Mother of stars

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
Official comment: An eerie pillar of star birth in the Carina Nebula rises from a sea of greenish-colored clouds. More can be viewed here
From Jan: The Hubble Telescope shows us an object containing stars, gas and dust in which new stars are being born. How we [...]

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Ancient secrets

Hello, well I’m in a bit of a philosophical mood this early afternoon. The coffee was reviving and the cheese sandwiches all you could wish from sandwiches with cheese inside – even the sharp tang. I’ll skip over lunch as breakfast was rather late due to a lingering hangover from Saturday night [...]

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Space race

Another heap of junk is about to collide at high velocity with the Moon to test a theory about ice possibly lying in abundance near its poles. This is important for any humans who are planning to exploit it in the near future, not in the least because they’ll need ice in their cokes when [...]

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Eternal One

Tick – a century is gone Tock – there goes another one Ten thousand years are as a sigh To fires that burn in nighttime sky And those that swirl and hold us all Perhaps the oldest in that hall [...]

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Eye in the sky

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/The SINGS Team (SSC/Caltech)

Isn’t this an amazing picture from the Spitzer telescope? I add the official interpretation for your perusal. Of course, that explanation involves a black hole which is still just speculation even though the authorities would have us believe otherwise. I would like to think that at the centre of this and [...]

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Triangle

NGC 6791. The full Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys field is full of stars estimated to be 8 billion years old. Two background galaxies can be seen at upper left.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and L. Bedin (STScI)
 
Oh little star, so near, so far, you shine for all to see. [...]

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Cosmic miscellany

Anyone like to remove the wrapping and taste one of the delicacies?
Jan
Vivid View of Tycho’s Supernova Remnant
This composite image of the Tycho supernova remnant combines infrared and X-ray observations obtained with NASA’s Spitzer and Chandra space observatories, respectively, and the Calar Alto observatory, Spain. It shows the scene more than four centuries after [...]

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Universal contact

A million light years of pure darkness Then a glow spreads through the night Timeless moment of creation Raw intelligence in flight.
An eye that opens to the starlight Far away in time and space Sees the galaxies and gas [...]

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Science – fact and fiction

A short list of scientific subjects which can still be used in science fiction stories, as they have as yet no proven foundation in science, no matter what some would have us believe:
Global Warming
No conclusive evidence. Based on primitive models of the Earth and trends which may or may not be relevant [...]

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Galaxy Cluster

Another view from afar. Nearly every object you see here is a galaxy, some like ours and some different. Those with spikes are stars in our galaxy. The colored areas are gas clouds. Just think: races galore all struggling to survive.
The official story can be found here.

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