G | Atacama Desert, Chile, 10 April 2016
© 2016 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
Do not use without permission. 2016.04.10_107353
The Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy
Credit: DESI LIS, Giuseppe Donatiello
The Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy (also Sculptor System) is a satellite of the Milky Way at about 90 kpc. It was discovered in 1937 by Harlow Shapley.
Acknowledgments
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) data are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (“CC BY 4.0”, Summary, Full Legal Code). Users are free to share, copy, redistribute, adapt, transform and build upon the DESI data available through this website for any purpose, including commercially.
This image used data obtained with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). DESI construction and operations is managed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High-Energy Physics, under Contract No. DE–AC02–05CH11231, and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract. Additional support for DESI was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract No. AST-0950945 to the NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT); the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (MICINN), and by the DESI Member Institutions: www.desi.lbl.gov/collaborating-institutions. The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, or any of the listed funding agencies.
See also: flic.kr/p/YojEH5
Local Dwarf Galaxies
Credit: DECaLS, Giuseppe Donatiello
A collection of dwarf galaxies in a belt between about 3 and 5 Mpc centered on the Milky Way. All images are from DECaLS DR9.
The compilation includes some irregular, elliptical dwarfs, spheroidal dwarfs and ultra-faint dwarfs such as Donatiello II. (box 150x150 arcseconds)
Fifty [stacked] 30-sec exposures spanning approx. 25 min and showing Earth's rotation around the South Celestial Pole (SCP). Notice the meteor passing near the SCP and above Yepun (Venus in Mapuche), the fourth VLT Unit Telescope. The stacked image was then combined with the first frame in the sequence to produce the SCP-centered gradient effect. Photographed from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) in Cerro Paranal, Chile.
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
See the resulting video, cumulative video, Milky Way shot, Magellanic Clouds shot
Sweeping spiral arms extend from NGC 4536, littered with bright blue clusters of star formation and red clumps of hydrogen gas shining among dark lanes of dust. The galaxy’s shape may seem a little unusual, and that’s because it’s what’s known as an “intermediate galaxy”: not quite a barred spiral, but not exactly an unbarred spiral, either - a hybrid of the two.
NGC 4536 is also a starburst galaxy, in which star formation is happening at a tremendous rate that uses up the gas in the galaxy relatively quickly, by galactic standards. Starburst galaxies can happen due to gravitational interactions with other galaxies or - as seems to be the case for NGC 4536 - when gas is packed into a small region. The bar-like structure of NGC 4536 may be driving gas inwards toward the nucleus, giving rise to a crescendo of star formation in a ring around the nucleus. Starburst galaxies birth lots of hot blue stars that burn fast and die quickly in explosions that unleash intense ultraviolet light (visible in blue), turning their surroundings into glowing clouds of ionized hydrogen, called HII regions (visible in red).
NGC 4536 is approximately 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. It was discovered in 1784 by astronomer William Herschel. Hubble took this image of NGC 4536 as part of a project to study galactic environments to understand connections between young stars and cold gas, particularly star clusters and molecular clouds, throughout the local universe.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lee (Space Telescope Science Institute); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #DwarfGalaxy #StarCluster #StarburstGalaxy #SpiralGalaxy
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling cloudscape from one of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbors, a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Located 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the Milky Way’s many small satellite galaxies.
This view of dusty gas clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud is possible thanks to Hubble’s cameras, such as the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) that collected the observations for this image. WFC3 holds a variety of filters, and each lets through specific wavelengths, or colors, of light. This image combines observations made with five different filters, including some that capture ultraviolet and infrared light that the human eye cannot see.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #dwarfgalaxy #LargeMagellanicCloud
One of the brightest stars in the night sky and a dwarf galaxy right next to it: Regulus and the dwarf galaxy Leo I are a fascinating pair that I've had on my to-do list for quite some time. However, my first attempt turned out to be a failure because, after stacking, it turned out that a spike from Regulus was going right through the Leo I galaxy. I hadn't considered the spikes at all during the preparation of the capture. Fortunately, a new opportunity arose four weeks later, and I rotated the tube of my Newtonian telescope so that Leo I was now located between the spikes.
In the final stack, Leo I was nicely clear, bright, and clearly visible, so I could keep the editing very simple. Thanks to the CNC machined secondary spider, Regulus' spikes were also nearly perfect and required no corrections at all. I wish every image would work out like this...
I hope you enjoy my version of this odd couple!
Some more facts:
Regulus is not really a single star, but a multiple star system. It consists of two pairs of stars. Regulus A, the primary component in the Regulus system, is a spectroscopic binary star composed of a blue-white main sequence star with the spectral classification B7 V and a companion believed to be a white dwarf. With a visual magnitude of 1.35, Regulus A is reponsible for the star system’s brightness and bluish colour. The system lies approximately 79 light years from the Sun.
Leo I is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy in the constellation Leo. At about 820,000 light-years distant, it is a member of the Local Group of galaxies and is thought to be one of the most distant satellites of the Milky Way galaxy.
Leo I is located only 12 arc minutes from Regulus. For that reason, the galaxy is sometimes called the „Regulus Dwarf“. Scattered light from the star makes studying the galaxy more difficult, and it was not until the 1990s that it was detected visually. Typical to a dwarf galaxy, the metallicity of Leo I is very low, only one percent that of the Sun. The galaxy may be embedded in a cloud of ionized gas with a mass similar to that of the whole galaxy.
Skywatcher 200 1000 @750mm f/3.75
Starizona Nexus Coma Corrector & Reducer
Secondary Spider by Backyard Universe
EQ6-R Pro
ZWO ASI 2600 MC Pro (Gain 100, Offset 18, -10°)
RGB (Baader UV/IR Cut Filter): 180 × 60″
Total: 3 h
Bortle 5
Darks, Flats, Darkflats, Dithering
N.I.N.A., Guiding: ZWO ASI 120MM & PHD2
Astropixelprocessor, Photoshop, Pixinsight
An open cluster of stars shines through misty, cocoon-like gas clouds in this Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 460.
NGC 460 is located in a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. This particular region contains a number of young star clusters and nebulae of different sizes - all likely related to each other. The clouds of gas and dust can give rise to stars as portions of them collapse, and radiation and stellar winds from those hot, young bright stars in turn shape and compress the clouds, triggering new waves of star formation. The hydrogen clouds are ionized by the radiation of nearby stars, causing them to glow.
The NGC 460 star cluster resides in one of the youngest parts of this interconnected complex of stellar clusters and nebulae, which is also home to a number of O-type stars: the brightest, hottest and most massive of the normal, hydrogen-burning stars (called main-sequence stars) like our Sun. O-type stars are rare - out of more than 4 billion stars in the Milky Way, only about 20,000 are estimated to be O-type stars. The area that holds NGC 460, known as N83, may have been created when two hydrogen clouds in the region collided with one another, creating several O-type stars and nebulae.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Lindberg (The Johns Hopkins University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #DwarfGalaxy #StarCluster #SmallMagellanicCloud #nebula
The center of the Milky Way begins to rise behind the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) on this first day of Spring. To the right, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC), two dwarf galaxies 200,000 and 160,000 light years away, respectively. South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO), Sutherland, South Africa, 20 Mar 2010.
© 2010 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
The Moon illuminates the Very Large Telescope (VLT) as it sets in the West while the disk of our galaxy, The Milky Way, passes overhead in this time-lapse sequence composed of 1,000 thirty-second exposures. Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile. 24 Aug 09.
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
Explore #24 on 19 Dec 2009
See also:
Cumulative video, Milky Way still, 35-exp stack, Moonset, VLT at Dawn,
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the dwarf irregular galaxy UGC 4879 or VV124. As this image illustrates, Hubble’s high resolution can detect individual stars, even in the densest parts of the galaxy. This allows astronomers to better determine the galaxy’s distance, and the composition and age of its stars.
UGC 4879 is an isolated dwarf galaxy, lying just beyond our own Local Group of galaxies some four million light-years away. Because of its isolation, astronomers are studying UGC 4879 to determine if it is a relatively undisturbed, old galaxy. Theories suggest that the lowest mass dwarf galaxies may have been the first galaxies to form. If UGC 4879 is a relic of the early universe, it could provide clues to the hierarchical structure and evolution of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and even the universe itself.
Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Chiboucas (NOIRLab - Gemini North (HI), and M. Monelli (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASA #galaxy #ESA #NASAGoddard #LargeMagellanicCloud #galaxy #dwarfgalaxy
Leo I (UGC 5470) dwarf galaxy
Credit: Giuseppe Donatiello (Oria Amateur Astrophysical Observatory - OAAO)
RA: 10h 08m 27.4s Dec: +12° 18′ 27″
Leo I is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy in Leo at 820,000 light-years. It is part of the Local Group of galaxies as satellite of our Milky Way (properly, Galaxy) . It was discovered in 1950 by Albert George Wilson on photographic plates of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS). The proximity of Regulus (Alfa Leo) and the low brightness make it very difficult to observe it.
Captured on April 20, 2025 with my 127ED f/9 refractor (strong cutout).
A bubbling region of stars both old and new lies some 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado. This complex cluster of emission nebulae is known as N11, and was discovered by American astronomer and NASA astronaut Karl Gordon Henize in 1956. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope brings a new image of the cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a nearby dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.
About 1,000 light-years across, N11’s sprawling filaments weave stellar matter in and out of each other like sparkling candy floss. These cotton-spun clouds of gas are ionized by a burgeoning host of young and massive stars, giving the complex a cherry-pink appearance. Throughout N11, colossal cavities burst from the fog. These bubbles formed as a result of the vigorous emergence and death of stars contained in the nebulae. Their stellar winds and supernovae carved the surrounding area into shells of gas and dust.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. M. Apellaniz (Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC/INTA Inst. Nac. de Tec. Aero.); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASA #galaxy #ESA #NASAGoddard #LargeMagellanicCloud #galaxy #dwarfgalaxy
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just solved a conundrum by proving a controversial finding made with the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope more than 20 years ago.
In 2003, Hubble provided evidence of a massive planet around a very old star, almost as old as the universe. Such stars possess only small amounts of heavier elements that are the building blocks of planets. This implied that some planet formation happened when our universe was very young, and those planets had time to form and grow big inside their primordial disks, even bigger than Jupiter. But how? This was puzzling.
To answer this question, researchers used Webb to study stars in a nearby galaxy that, much like the early universe, lacks large amounts of heavy elements. They found that not only do some stars there have planet-forming disks, but that those disks are longer-lived than those seen around young stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
This is a James Webb Space Telescope image of NGC 346, a massive star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is one of the Milky Way's nearest neighbors. With its relative lack of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, the NGC 346 cluster serves as a nearby proxy for studying stellar environments with similar conditions in the early, distant universe. Ten, small, yellow circles overlaid on the image indicate the positions of the ten stars surveyed in this study.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Olivia C. Jones (UK ATC), Guido De Marchi (ESTEC), Margaret Meixner (USRA)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #JWST #NASAWebb #NASAGoddard #galaxy
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and near the equator. Many navigators, including Ferdinand Magellan who lends his name to the SMC, used it to help find their way across the oceans.
Modern astronomers are also interested in studying the SMC (and its cousin, the Large Magellanic Cloud), but for very different reasons. Because the SMC is so close and bright, it offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are difficult to examine in more distant galaxies. New Chandra data of the SMC have provided one such discovery: the first detection of X-ray emission from young stars with masses similar to our Sun outside our Milky Way galaxy. The new Chandra observations of these low-mass stars were made of the region known as the "Wing" of the SMC. In this composite image of the Wing the Chandra data is shown in purple, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope is shown in red, green and blue and infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope is shown in red.
Astronomers call all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium -- that is, with more than two protons in the atom's nucleus -- "metals." The Wing is a region known to have fewer metals compared to most areas within the Milky Way. There are also relatively lower amounts of gas, dust, and stars in the Wing compared to the Milky Way.
Taken together, these properties make the Wing an excellent location to study the life cycle of stars and the gas lying in between them. Not only are these conditions typical for dwarf irregular galaxies like the SMC, they also mimic ones that would have existed in the early Universe.
Most star formation near the tip of the Wing is occurring in a small region known as NGC 602, which contains a collection of at least three star clusters. One of them, NGC 602a, is similar in age, mass, and size to the famous Orion Nebula Cluster. Researchers have studied NGC 602a to see if young stars -- that is, those only a few million years old -- have different properties when they have low levels of metals, like the ones found in NGC 602a.
Using Chandra, astronomers discovered extended X-ray emission, from the two most densely populated regions in NGC 602a. The extended X-ray cloud likely comes from the population of young, low-mass stars in the cluster, which have previously been picked out by infrared and optical surveys, using Spitzer and Hubble respectively. This emission is not likely to be hot gas blown away by massive stars, because the low metal content of stars in NGC 602a implies that these stars should have weak winds. The failure to detect X-ray emission from the most massive star in NGC 602a supports this conclusion, because X-ray emission is an indicator of the strength of winds from massive stars. No individual low-mass stars are detected, but the overlapping emission from several thousand stars is bright enough to be observed.
The Chandra results imply that the young, metal-poor stars in NGC 602a produce X-rays in a manner similar to stars with much higher metal content found in the Orion cluster in our galaxy. The authors speculate that if the X-ray properties of young stars are similar in different
environments, then other related properties -- including the formation and evolution of disks where planets form -- are also likely to be similar.
X-ray emission traces the magnetic activity of young stars and is related to how efficiently their magnetic dynamo operates. Magnetic dynamos generate magnetic fields in stars through a process involving the star's speed of rotation, and convection, the rising and falling of hot gas in the star's interior.
The combined X-ray, optical and infrared data also revealed, for the first time outside our Galaxy, objects representative of an even younger stage of evolution of a star. These so-called "young stellar objects" have ages of a few thousand years and are still embedded in the pillar of dust and gas from which stars form, as in the famous "Pillars of Creation" of the Eagle Nebula.
A paper describing these results was published online and in the March 1, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The first author is Lidia Oskinova from the University of Potsdam in Germany and the co-authors are Wei Sun from Nanjing University, China; Chris Evans from the Royal
Observatory Edinburgh, UK; Vincent Henault-Brunet from University of Edinburgh, UK; You-Hua Chu from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL; John Gallagher III from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI; Martin Guerrero from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain; Robert Gruendl from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL; Manuel Gudel from the University of Vienna, Austria; Sergey Silich from the Instituto Nacional de Astrofısica Optica y Electr´onica, Puebla, Mexico; Yang Chen from Nanjing University, China; Yael Naze from Universite de Liege, Liege, Belgium; Rainer Hainich from the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Jorge Reyes-Iturbide from the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Ilheus, Brazil.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/ngc602/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
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These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or
endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
Credit: DESI LIS, Giuseppe Donatiello
(50% of the original image)
The Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal is an elliptical dwarf galaxy at a distance of 460 ± 30 kly (140 ± 10 kpc) in the constellation Fornax. It was discovered in 1938 by Harlow Shapley.
The galaxy is a satellite of the Milky Way and has six globular clusters (see here)
www.flickr.com/photos/133259498@N05/51083353861/in/datepo...
The Fornax dwarf galaxy has one of the most complex star formation histories of any of the Local Group dSphs (Stetson et al. 1998). While a few of these galaxies seem to have only old stars (e.g., Draco, Sculptor), such dSphs as Leo I and Carina show star formation.
Acknowledgments
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) data are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (“CC BY 4.0”, Summary, Full Legal Code). Users are free to share, copy, redistribute, adapt, transform and build upon the DESI data available through this website for any purpose, including commercially.
This image used data obtained with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). DESI construction and operations is managed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High-Energy Physics, under Contract No. DE–AC02–05CH11231, and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract. Additional support for DESI was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract No. AST-0950945 to the NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT); the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (MICINN), and by the DESI Member Institutions: www.desi.lbl.gov/collaborating-institutions. The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, or any of the listed funding agencies.
See also: www.flickr.com/photos/133259498@N05/42603164340/in/album-...
Near Dubbo, NSW, Australia. November 2017. What a dark and starry night! The Greater Magellanic Cloud lay close to the eastern horizon. The tree line marks the Golden Highway, with road trains intermittently rumbling past and chasing away the dark.
Leo II dwarf galaxy
Credit: DESI LIS, Giuseppe Donatiello
RA,Dec = 168.3627, 22.1539
Leo II is a dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxy of the Milky Way at about 690,000 light-years away in Leo. It was discovered in 1950 by Robert George Harrington and Albert George Wilson, from the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories in California. Leo II consists largely of metal-poor older stars.
Acknowledgments
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) data are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (“CC BY 4.0”, Summary, Full Legal Code). Users are free to share, copy, redistribute, adapt, transform and build upon the DESI data available through this website for any purpose, including commercially.
This image used data obtained with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). DESI construction and operations is managed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High-Energy Physics, under Contract No. DE–AC02–05CH11231, and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract. Additional support for DESI was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Division of Astronomical Sciences under Contract No. AST-0950945 to the NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT); the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain (MICINN), and by the DESI Member Institutions: www.desi.lbl.gov/collaborating-institutions. The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, or any of the listed funding agencies.
The Tarantula Nebula is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group of Galaxies. The Local Group comprises more than 54 Galaxies (mostly dwarf Galaxies). The three largest members of the group (in descending order) are the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy.
The Tarantula Nebula (also known as NGC 2070, the Doradus Nebula, or 30 Doradus) is a H II region in the very dense Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC is one of the irregular satellite dwarf Galaxies of the Milky Way Galaxy, that is among the closest Galaxies to Earth. There is also a Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), both discovered by Magellan. The Magellanic Clouds are visible from the Southern Hemisphere with the naked eye.
About this image:
This wide field image consists of 12 x 2 minute exposures at ISO 3200. Photographed in the rural skies of North West Province, South Africa.
About the Star Colors:
You will notice that star colors differ from red, orange and yellow, to blue. This is an indication of the temperature of the star's Nuclear Fusion process. This is determined by the size and mass of the star, and the stage of its life cycle. In short, the blue stars are hotter, and the red ones are cooler.
About the Milky Way, and Earth's place within it:
The Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to have over 400 billion stars. Stars are suns, and just like in our Solar System, many of the stars have planets with moons orbiting them.
Our sun is a middle aged Yellow Dwarf star, located in the Orion Arm (or Orion Spur) of the Milky Way Galaxy. It’s a minor side spiral arm, located between two larger arms of the Milky Way Galaxy's spiral.
The Milky Way is merely one mid-sized barred spiral Galaxy, amongst over 100 billion other Galaxies in the observable Universe. When we look up at the night sky from Earth, we see a glimpse of the Carina–Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. It takes about 250 million years for the Milky Way Galaxy's spiral arms to complete one rotation.
The size, distance and age of the Universe is far beyond human comprehension. The known Universe is estimated to contain over One Billion Trillion stars.
1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the subtle glow of the galaxy named IC 3430, located 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. This dwarf elliptical galaxy is part of the Virgo cluster, a rich collection of galaxies both large and small, many of which are very similar in type to this diminutive galaxy.
Like its larger elliptical cousins, IC 3430 has a smooth, oval shape lacking any recognizable features like arms or bars, and is missing much of the gas needed to form many new stars. Interestingly, IC 3430 does feature a core of hot, massive blue stars —an uncommon sight in elliptical galaxies — that indicates recent star-forming activity. Astronomers think that pressure from the galaxy ploughing through gas within the Virgo cluster ignited what gas IC 3430 had in its core to form the newer stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASA #galaxy #ESA #NASAGoddard #DwarfGalaxy
Editor's note: I love this factoid from the write-up: "Because this gas is about six million degrees, it only glows in X-ray light." Wow. :)
Observations with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed a massive cloud of multimillion-degree gas in a galaxy about 60 million light years from Earth. The hot gas cloud is likely caused by a collision between a dwarf galaxy and a much larger galaxy called NGC 1232. If confirmed, this discovery would mark the first time such a collision has been detected only in X-rays, and could have implications for understanding how galaxies grow through similar collisions.
An image combining X-rays and optical light shows the scene of this collision. The impact between the dwarf galaxy and the spiral galaxy caused a shock wave − akin to a sonic boom on Earth – that generated hot gas with a temperature of about six million degrees. Chandra X-ray data, in purple, show the hot gas has a comet-like appearance, caused by the motion of the dwarf galaxy. Optical data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope reveal the spiral galaxy in blue and white. X-ray point sources have been removed from this image to emphasize the diffuse emission.
Near the head of the comet-shaped X-ray emission (mouse over the image for the location) is a region containing several very optically bright stars and enhanced X-ray emission. Star formation may have been triggered by the shock wave, producing bright, massive stars. In that case X-ray emission would be generated by massive star winds and by the remains of supernova explosions as massive stars evolve.
The mass of the entire gas cloud is uncertain because it cannot be determined from the two-dimensional image whether the hot gas is concentrated in a thin pancake or distributed over a large, spherical region. If the gas is a pancake, the mass is equivalent to forty thousand Suns. If it is spread out uniformly, the mass could be much larger, about three million times as massive as the Sun. This range agrees with values for dwarf galaxies in the Local Group containing the Milky Way.
The hot gas should continue to glow in X-rays for tens to hundreds of millions of years, depending on the geometry of the collision. The collision itself should last for about 50 million years. Therefore, searching for large regions of hot gas in galaxies might be a way to estimate the frequency of collisions with dwarf galaxies and to understand how important such events are to galaxy growth.
An alternative explanation of the X-ray emission is that the hot gas cloud could have been produced by supernovas and hot winds from large numbers of massive stars, all located on one side of the galaxy. The lack of evidence of expected radio, infrared, or optical features argues against this possibility.
A paper by Gordon Garmire of the Huntingdon Institute for X-ray Astronomy in Huntingdon, PA describing these results is available online and was published in the June 10th, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/ngc1232/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Huntingdon Inst. for X-ray Astronomy/G.Garmire, Optical: ESO/VLT
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
_____________________________________________
These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
25-sec exposures. Nikon D700 (ISO 2500) & D3 (ISO 3200) + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G lenses
ALMA under construction, Llano de Chajnantor Observatory, Chile, night of 16/17 June 2010.
© 2010 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
The Hubble Picture of the Week this week reveals the subtle glow of the galaxy named IC 3430, located 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. It is part of the Virgo cluster, a rich collection of galaxies both large and small, many of which are very similar in type to this diminutive galaxy.
IC 3430 is a dwarf galaxy, a fact well reflected by this view from Hubble, but it is more precisely known as a dwarf elliptical or dE galaxy. Like its larger cousins, this galaxy has a smooth, oval shape lacking any recognisable features like arms or bars, and it is bereft of gas to form very many new stars. Interestingly, IC 3430 does feature a core of hot, massive blue stars, an uncommon sight in elliptical galaxies that indicates recent star-forming activity. It’s believed that ram pressure from the galaxy ploughing through gas within the Virgo cluster has ignited what gas does remain in IC 3430’s core to form some new stars.
Dwarf galaxies are really just galaxies with not many stars, usually fewer than a billion, but that is often enough for them to reproduce in miniature the same forms as larger galaxies. There are dwarf elliptical galaxies like IC 3430, dwarf irregular galaxies, dwarf spheroidal galaxies and even dwarf spiral galaxies! The so-called Magellanic spiral is a distinct type of dwarf galaxy, too, the best example being the well-known dwarf galaxies that are the Magellanic Clouds.
[Image Description: A relatively small, oval-shaped galaxy, tilted diagonally. It glows brightly at the centre and dims gradually to its edge. At the centre it is crossed by some wisps of dark dust, and a few small, blue, glowing spots are visible, where stars are forming. The galaxy is on a dark background in which many background galaxies and foreground stars can be seen.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun; CC BY 4.0