Stars & Nebulae
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| Peeking at a Planet (October 25, 2009) |
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Hubble Space Telescope captured some of the first pictures of a planet in another star system by monitoring Fomalhaut for several years. A small dot of light, which moved from 2004 to 2006 (inset), is a giant planet in a distant orbit around the planet. Fomalhaut is surrounded by a wide, thick ring of dust, which may have given birth to more planets. [NASA/ESA/P.Kalas (UC-Berkeley)] For more information, see our October 25 program. |
| Veiling the Pleiades (October 19, 2009) |
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A thick cloud of dust around the Pleiades star cluster glows brightly in this false-color infrared image from Spitzer Space Telescope. The stars are lighting up the dust cloud, known as the Merope Nebula, as they pass through it. The stars and nebula are unrelated. [NASA/JPL/Caltech] For more information, see our October 19 episode. |
| Cool Galaxy (October 5, 2009) |
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Knots and filaments of gas and dust are giving birth to new stars in this busy region of the Milky Way, which is in the Southern Cross, hundreds of light-years from Earth. Europe's Herschel space observatory snapped this infrared image on September 3, shortly after it completed its orbital checkout. Although the image is colored in shades of red, yellow, and white, this region is actually fairly cold. Warmer regions glow more brightly. [ESA/PACS Consortium] |
| Fly Like an Eagle (September 6, 2009) |
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The constellation Aquila, the eagle, soars high across the southern sky on September nights. Its brightest star, Altair, stands high in the south or southeast at nightfall. The constellation is home to many interesting stars, including one that expands and contracts like a beating heart (Eta Aquilae), and another that a derelict spacecraft will pass in several million years. [Tim Jones] For more information, see our September 8 program. |
| A Wispy Swan (August 25, 2009) |
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Filaments of gas and dust fill part of the constellation Cygnus, the swan, in this infrared view from a space-based telescope. The bright, dense clumps mark regions where new stars are being born. [MSX] For more information, see our August 26 program. |
| Staring Into Space (August 19, 2009) |
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The Kepler spacecraft is staring at a region of space between two of the brightest stars in the summer sky, Vega and Deneb. The orbiting telescope is monitoring 100,000 stars for evidence of Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars. Such planets are considered the most likely home for Earth-like life. Kepler's search area, which is near the edge of the glowing band of the Milky Way, is denoted by the white boxes. [Carter Roberts/NASA] For more information, see our August 19 program. |
| Planetary Smash-Up (August 13, 2009) |
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A body about the size of the Moon rams into another about the size of Mercury in this concept of a collision in another star system. Spitzer Space Telescope detected evidence of such a collision in the system known as HD 172555, which is about 100 light-years away. The collision, which probably took place a few thousand years ago, left behind a ring of dust which glows brightly in infrared wavelengths. [NASA/JPL/Caltech] |
| Crowded Neighborhood (July 30, 2009) |
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Thousands of stars are packed tightly in the central regions of M4, one of the closest globular clusters to Earth. It is more than 6,000 light-years away. Most of its stars are old and relatively faint. The cluster contains so many stars, however, that it is faintly visible to the unaided eye as a fuzzy patch of light near Antares, the bright orange star that marks the heart of Scorpius. [NOAO/AURA/NSF] For more information, see our July 30 program. |
| Colorful Nursery (July 9, 2009) |
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A "nursery" of hundreds of newborn stars sculpts and illuminates the remaining gas and dust in this recent view from the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope in Chile. The nursery is known as M17, the Omega Nebula. It's about 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. It's one of the youngest stellar nurseries in the galaxy: None of its stars is more than one million years old, and more stars are continuing to take shape even today. [ESO] |
| Hard Labor (June 30, 2009) |
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A giant star at the center of the Trifid Nebula is causing the vast cloud of gas and dust around it to fracture into smaller pockets, which are collapsing to form new stars. Lanes of dark dust cut across the nebula, which is colored pink by the glow of hydrogen atoms and blue by reflected starlight. The nebula is in the southern constellation Sagittarius, which is in good view on summer evenings. [Todd Boroson/NOAO/AURA/NSF] For more information, see our June 30 program. |
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