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Zooming in on Star Formation in the Southern Milky Way | ESO
This zoom sequence takes the viewer deep into the spectacular southern Milky Way in the constellation of Carina (The Keel). We see two regions where stars are forming, the very rich cluster NGC 3603 and its surroundings and the strange glowing gas clouds known as NGC 3576. The final detailed views come from images taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
The star cluster NGC 3603 is located 20,000 light-years away in the Carina–Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The collection of glowing gas clouds, known as NGC 3576, lies only about half as far from Earth.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/G. Beccari/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org)
A Close-up Look at Star Formation in the Southern Milky Way | ESO
This pan video gives a close-up view of a spectacular mosaic of images from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile that shows two dramatic star formation regions in the southern Milky Way. The first is of these, on the left, is dominated by the star cluster NGC 3603, located 20,000 light-years away, in the Carina–Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The second object, on the right, is a collection of glowing gas clouds known as NGC 3576 that lies only about half as far from Earth.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/G. Beccari
This mosaic of images from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows two dramatic star formation regions in the southern Milky Way. The first of these, on the left, is dominated by the star cluster NGC 3603, located about 20,000 light-years away, in the Carina–Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. The second object, on the right, is a collection of glowing gas clouds known as NGC 3576 that lies only about half as far from Earth.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/G. Beccari
The Eta Aquariids meteor shower was captured in this stunning image by astrophotographer Petr Horálek. It was taken near San Pedro de Atacama, a Chilean town about 50 km away from the Chajnantor observatory site, where APEX and ALMA, astronomical facilities co-owned by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), are located. The Eta Aquariids meteors are caused by leftover debris from Halley’s comet and make up the bright, arrow-like darts of light in the photo.
The luminous object towards the bottom of the sky is Venus. Above it, arranged in a satisfying line, are several planets in conjunction. Directly above Venus is Jupiter, followed by the bright red Mars, and then Saturn. Conjunctions such as this are rare, often occurring decades apart. The planets also trace the zodiacal light, the faint glow stretching like a pillar, up towards the bright stellar-dense center of the Milky Way, our home galaxy.
Zodiacal light is often seen from dark sites like ESO observatories just after sunset, or before sunrise, and is the reflected sunlight from dust particles in the plane of the Solar System. The dust comes from asteroids, passing comets, and even from other inner Solar System planets, such as Mars. Here we see the zodiacal light paired with the red sunset over the mountains and volcanoes surrounding the Chajnantor site, a spectacular backdrop to this dreamy night sky.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/P. Horalek
Red Giant Star U Camelopardalis Blows a Bubble | Hubble
A bright star is surrounded by a tenuous shell of gas in this unusual image from the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope. U Camelopardalis, or U Cam for short, is a star nearing the end of its life. As it begins to run low on fuel, it is becoming unstable. Every few thousand years, it coughs out a nearly spherical shell of gas as a layer of helium around its core begins to fuse. The gas ejected in the star’s latest eruption is clearly visible in this picture as a faint bubble of gas surrounding the star.
U Cam is an example of a carbon star. This is a rare type of star whose atmosphere contains more carbon than oxygen. Due to its low surface gravity, typically as much as half of the total mass of a carbon star may be lost by way of powerful stellar winds.
Located in the constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe), near the North Celestial Pole, U Cam itself is actually much smaller than it appears in Hubble’s picture. In fact, the star would easily fit within a single pixel at the center of the image. Its brightness, however, is enough to overwhelm the capability of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys making the star look much bigger than it really is.
The shell of gas, which is both much larger and much fainter than its parent star, is visible in intricate detail in Hubble’s portrait. While phenomena that occur at the ends of stars’ lives are often quite irregular and unstable, the shell of gas expelled from U Cam is almost perfectly spherical.
The image was produced with the High Resolution Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble, NASA and H. Olofsson (Onsala Space Observatory)
A Tour of Giant Star AG Carinae in Carina | Hubble
Space Sparks Episode 3: This video showcases AG Carinae—a star in the constellation Carina. It is classified as a luminous blue variable (LBV) and is one of the most luminous stars in the Milky Way. It shines with the brilliance of 1 million suns. AG Carinae is a few million years old and resides 20,000 light-years away. This giant star is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction. The star is surrounded by an expanding shell of gas and dust—a nebula—that is shaped by the powerful winds emanating from the star. The nebula is about five light-years wide, equal to the distance from here to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
AG Carinae is formally classified as a Luminous Blue Variable because it is hot (blue), very luminous, and variable. Such stars are quite rare because there are not many stars that are so massive. Luminous Blue Variable stars continuously lose mass in the final stages of their life, during which a significant amount of stellar material is ejected into the surrounding interstellar space, until enough mass has been lost that the star has reached a stable state.
AG Carinae is surrounded by a spectacular nebula, formed by material ejected by the star during several of its past outbursts. The nebula is approximately 10,000 years old, and the observed velocity of the gas is approximately 70 kilometers per second. While this nebula looks like a ring, it is in fact a hollow shell rich in gas and dust, the center of which has been cleared by the powerful stellar wind travelling at roughly 200 kilometers per second. The gas (composed mostly of ionised hydrogen and nitrogen) is visible to us in these images as a thick bright red ring, which appears doubled in places—possibly the result of several outbursts colliding into each other. The dust, here visible in blue, has formed in clumps, bubbles and filaments that are shaped by the stellar wind.
Scientists who observed the star and its surrounding nebula note that the ring is not perfectly spherical; it appears to have a bipolar symmetry, indicating that the mechanism producing the outburst may have been caused by the presence of a disc in the center, or that the star is not alone but might have a companion (known as a binary star). An alternative and simpler theory is that the star rotates very fast (as many massive stars have been found to do).
This video showcases the 31st anniversary image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Flight to Maisie's Galaxy: 3D Time Travel| James Webb Space Telescope
This 3D visualization portrays about 5,000 galaxies within a small portion of the CEERS (Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science) Survey, which gathered data from a region known as the Extended Groth Strip. As the camera flies away from our viewpoint, each second amounts to traveling 200 million light-years into the data set, and seeing 200 million years further into the past. The appearances of the galaxies change, reflecting the fact that more distant objects are seen at earlier times in the universe, when galaxies were less developed. The video ends at Maisie’s Galaxy, which formed only 390 million years after the big bang, or about 13.4 billion years ago.
Video Credits: Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
Visualization:
Frank Summers (STScI), Greg Bacon (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Leah Hustak (STScI), Joseph Olmsted (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Science:
Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin), Rebecca Larson (RIT), Micaela Bagley (UT Austin)
Duration: 1 minute, 16 seconds Release Date: July 10, 2023
AG Carinae (AG Car) is a star in the constellation Carina. It is classified as a luminous blue variable (LBV) and is one of the most luminous stars in the Milky Way. It shines with the brilliance of 1 million suns. AG Carinae is a few million years old and resides 20,000 light-years away. This giant star is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction. The star is surrounded by an expanding shell of gas and dust—a nebula—that is shaped by the powerful winds emanating from the star. The nebula is about five light-years wide, equal to the distance from here to our nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
AG Carinae is formally classified as a Luminous Blue Variable because it is hot (blue), very luminous, and variable. Such stars are quite rare because there are not many stars that are so massive. Luminous Blue Variable stars continuously lose mass in the final stages of their life, during which a significant amount of stellar material is ejected into the surrounding interstellar space, until enough mass has been lost that the star has reached a stable state.
AG Carinae is surrounded by a spectacular nebula, formed by material ejected by the star during several of its past outbursts. The nebula is approximately 10,000 years old, and the observed velocity of the gas is approximately 70 kilometers per second. While this nebula looks like a ring, it is in fact a hollow shell rich in gas and dust, the center of which has been cleared by the powerful stellar wind travelling at roughly 200 kilometers per second. The gas (composed mostly of ionised hydrogen and nitrogen) is visible to us in these images as a thick bright red ring, which appears doubled in places—possibly the result of several outbursts colliding into each other. The dust, here visible in blue, has formed in clumps, bubbles and filaments that are shaped by the stellar wind.
Scientists who observed the star and its surrounding nebula note that the ring is not perfectly spherical; it appears to have a bipolar symmetry, indicating that the mechanism producing the outburst may have been caused by the presence of a disc in the center, or that the star is not alone but might have a companion (known as a binary star). An alternative and simpler theory is that the star rotates very fast (as many massive stars have been found to do).
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble and NASA, A. Nota, C. Britt
The Science of Snow: Digging for Data | NASA Goddard
It takes a lot of field work in challenging conditions to gather important snow data. This is the story of NASA’s last SnowEx campaign and those who participated in it. In March 2023, scientists traveled to research sites in the northern tundra and in Fairbanks, Alaska. Ground crews looked to validate data collected from airborne instruments, while the flight crews continued collecting snow data in order to see what instruments best measure snow globally.
The goal for SnowEx is to determine the best remote-sensing techniques for a potential future satellite. Snow data is extremely important and can tell us things like how much spring runoff can be expected, which is vital for water resource management.
Distant Galaxy Cluster eMACS J1353.7+4329: "The Monster Mash" | Hubble
The NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope has captured a monster in the making in this observation of the exceptional galaxy cluster eMACS J1353.7+4329, which lies about eight billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. This disturbed collection of at least two galaxy clusters is in the process of merging together to create a cosmic monster, a single gargantuan cluster acting as a gravitational lens.
Image Description: A cluster of elliptical galaxies, visible as a dense crowd of oval shapes, each glowing orange around a bright core. Right of the largest, central galaxy, a background galaxy is stretched into two connected, thin arcs by the cluster’s gravity. Various other galaxies are dotted all around, a few being small spirals. A bright star with four long spikes stands out at the right.
Gravitational lensing is a dramatic example of Einstein’s general theory of relativity in action. A celestial body such as a galaxy cluster is sufficiently massive to distort spacetime, which causes the path of light around the object to be visibly bent as if by a vast lens. Gravitational lensing can also magnify distant objects, allowing astronomers to observe objects that would otherwise be too faint and too far away to be detected. It can also distort the images of background galaxies, turning them into streaks of light. The first hints of gravitational lensing are already visible in this image as bright arcs which mingle with the throng of galaxies in eMACS J1353.7+4329.
The data in this image are drawn from an observing proposal called Monsters in the Making, which used two of Hubble’s instruments to observe five exceptional galaxy clusters at multiple wavelengths. These multi-wavelength observations were made possible by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)/Hubble & NASA, H. Ebeling
This panoramic fulldome video shows a detailed view into the spectacular Eta Carinae Nebula. The area shown is that around one of the most massive and most luminous stars known, the Wolf-Rayet star WR 22, as well as the surroundings of the unique star Eta Carinae.
The images shown were obtained by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Note: The full dome video display format is designed for projection systems in planetariums.
Zoom into The Eta Carinae Nebula & Supergiant Star | ESO
This animation zooms in on the massive star Eta Carinae in the European Southern Observatory/WFI image of the Eta Carinae Nebula.
The Eta Carinae Nebula is located in the Carina–Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, approximately 8,500 light-years from Earth.
Within the Carina Nebula is the supergiant star Eta Carinae. It has a mass about 100 times greater than our Sun. It is an excellent candidate for a future supernova.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO), Digitized Sky Survey 2 and A. Fujii
Pan over The Eta Carinae Nebula | European Southern Observatory
Color-composite image of the Eta Carinae Nebula, revealing exquisite details in the stars and dust of the region. Several well known astronomical objects can be seen in this wide field image. To the bottom left is one of the most impressive binary stars in the Universe, Eta Carinae, with the famous Keyhole Nebula just adjacent to the star. The collection of very bright, young stars above and to the right of Eta Carinae is the open star cluster Trumpler 14. A second open star cluster, Collinder 228 is also seen in the image, just below Eta Carinae.
This spectacular panoramic view combines an image of the field around the Wolf–Rayet star WR 22 in the Eta Carinae Nebula (right) with a picture of the region around the unique star Eta Carinae in the heart of the nebula (left). The picture was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
The Eta Carinae Nebula above ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile
The Eta Carinae Nebula, a bright emission nebula, gives off a fiery red glow above Cerro Paranal and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) platform. This nebula is home to the Eta Carinae star system, stars with a combined luminosity five million times higher than the Sun. The Eta Carinae Nebula is located in the Carina–Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, approximately 8,500 light-years from Earth.
The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile.
Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/B. Tafreshi (twanight.org)
The Magnificent Eta Carinae Nebula | European Southern Observatory
The Eta Carinae Nebula, located in the Carina constellation, lights up in bright red in this image taken at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory. This nebula is home to the Eta Carinae star system, stars with a combined luminosity five million times higher than the Sun.
The Eta Carinae Nebula is located in the Carina–Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, approximately 8,500 light-years from Earth.
Credit: Zdeněk Bardon/European Southern Observatory (ESO)
