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    star formation tagged posts

    Hubble spots a lopsided Lynx

    August 15, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    NASA's Hubble Spots a Lopsided Lynx

    Galaxy NGC 2337 in constellation Lynx Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

    This galaxy, NGC 2337, resides 25 million light-years away in the constellation of Lynx. NGC 2337 is an irregular galaxy, ie —along with a quarter of all galaxies in the universe—lacks a distinct, regular appearance. The galaxy was discovered in 1877 by the French astronomer Édouard Stephan who, in the same year, discovered the galactic group Stephan’s Quintet (heic0910i).

    Although irregular galaxies may never win a beauty prize when competing with their more symmetrical spiral and elliptical peers, astronomers consider them to be very important. Some irregular galaxies may have once fallen into one of the regular classes of the Hubble sequence, but were warped and deformed by a passing cosmic companion...

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    Astronomers make first accurate measurement of #Oxygen in Distant Galaxy

    August 5, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Galaxy COSMOS-1908 is in the center of this Hubble Space Telescope image, indicated by the arrow. Nearly everything in the image is a galaxy; many of these galaxies are much closer to Earth than COSMOS-1908. Credit: Ryan Sanders and the CANDELS team

    Galaxy COSMOS-1908 is in the center of this Hubble Space Telescope image, indicated by the arrow. Nearly everything in the image is a galaxy; many of these galaxies are much closer to Earth than COSMOS-1908. Credit: Ryan Sanders and the CANDELS team

     
    Quantifying the amount of oxygen is key to understanding how #matter #cycles in and out of galaxies. Oxygen, the third-most abundant chemical element in the universe, is created inside stars and released into interstellar gas when stars die. “This is by far the most distant galaxy for which the oxygen abundance has actually been measured,” said Alice Shapley, a UCLA professor of astronomy. “We’re looking back in time at this galaxy as it appeared 12 billion years ago.”
     
    Knowing the abundance of oxygen in the galaxy called #COSMO...
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    Deepest ever look into Orion Nebula

    July 13, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This spectacular image of the Orion Nebula star-formation region was obtained from multiple exposures using the HAWK-I infrared camera on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. This is the deepest view ever of this region and reveals more very faint planetary-mass objects than expected. Credit: ESO/H. Drass et al.

    This spectacular image of the Orion Nebula star-formation region was obtained from multiple exposures using the HAWK-I infrared camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. This is the deepest view ever of this region and reveals more very faint planetary-mass objects than expected. Credit: ESO/H. Drass et al.

    HAWK-I infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has revealed the deepest and most comprehensive view of the Orion Nebula to date. It has revealed a great abundance of faint brown dwarfs and isolated planetary-mass objects. The very presence of these low-mass bodies provides an exciting insight into the history of star formation within the nebula itself...

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    Study explains why Galaxies Stop Creating Stars

    July 9, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    ESO 137-001 is a perfect example of a spiral galaxy zipping through a crammed cluster of galaxies. Gas is being pulled from its disc in a process called ram pressure stripping. The galaxy appears to be losing gas as it plunges through the Norma galaxy cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

    ESO 137-001 is a perfect example of a spiral galaxy zipping through a crammed cluster of galaxies. Gas is being pulled from its disc in a process called ram pressure stripping. The galaxy appears to be losing gas as it plunges through the Norma galaxy cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

    Astronomers examined around 70,000 galaxies to address an important unsolved mystery in astrophysics. Galaxies come in 3 main shapes – elliptical, spiral (such as the Milky Way) and irregular. They can be massive or small. To add to this mix, galaxies can also be blue or red. Blue galaxies are still actively forming stars. Red ones mostly are not currently forming stars, and are considered passive.

    The processes that cause galaxies to “quench,” ie cease star formation, are...

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