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If your kiddos are getting tired of boring old regular playdough colors, then try adding some sparkles to the black dough and they can suddenly play with space playdough. If you want to make your own, Fairy Dust Teaching has a great recipe.
Researchers have discovered that only four percent of galaxies have similar qualities as our own Milky Way. I guess every galaxy really is a snowflake.
The research team compared the Milky Way to similar galaxies in terms of luminosity–a measure of how much light is emitted–and distance to other bright galaxies. They found galaxies that have two satellites that are as bright and close by as the Milky Way’s two closest satellites, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, are rare.
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Galaxy M87 is an enormous collection of heavenly bodies, but astronomers who have studied the effects of its black hole see similarities to the recent volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and have dubbed it a galactic super-volcano. We covered the shockwaves associated with the Earth mountain previously, and parallels can actually be seen in the distant galaxy.
In the analogy with Eyjafjallajökull, the energetic particles produced in the vicinity of the black hole rise through the X-ray emitting atmosphere of the cluster, lifting up the coolest gas near the center of M87 in their wake, much like the hot volcanic gases drag up the clouds of dark ash. And just like the volcano here on Earth, shockwaves can be seen when the black hole pumps energetic particles into the cluster gas.
“This analogy shows that even though astronomical phenomena can occur in exotic settings and over vast scales, the physics can be very similar to events on Earth,” said co-author Aurora Simionescu also of the Kavli Institute.
Chandra X-Ray Observatory has much more info on this and other astronomical wonders.
Link – and here’s just the X-Ray version of the phenomenon.
(Image credit: NASA/CXC/KIPAC/N. Werner, E. Million et al); Radio (NRAO/AUI/NSF/F. Owen)
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Today's image from Astronomy Picture of the Day, by Rogelio Bernal Andreo of Deep Sky Colors is something you have to enjoy in its full splendor. Go on. We'll wait.
From APOD:
A Dark River of dust seems to run from our Galactic Center, then pool into a starfield containing photogenic sky wonders. Scrolling right will reveal many of these objects including (can you find?) the bright orange star Antares, a blue(-eyed) horsehead nebula, the white globular star cluster M4, the bright blue star system Rho Ophiuchi, the dark brown Pipe nebula, the red Lagoon nebula, the red and blue Trifid nebula, the red Cat's Paw Nebula, and the multicolored but still important center of our Galaxy. This wide view captures in exquisite detail about 50 degrees of the nighttime sky, 100 times the size of the full Moon, covering constellations from the Archer (Sagittarius) through the Snake Holder (Ophiuchus), to the Scorpion (Scorpius). The Dark River itself can be identified as the brown dust lane connected to Antares, and spans about 100 light years. Since the Dark River dust lane lies only about 500 light years away, it only appears as a bridge to the much more distant Galactic Center, that actually lies about 25,000 light years farther away.
Rogelio added these notes:
When I drove a total of 1,200 miles to capture my widefield image of the IFN I thought I had gone too far and told myself I should control myself a bit. So when I calculated the total driving time for this image to be over 1,800 miles (and that's not including the Rho Op area on the left of the image - otherwise, add 800 miles to the 1,800!) I realized I didn't talk to myself clearly enough! :-)
The mosaic above is made out of 52 frames. If we take out the 12 frames from the already mosaic I had done of the Rho Op area, that leaves the 40 frames I captured and processed this month of June alone. Each frame is 3x5 minutes of L and 3x3 minutes each RGB, all bin 2x2.
I captured the data in 9 different nights: 6 outside of the DARC Observatory, 2 during a camping weekend in Plettstone (Bear Valley), and one additional frame catured at the back of the Lick Observatory. All during a period of around 12 days. Um, yes... I do have a DAY job too!!
As I mentioned earlier, the total round trip driving time to these dark sites added up to 1,840 miles driven. Total exposure time for the 40 frames is around 40 hours (48 if we count the Rho Op area) with a time in the field exceeding over 70 hours. The original image, over 18,000 pixels wide, can be provided upon request. It's just too big in size I'd rather not to pay the bandwidth toll (yes I pay for my bandwidth).
Links: APOD | Deep Sky Colors
Photo: ESA & SPIRE Consortium & HerMES consortia
In 1986, astronomer Felix J. Lockman discovered a curious region in space where there is little neutral hydrogen gas. This region, called the Lockman Hole, provides a keyhole through which astronomers can observe distant galaxies.
Using the Herschel Space Observatory, scientists at the European Space Agency decided to take a peek through the Lockman Hole and found thousands of galaxies. Each dot you see is an entire galaxy containing billions of stars:
The galaxies seen in this image are all in the distant Universe and appear as they did 10–12 billion years ago. They are colour coded in blue, green, and red to represent the three wavebands used for Herschel’s observation. Those appearing in white have equal intensity in all three bands and are the ones forming the most stars. The galaxies shown in red are likely to be the most distant, appearing as they did around 12 billion years ago.
Just think about it.
Link – via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day shows the aftermath of powerful collision between two asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. They estimate the speed of the impact at “15,000 kilometers per hour — five times the speed of a rifle bullet — and liberated energy in excess of a nuclear bomb.”
What Hubble saw indicates that P/2010 A2 is unlike any object ever seen before. At first glance, the object appears to have the tail of a comet. Close inspection, however, shows a 140-meter nucleus offset from the tail center, very unusual structure near the nucleus, and no discernable gas in the tail.
Link Photo: NASA/ESA/D. Jewitt (UCLA)
The Hubble Space Telescope took a closer look at this triple galaxy group on April 1 and 2 after 140,000 people around the world voted on six potential targets.
The areas have previously only been photographed by ground-based telescopes:
The Arp 274 galaxy group won the competition with more than 67,000 votes. Hubble’s image suggests the galaxies may not be close enough together to interact as they appear to be in the image taken by the Palomar Observatory near San Diego.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by sunnyspeaks.
This is the magnificent Cartwheel galaxy, a stellar structure which measures more than 100,000 light years across.
It was released to promote a 24-hour webcast from observatories around the world, marking the International Year of Astronomy.
The kaleidoscopic galaxy lies 500million light years from Earth, and its unusual shape is due to a catastrophic collision with one of the smaller galaxies on the lower left hundreds of millions of years ago.
The smaller galaxy produced compression waves in the gas of the Cartwheel as it plunged through it, which triggered bursts of star formation, lighting up the rim.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by sunnyspeaks.
Is life on Earth special? Not according to Carnegie Institution’s astronomer Alan Boss. The author of the new book The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets
[Boss] made the prediction based on the number of "super-Earths" — planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants like Jupiter — discovered so far circling stars outside the solar system.
Boss said that if any of the billions of Earth-like worlds he believes exist in the Milky Way have liquid water, they are likely to be home to some type of life.
"Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs," he said.
"But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence."
