For a existential longing for the stars and the unknown, observing the night sky in all it’s hypnotic incandescence. Now we only dream as the age of exploration comes to a brief pause, reaching our hands out into the gaseous, cloudy void and the incessant cries of light-years passing us by. For dreaming of the stars. x
Track Listing1 Speed of Sound | Coldplay 2 Super 8 Suite | Michael Giacchino 3 Night of the Meteor | Joe Hisaishi 4 All My Stars Aligned | St. Vincent 5 Clair de Lune | Debussy 6 The Fountain Scene | John Williams 7 So long, Lonesome | Explosions in the Sky 8 End Credits (Star Trek 2009) | Michael Giacchino
The glow of the Lagoon nebula
Gas and dust condense, beginning the process of creating new stars in this image of Messier 8, also known as the Lagoon Nebula. Located four to five thousand light-years away, in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), the nebula is a giant interstellar cloud, one hundred light-years across. It boasts many large, hot stars, whose ultraviolet radiation sculpts the gas and dust into unusual shapes. Two of these giant stars illuminate the brightest part of the nebula, known as the Hourglass Nebula, a spiralling, funnel-like shape near its centre. Messier 8 is one of the few star-forming nebulae visible to the unaided eye, and was discovered as long ago as 1747, although the full range of colours wasn’t visible until the advent of more powerful telescopes. The Lagoon Nebula derives its name from the wide lagoon-shaped dark lane located in the middle of the nebula that divides it into two glowing sections.
Image credit: ESO/IDA/Danish 1.5 m/ R. Gendler, U.G. Jørgensen, K. Harpsøe
Reflection and Emission Nebulas
— Rho Ophiuchi Cloud ComplexCredit: Gerald Rhemann // Astrostudio
Black Hole Powered Jets Plow Into Galaxy
This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF’s Very Large Array (pink).
This multi-wavelength view shows 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth. The radio emission comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy.
The X-ray data show a different aspect of this galaxy, tracing the location of hot gas. The bright X-rays in the center of the image mark a pool of million-degree gas around the black hole. Some of this material may eventually be consumed by the black hole, and the magnetized, whirlpool of gas near the black hole could in turn, trigger more output to the radio jet.
Most of the low-energy X-rays from the vicinity of the black hole are absorbed by dust and gas, probably in the shape of a giant doughnut around the black hole. This doughnut, or torus blocks all the optical light produced near the black hole, so astronomers refer to this type of source as a hidden or buried black hole. The optical light seen in the image is from the stars in the galaxy.
A wide view of the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters - possibly the single most famous star cluster. The 450-light-years-distant Pleiades cluster seems to contain only seven stars when observed with the naked eye, but telescopic views reveal that it actually has around 1,000.
Big Dipper and Magic Telescope
Stars of the constellation Ursa Major (the Big bear) form the familiar dipper-like asterism in the northern sky as photographed from the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the Canary island of La Palma.
The starry night sky is reflected from one of a pair of 17 meter diameter, multi-mirrored MAGIC telescopes. The MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) telescope is intended to observe gamma rays indirectly by detecting brief flashes of optical light, called -Cherenkov light. — Babak Tafreshi
diarrheaworldstarhiphop:discoverynews:
Introducing Kepler-62: A Star System With Two Earths?
Two Earth-sized planets have been discovered orbiting Kepler-62, a star approximately 1,200 light-years away, inside its habitable zone. Which, quite frankly, is bonkers.
“We’re particularly delighted to find that there are two planets in the habitable zone.” — lead Kepler scientist William Borucki
ISTS HABBIDNG.
