Where In The Universe Challenge #15

By Nancy Atkinson - August 7, 2008 at 3:39 PM UTC | Observing
where-in-the-universe-15.jpg

Betcha thought I forgot about this week's "Where In the Universe" challenge. Sorry its late, but summer is the time for vacations and partaking in hobbies like rock hunting and late night stargazing. Here's an image that might provide the opportunity for both. That's just a little hint for this week's challenge. Your mission, should you choose to accept, is to name the location in the universe this image was taken, or maybe in this instance, what this is an image of. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image (that might be the easy part this week). No peeking below until you make your guess. And to be honest, I should say that this image is part of a larger image, which can be seen below.

[caption id="attachment_16560" align="alignnone" width="580" caption="image credit: Hubble Space Telescope"]

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In this unusual image, the Hubble Space Telescope captures a rare view of the celestial equivalent of a geode -- a gas cavity carved by the stellar wind and intense ultraviolet radiation from a hot young star. The object, called N44F, is being inflated by a torrent of fast-moving particles --a stellar wind --from an exceptionally hot star once buried inside a cold dense cloud. N44F is located about 160,000 light-years in our neighboring dwarf galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud, in the direction of the southern constellation Dorado.

Real geodes are baseball-sized, hollow rocks that start out as bubbles in volcanic or sedimentary rock. Only when these geodes are split in half by a geologist, do we get a chance to appreciate the inside of the rock cavity that is lined with crystals. In the case of Hubble's 35 light-year diameter "celestial geode" the transparency of its bubble-like cavity of interstellar gas and dust reveals the treasures of its interior.

Compared with our Sun, the central star in N44F is ejecting more than a 100 million times more mass per second. The hurricane of particles moves much faster at about 4 million miles per hour (7 million kilometers per hour), as opposed to about 0.9 million miles per hour (1.5 million kilometers per hour) for our Sun. Because the bright central star does not exist in empty space but is surrounded by an envelope of gas, the stellar wind collides with this gas, pushing it out, like a snowplow. This forms a bubble, whose striking structure is clearly visible in the crisp Hubble image.

How'd everyone do?

Find the original image

here.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com