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Citizen Scientist Project Finds Thousands of ‘Star Bubbles’

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Remember when you were a kid and blowing bubbles was such great fun? Well, stars kind of do that too. The “bubbles” are partial or complete rings of dust and gas that occur around young stars in active star-forming regions, known as stellar nurseries. So far, over 5,000 bubbles have been found, but there are many more out there awaiting discovery. Now there is a project that you can take part in yourself, to help find more of these intriguing objects.

The Milky Way Project, part of Zooniverse, has been cataloguing these cosmic bubbles thanks to assistance from the public, or “citizen scientists” – anyone can help by examining images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, specifically the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer Galactic Plane Survey (MIPSGAL).

They have been seen before, but now the task is to find as many as possible in the newer, high-resolution images from Spitzer. A previous catalogue of star bubbles in 2007 listed 269 of them. Four other researchers had found about 600 of them in 2006. Now they are being found by the thousands. As of now, the new catalogue lists 5,106 bubbles, after looking at almost half a million images so far. As it turns out, humans are more skilled at identifying them in the images than a computer algorithm would be. People are better at pattern recognition and then making a judgment based on the data as to what actually is a bubble and what isn’t.

The bubbles form around hot, young massive stars where it is thought that the intense light being emitted causes a shock wave, blowing out a space, or bubble, in the surrounding gas and dust.

Eli Bressert, of the European Southern Observatory and Milky Way Project team member, stated that our galaxy “is basically like champagne, there are so many bubbles.” He adds, “We thought we were going to be able to answer a lot of questions, but it’s going to be bringing us way more questions than answers right now. This is really starting something new in astronomy that we haven’t been able to do.”

There are currently about 35,000 volunteers in the project; if you would like to take part, you can go to The Milky Way Project for more information.

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Cooking Up Stars In Cygnus X

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Thanks to the incredible infra-red imagery of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, we’re able to take a look into a tortured region of star formation. Infrared light in this image has been color-coded according to wavelength. Light of 3.6 microns is blue, 4.5-micron light is blue-green, 8.0-micron light is green, and 24-micron light is red. The data was taken before the Spitzer mission ran out of its coolant in 2009, and began its “warm” mission. This image reveals one of the most active and tumultuous areas of the Milky Way – Cygnus X. Located some 4,500 light years away, the violent-appearing dust cloud holds thousands of massive stars and even more of moderate size. It is literally “star soup”…

“Spitzer captured the range of activities happening in this violent cloud of stellar birth,” said Joseph Hora of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who presented the results today at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas. “We see bubbles carved out by massive stars, pillars of new stars, dark filaments lined with stellar embryos and more.”

According to popular theory, stars are created in regions similar to Cygnus X. As their lives progress, they drift away from each other and it is surmised the Sun once belonged to a stellar association formed in a slightly less extreme environment. In regions like Cygnus X, the dust clouds are characterized with deformations caused by stellar winds and high radiation. The massive stars literally shred the clouds that birth them. This action can stop other stars from forming… and also cause the rise of others.

“One of the questions we want to answer is how such a violent process can lead to both the death and birth of new stars,” said Sean Carey, a team member from NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “We still don’t know exactly how stars form in such disruptive environments.”

Thanks to Spitzer’s infra-red data, scientists are now able to paint a clearer picture of what happens in dusty complexes. It allows astronomers to peer behind the veil where embryonic stars were once hidden – and highlights areas like pillars where forming stars pop out inside their cavities. Another revelation is dark filaments of dust, where embedded stars make their home. It is visions like this that has scientists asking questions… Questions such as how filaments and pillars could be related.

“We have evidence that the massive stars are triggering the birth of new ones in the dark filaments, in addition to the pillars, but we still have more work to do,” said Hora.

Original Story Source: NASA Spitzer News Release.

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We Are Stardust… We Are Cold Then

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When we think of stars, we might think of their building blocks as white hot… But that’s not particularly the case.The very “stuff” that creates a sun is cold dust and in this combined image produced by the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions; and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, we’re taking an even more incredible look into the environment which forms stars. This new image peers into the dusty arena of both the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – just two of our galactic neighbors.

Through the infra-red eyes of the Herschel-Spitzer observation, the Large Magellanic Cloud would almost appear to look like a gigantic fireball. Here light-years long bands of dust permeate the galaxy with blazing fields of star formation seen in the center, center-left and top right (the brightest center-left region is called 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula. The Small Magellanic Cloud is much more disturbed looking. Here we see a huge filament of dust to the left – known as the galaxy’s “wing” – and, to the right, a deep bar of star formation.

This new image shows the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy in infrared light from the Herschel Space Observatory a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI

What makes these images very unique is that they are indicators of temperature within the Magellanic Clouds. The cool, red areas are where star formation has ceased or is at its earliest stages. Warm areas are indicative of new stars blooming to life and heating the dust around them. “Coolest areas and objects appear in red, corresponding to infrared light taken up by Herschel’s Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver at 250 microns, or millionths of a meter. Herschel’s Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer fills out the mid-temperature bands, shown in green, at 100 and 160 microns.” says the research team. “The warmest spots appear in blue, courtesy of 24- and 70-micron data from Spitzer.”

Both the LMC and SMC are the two largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way and are cataloged as dwarf galaxies. While they are large in their own right, this pair contains fewer essential star-forming elements such as hydrogen and helium – slowing the rate of star growth. Although star formation is generally considered to have reached its apex some 10 billion years ago, some galaxies were left with less basic materials than others.

“Studying these galaxies offers us the best opportunity to study star formation outside of the Milky Way,” said Margaret Meixner, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md., and principal investigator for the mapping project. “Star formation affects the evolution of galaxies, so we hope understanding the story of these stars will answer questions about galactic life cycles.”

Original Story Source: NASA/Herschel News.

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A Star-Making Blob from the Cosmic Dawn

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Looking back in time with some of our best telescopes, astronomers have found one of the most distant and oldest galaxies. The big surprise about this blob-shaped galaxy, named GN-108036, is how exceptionally bright it is, even though its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us. This means that back in its heyday – which astronomers estimate at about 750 million years after the Big Bang — it was generating an exceptionally large amount of stars in the “cosmic dawn,” the early days of the Universe.

“The high rate of star formation found for GN-108036 implies that it was rapidly building up its mass some 750 million years after the Big Bang, when the Universe was only about five percent of its present age,” said Bahram Mobasher, from the University of California, Riverside. “This was therefore a likely ancestor of massive and evolved galaxies seen today.”


An international team of astronomers, led by Masami Ouchi of the University of Tokyo, Japan, first identified the remote galaxy after scanning a large patch of sky with the Subaru Telescope atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Its great distance was then confirmed with the W.M. Keck Observatory, also on Mauna Kea. Then, infrared observations from the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes were crucial for measuring the galaxy’s star-formation activity.

“We checked our results on three different occasions over two years, and each time confirmed the previous measurement,” said Yoshiaki Ono, also from the of the University of Tokyo.

Astronomers were surprised to see such a large burst of star formation because the galaxy is so small and from such an early cosmic era. Back when galaxies were first forming, in the first few hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, they were much smaller than they are today, having yet to bulk up in mass.

The team says the galaxy’s star production rate is equivalent to about 100 suns per year. For reference, our Milky Way galaxy is about five times larger and 100 times more massive than GN-108036, but makes roughly 30 times fewer stars per year.

Astronomers refer to the object’s distance by a number called its “redshift,” which relates to how much its light has stretched to longer, redder wavelengths due to the expansion of the universe. Objects with larger redshifts are farther away and are seen further back in time. GN-108036 has a redshift of 7.2. Only a handful of galaxies have confirmed redshifts greater than 7, and only two of these have been reported to be more distant than GN-108036.

About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, a decrease in the temperature of the Universe caused hydrogen atoms to permeate the cosmos and form a thick fog that was opaque to ultraviolet light, creating what astronomers call the cosmic dark ages.

“It ended when gas clouds of neutral hydrogen collapsed to generate stars, forming the first galaxies, which probably radiated high-energy photons and reionized the Universe,” Mobasher said. “Vigorous galaxies like GN-108036 may well have contributed to the reionization process, which is responsible for the transparency of the Universe today.”

“The discovery is surprising because previous surveys had not found galaxies this bright so early in the history of the universe,” said Mark Dickinson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz. “Perhaps those surveys were just too small to find galaxies like GN-108036. It may be a special, rare object that we just happened to catch during an extreme burst of star formation.”

Sources: Science Paper by: Y. Ono et al., Subaru , Spitzer Hubble

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In The Dragonfish’s Mouth – The Next Generation Of “SuperStars”

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At the University of Toronto, a trio of astronomers have been fishing – fishing for a copious catch of young, supermassive stars. What they caught was unprecedented… Hundreds of thousands of stars with several hundreds of these being the most massive kind. They hauled in blue stars dozens of times heavier than the Sun, with light so intense it ate its way through the gas that created it. All that’s left is the hollow egg-shell… A shell that measures a hundred light years across.

Their work will be published in the December 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, but the team isn’t stopping there. The next catch is waiting. “By studying these supermassive stars and the shell surrounding them, we hope to learn more about how energy is transmitted in such extreme environments,” says Mubdi Rahman, a PhD candidate in the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. Rahman led the team, along with supervisors, Professors Dae-Sik Moon and Christopher Matzner.

Is the discovery of a huge factory for massive stars new? No. Astronomers have picked them up in other galaxies, but the distance didn’t allow for a clear picture – even when combined with data from other telescopes. “This time, the massive stars are right here in our galaxy, and we can even count them individually,” Rahman says.

However, studying this bright stellar cache isn’t going to be an easy task. Since they are located some 30,000 light years away, the measurements will be extremely labor intensive due to intervening gas and dust. Their light is absorbed, which makes the most luminous of them seem to be smaller and closer. To make matters worse, the fainter stars don’t show up at all. “All this dust made it difficult for us to figure out what type of stars they are,” Rahman says. “These stars are incredibly bright, yet, they’re very hard to see.”

By employing the New Technology Telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the researchers gathered as much light as possible from a small collection of stars. From this point, they calculated the amount of light each star emitted across the spectrum to determine how many were massive. At least twelve were of the highest order, with a few measuring out to be around a hundred times more massive than the Sun. Before researching the area with a ground-based telescope, Rahman used the WMAP satellite to study the microwave band. There he encountered the glow of the heated gas shell. Then it was Spitzer time… and the imaging began in infra-red.

Once the photos came back the picture was clear… Rahman noticed the stellar egg-shell had a striking resemblance to Peter Shearer’s illustration “The Dragonfish”. And indeed it does look like a mythical creature! With just a bit of imagination you can see a tooth-filled mouth, eyes and even a fin. The interior of the mouth is where the gas has been expelled by the stellar light and propelled forward to form the shell. Not a sight you’d want to encounter on a dark night… Or maybe you would!

“We were able to see the effect of the stars on their surroundings before seeing the stars directly,” Rahman says. This strange heat signature would almost be like watching a face lit by a fire without being able to see the fueling source. Just as red coals are cooler than blue flame, gas behaves the same way in color – with much of it in the infra-red end of the spectrum and only visible to the correct instrumentation. At the other end of the equation are the giant stars which emit in ultra-violet and remain invisible in this type of image. “But we had to make sure what was at the heart of the shell,” Rahman says.

With the positive identification of several massive stars, the team knew they would expire quickly in astronomical terms. “Still, if you thought the inside of the shell was empty, think again,” explains Rahman. For every few hundred superstars, thousands of ordinary stars like the Sun also exist in this region. When the massive ones go supernova, they’ll release metals and heavy atoms which – in turn – may create solar nebulae around the less dramatic stars. This means they could eventually form solar systems of their own

“There may be newer stars already forming in the eyes of the Dragonfish,” Rahman says. Because some areas of the shell appear brighter, researchers surmise the gases contained there are possibly compressing enough to ignite new stars – with enough to go around for many more. However, when there’s no mass or gravity to hold them captive, it would seem they want to fly the nest. “We’ve found a rebel in the group, a runaway star escaping from the group at high speed,” Rahman says. “We think the group is no longer tied together by gravity: however, how the association will fly apart is something we still don’t understand well.”

Original Story Source: In The Dragonfish’s Mouth: The Next Generation Of Superstars To Stir Up Our Galaxy.

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Astronomers Discover Ancient ‘Ultra-Red’ Galaxies

[/caption]A team of astronomers, led by Jiasheng Huang (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) using the Spitzer Space Telescope, have discovered four ‘Ultra-Red’ galaxies that formed when our Universe was about a billion years old. Huang and his team used several computer models in an attempt to understand why these galaxies appear so red, stating, “We’ve had to go to extremes to get the models to match our observations.”

The results of Huang’s research were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal

Using the Spitzer Space Telescope helped make the discovery possible, as it is more sensitive to infrared light than other space telescopes such as the Hubble. The newly discovered galaxies are sixty times brighter in the infrared than they are at the longest/reddest wavelengths HST can detect.

What processes are at work to create these extremely red objects, and why are they of interest to astronomers?

There are several reasons a galaxy could be reddened. For starters, extremely distant galaxies can have their light “redshifted” due to the expansion of the universe. If a galaxy contains large amounts of dust, it will also appear redder than a galaxy with less dust. Lastly, older galaxies will tend to be redder, due to a higher concentration of old, red stars and less younger bluer stars.

According to the paper, Huang and his team created three models to determine why these galaxies appear so red. Of their models, the one which suggests an old stellar population is currently the best fit to the observations. Supporting this conclusion, co-author Giovanni Fazio stated, “Hubble has shown us some of the first protogalaxies that formed, but nothing that looks like this. In a sense, these galaxies might be a ‘missing link’ in galactic evolution”.

Studying these extremely distant galaxies helps provide astronomers with a better understanding of the early universe, specifically how early galaxies formed and what conditions were present when some of the first stars were created. The next step in understanding these “ERO” galaxies is to obtain an accurate redshift for the galaxies, by using more powerful telescopes such as the Large Millimeter Telescope or Atacama Large Millimeter Array.

Huang and his team have plans to search for more galaxies similar to the four recently discovered by his team. Huang’s co-author Giovanni Fazio adds, “There’s evidence for others in other regions of the sky. We’ll analyze more Spitzer and Hubble observations to track them down.”

If you’d like to learn more, you can access the full paper (via arXiv.org) at: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.4129v1

Source: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics press release , arxiv.org

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Tarantula Nebula Is Growing!

Don’t like spiders? Well, here’s one that will grow on you! Located about 160,000 light years in the web of the Large Magellanic Cloud, star-forming region 30 Doradus is best known as the “Tarantula Nebula”. But don’t let it “bug” you… this space-born arachnid is home to giant stars whose intense radiation causes stellar winds to blast through surrounding gases to give us an incredible view!

When seen through the eyes of the Chandra X-ray Observatory, these huge shockwaves of x-ray energy heat the encompassing gaseous environment up to multi-millions of degrees and show up as blue. The supernovae detonations blast their way outward… gouging out “bubbles” in the cooler gas and dust. They show up hued as orange when observed through infra-red emissions and recorded by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

What’s so special about the Tarantula? Because it is so close, it’s a prime candidate for studying an active HII region. This stellar nursery is the largest in our Local Group and a perfect laboratory for monitoring stellar evolution. Right now astronomers are intensely interested in what causes growth on such a large scale – and their curent findings show it doesn’t have anything to do with pressure and radiation from the massive stars. However, an earlier study had opposing conclusions when it came to 30 Doradus’ central regions. By employing the Chandra Observatory observations, we may just find different opinions!

“Observations show that star formation is an inefficient and slow process. This result can be attributed to the injection of energy and momentum by stars that prevents free-fall collapse of molecular clouds. The mechanism of this stellar feedback is debated theoretically; possible sources of pressure include the classical warm H II gas, the hot gas generated by shock heating from stellar winds and supernovae, direct radiation of stars, and the dust-processed radiation field trapped inside the H II shell.” says Laura Lopez (et al). “By contrast, the dust-processed radiation pressure and hot gas pressure are generally weak and not dynamically important, although the hot gas pressure may have played a more significant role at early times.”

Original Story Source: Chandra News Release. For Further Reading: What Drives the Expansion of Giant H II Regions?: A Study of Stellar Feedback in 30 Doradus.

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Failed Star Is One Cool Companion

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Astronomers have located a planet-like star that’s barely warmer than a balmy summer day on Earth… it’s literally the coldest object ever directly imaged outside of our solar system!

WD 0806-661 B is a brown “Y dwarf” star that’s a member of a binary pair. Its companion is a much hotter white dwarf, the remains of a Sun-like star that has shed its outer layers. The pair is located about 63 light-years away, which is pretty close to us as stars go. The stars were identified by a team led by Penn State Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kevin Luhman using images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Two infrared images taken in 2004 and 2009 were overlaid on top of each other and show the stars moving in tandem, indicating a shared orbit.

These two infrared images were taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2004 and 2009. They show a faint object moving through space together with a white dwarf. Credit: Kevin Luhman, Penn State University, October 2011. (Click to play.)

Of course, locating the stars wasn’t quite as easy as that. To find this stellar duo Luhman and his team searched through over six hundred images of stars located near our solar system taken years apart, looking for any shifting position as a pair.

The use of infrared imaging allowed the team to locate a dim brown dwarf star like WD 0806-661 B, which emits little visible light but shines brightly in infrared. (Even though brown dwarfs are extremely cool for stars they are still much warmer than the surrounding space. And, for the record, brown dwarfs are not actually brown.) Measurements estimate the temperature of WD 0806-661 B to be in the range of about 80 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit (26 to 54 degrees C, or 300 – 345 K)… literally body temperature!

“Essentially, what we have found is a very small star with an atmospheric temperature about cool as the Earth’s.”

– Kevin Luhman, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Penn State

Six to nine times the mass of Jupiter, WD 0806-661 B is more like a planet than a star. It never accumulated enough mass to ignite thermonuclear reactions and thus more resembles a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. But its origins are most likely star-like, as its distance from its white dwarf companion – about 2,500 astronomical units – indicates that it developed on its own rather than forming from the other star’s disc.

There is a small chance, though, that it did form as a planet and gradually migrated out to its current distance. More research will help determine whether this may have been the case.

Brown dwarfs, first discovered in 1995, are valuable research targets because they are the next best thing to studying cool atmospheres on planets outside our solar system. Scientists keep trying to locate new record-holders for the coldest brown dwarfs, and with the discovery of WD 0806-661 B Luhman’s team has done just that!

A paper covering the team’s findings will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. Other authors of the paper include Ivo Labbé, Andrew J. Monson and Eric Persson of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, Calif.; Didier Saumon of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico; Mark S. Marley of the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.; and John J. Bochanski also of The Pennsylvania State University.

Read more on the Penn State science site here.

 

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Evidence of a Late Heavy Bombardment Occuring in Another Solar System

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Planetary scientists have not been able to agree that a turbulent period in our solar system’s history called the Late Heavy Bombardment actually occurred. But now, using observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have detected activity resembling a similar type of event where icy bodies from the outer solar system are possibly pummeling rocky worlds closer to the star. This is the first time such activity has been seen in another planetary system.

“Where the comets are hitting the rocky bodies is in the habitable zone around this star, so not only are life-forming materials possibly being delivered to rocky worlds, but also in the right place for life as we know it to grow,” said Carey Lisse, senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “This is similar to what happened to our own solar system during the Late Heavy Bombardment.”

Lisse spoke to journalists in a conference call from the Signposts of Planets meeting taking place at Goddard Space Flight Center this week.

Spitzer observations showed a band of dust around the nearby, naked-eye-visible star called Eta Corvi, located in the constellation Corvus in northern sky. Within the band of warm dust, Spitzer’s infrared detectors saw the chemical fingerprints of water ice, organics and rock, which strongly matches the contents of an obliterated giant comet, suggesting a collision took place between a planet and one or more comets. Also detected was evidence for flash-frozen rocks, nanodiamonds and amorphous silica.

This dust is located 3 AU away from Eta Corvi, which is the “habitable zone” around that star, and is close enough to the star that Earth-like worlds could exist. Lisse said although it hasn’t been confirmed, researchers think there is a Neptune-like world and at least two other planets in this system. A bright, icy Kuiper Belt-like region located 3-4 times farther out than our own Kuiper Belt was discovered around Eta Corvi in 2005.

“This is very possibly a planet-rich system,” Lisse said.

The light signature emitted by the dust around Eta Corvi also resembles meteorites found on Earth. “We see a match between dust around Eta Corvi and the Almahata Sitta meteorites, which fell to Earth in Sudan in 2008,” Llisse said. “We can argue that the material around Eta Covi is rich in carbon and water, things that help life grow on Earth.”

The Eta Corvi system is approximately one billion years old, which the research team considers about the right age for such a bombardment.

No asteroidal dust was found in the disk around Eta Corvi.

“Asteroidal dust would look like it had been heated, and chemically and physically altered, and most of the water and carbon would be gone,” Lisse said. “This dust is very rich in water and carbon and the rocky components are very primitive and un-altered.”

Most planetary formation theories can’t account for such an intense period of bombardment in our own solar system so late in its history, but the Nice Model proposed in 2005 suggests the Late Heavy Bombardment was triggered when the giant planets in our solar system— which formed in a more compact configuration – rapidly migrated away from each other (and their orbital separations all increased), and a disk of small asteroids and comets that lay outside the orbits of the planets was destabilized, causing a sudden massive delivery of asteroids and comets to the inner solar system. The barrage scarred the Moon and produced large amounts of dust.

“We can see the process of this happening at Eta Corvi and can learn more about our own solar system, since we can’t go back in time,” Lisse said. “It’s very possible that the rain of comets and Kuiper Belt Objects brought life to Earth.”

Lisse and his team are not sure if one big comet or lots of smaller comets are pummeling the inner solar system. “It is probably many bodies, but we only see the effects of the largest ones,” he said.

Could this be an indication that a Late Heavy Bombardment happens in many solar systems? “It’s not clear whether this is an atypical system, but we do know of one other possible system where it could be happening,” Lisse said in response to the question posed by Universe Today. “I think this is a rare event, which might mean that life is rare if you need a Late Heavy Bombardment for life to happen.”

Lisse said the reason they studied this star was the earlier detection of the Kuiper Belt-like region around Eta Corvi. “We knew it was an exceptional system from previous infrared sky surveys and the large bright Kuiper Belt was just the tip of the iceberg,” Lisse said. “This system was shouting, ‘I’m something extraordinary, come figure out my mystery!”

Paper: Spitzer Evidence for a Late Heavy Bombardment and the Formation of Urelites in Eta Corvi at ~1 Gyr

Source: Signposts of Planets conference call, JPL Press release

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Welcome To The Heart Of The Milky Way…

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When it comes to my job, I see a lot of astrophotography. I’ve contemplated innumerable nebulae, viewed myriad galaxies and dreamed over abounding star clusters. Each photo is a work of art in its own right – where the palette is a computer program and the canvas is a screen. These creations are stunning, showing us the true nature of what lay just beyond the visible perception of human sight. However, there are very few that when printed seem to have life of their own. This snapshot in time is one of them…

When this image was originally revealed on November 10, 2009, it was meant to commemorate Galileo’s 400th anniversary of turning a telescope towards the heavens. At the time, 150 prints were released to libraries, schools, planetariums, nature centers and observatories across the country. These massive six feet by three feet prints are a composite of a near-infrared view from the Hubble Space Telescope, an infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope and an X-ray view from the Chandra X-ray Observatory into one multi-wavelength picture.

What no one could prepare you for is the emotional impact such an image could have on you… If only you let it.

In this revelation of the heart of the Milky Way you’ll witness star birth – and death. You’ll travel along the effects of a supermassive black hole nearly four million times more massive than our Sun. You’ll walk into a complex web weaved from glowing gas clouds, dripping with globules, filaments and dark, dusty cocoons where neophyte stars await their turn to emerge. You’ll be swept away on the glowing blue stellar winds of X-ray light and dropped into the well of infra-red. You’ll feel yourself uplifted… Pulled into the “pillars of creation”. You’ll fly along hundreds of thousands of stars that could never be seen in visible light.

In short, you can’t walk away untouched.

Each telescope's contribution is presented in a different color: Yellow represents the near-infrared observations of Hubble. They outline the energetic regions where stars are being born as well as reveal hundreds of thousands of stars. Red represents the infrared observations of Spitzer. The radiation and winds from stars create glowing dust clouds that exhibit complex structures from compact, spherical globules to long, stringy filaments. Blue and violet represent the X-ray observations of Chandra. X-rays are emitted by gas heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and by outflows from the supermassive black hole in the galaxy's center. The bright blue blob on the left side is emission from a double star system containing either a neutron star or a black hole. Credit: NASA, ESA, SSC, CXC, and STScI

To see the full size image here on your screen is one thing, to see it accompanied by the individuals that make up the three by four feet composite is nice… But it’s the difference between looking up an image of the Mona Lisa and looking at the Mona Lisa as it hangs in the art gallery. I strongly urge you to investigate these NASA’s Great Observatories – Galactic Center Image Locations and take the time to visit in person.

You won’t regret the experience.

My many thanks go to Rich Ruggles of Astronomy 1 On 1 for opening my eyes to all the joy, wonder and mystery all over again.