Oh My God, It's Full of Stars!

Posted by Alex in Pictures, Science & Tech on September 9, 2009 at 1:50 pm


Image: NASA

The Hubble Space Telescope has got new glasses after astronauts refurbished it in May 2009, and now NASA has kindly released snapshots from the 19-year-old space telescope.

I’m particularly awestruck with this one of the Globular Star Cluster Omega Centauri:

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope snapped this panoramic view of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of a giant star cluster.

The image reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which boasts nearly 10 million stars. Globular clusters, ancient swarms of stars united by gravity, are the homesteaders of our Milky Way galaxy. The stars in Omega Centauri are between 10 billion and 12 billion years old. The cluster lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth. [...]

All of the stars in the image are cozy neighbors. The average distance between any two stars in the cluster’s crowded core is only about a third of a light-year, roughly 13 times closer than our Sun’s nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. Although the stars are close together, WFC3’s sharpness can resolve each of them as individual stars. If anyone lived in this globular cluster, they would behold a star-saturated sky that is roughly 100 times brighter than Earth’s sky.

I wonder how many of those harbor alien life (seems like a waste if none of them do, don’t you think?) … Link

 
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VideoSift Clips of the Week - Neatorama

Posted by dag in VideoSift on June 11, 2009 at 6:25 am

(Links open in a new browser window/tab)

Planet and Star Size Comparison in HD

You may have seen a planet and star size comparison before but this one is beautifully crafted and looks stunning in full-screen HD.

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Choir uses hands to create a thunderstorm

I was blown away by how realistic their thunderclaps sound – and the song is good too.

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The Cigarette Trick

Short and sweet. A cigarette is tossed and caught in the mouth, then a lit match is tossed and caught in the mouth to light the cigarette.

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What IS this creature?!?

So far, no one on VideoSift has come to any verifiable conclusion on what this creature is. The closet guess is a head crab. ;) Calling all cryptozoologists, we need your help.

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Tilt-Shift video of trains in Switzerland

Wonderful tilt-shift video of trains in the villages of Sisikon and Göschenen in Switzerland. Created by Andi Leemann and Jeri Peier. They used two EOS 5D Mark II cameras, a Canon 90mm TS-E f/2.8 and a Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5 combined with a 1.4x converter. (and polarisation filters)

Link

For more of the web’s most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.

 
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Milky Way Time-Lapse

Posted by Miss Cellania in Video Clips on May 18, 2009 at 9:49 am


(Vimeo link)

William Castleman shot this video of the night sky at the Texas Star Party in Fort Davis, TX April 21-22. Watch as the core of the Milky Way passes over. -via reddit

 
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Scientists Spot Oldest Object in Universe

Posted by Queuebot in Science & Tech on April 30, 2009 at 6:20 am

I don’t know about you, but each time I read this kind of news my head spins. Scientists have detected a gamma ray burst that dates back 13 billion years, 95 percent back to the beginning of time. That makes it the oldest thing ever seen. Astronomer Edo Berger was blown away by the information.

The star which exploded was 30 to 100 times larger than our own sun, and when it died, it gave off “about million times the amount of energy the sun will release in its entire lifetime,” Berger told CNN by phone from Harvard University, where he is an assistant professor of astronomy.

Its death throes produced so much energy that “momentarily, we can essentially see it anywhere in the universe,” Berger said.

The object, known as GRB 090423, is about 200 million years older than the previous record-holder for oldest object ever seen.

Berger isn’t just interested in the record books, though — the gamma ray burst extended the frontiers of human knowledge about the history of the universe.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by scbr.

 
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