Stargate Milky Way

There is a huge gate of stars in the sky, and you pass through it twice a day. The stargate is actually our Milky Way Galaxy, and it is the spin of the Earth that appears to propel you through it. More typically, the central band of our Milky Way appears as a faint band stretching across the sky, only visible in away from bright city lights. In a long-exposure wide-angle image from a dark location like this, though, the Milky Way's central plane is easily visible. The featured picture is a digital composite involving multiple exposures taken on the same night and with the same camera, but employing a stereographic projection that causes the Milky Way to appear as a giant circular portal. Inside the stargate-like arc of our Galaxy is a faint stripe called zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected by dust in our Solar System. In the foreground are cacti and dry rocks found in the rough terrain of the high desert of Chile, not far from the El Sauce Observatory and the developing Vera Rubin Observatory, the latter expected to begin routine operations in 2024.

from NASA https://ift.tt/35k6HxM

Comments

The Galactic Center in Radio from MeerKAT

What's happening at the center of our galaxy? It's hard to tell with optical telescopes since visible light is blocked by intervening interstellar dust. In other bands of light, though, such as radio , the galactic center can be imaged and shows itself to be quite an interesting and active place . The featured picture shows the latest image of our Milky Way's center by the MeerKAT array of 64 radio dishes in South Africa . Spanning four times the angular size of the Moon (2 degrees ), the image is impressively vast, deep, and detailed. Many known sources are shown in clear detail, including many with a prefix of Sgr, since the galactic center is in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius . In our Galaxy's Center lies Sgr A , found here in the image center, which houses the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole. Other sources in the image are not as well understood, including the Arc , just to the left of Sgr A , and numerous filamentary threads....

Untitled

Why is our Sun so active now ? No one is sure. An increase in surface activity was expected because our Sun is approaching solar maximum in 2025. However, last month our Sun sprouted more sunspot s than in any month during the entire previous 11-year solar cycle -- and even dating back to 2002. The featured picture is a composite of images taken every day from January to June by NASA 's Solar Dynamic Observatory . Showing a high abundance of sunspots, large individual spots can be tracked across the Sun's disk, left to right, over about two weeks. As a solar cycle continues, sunspots typically appear closer to the equator. Sunspots are just one way that our Sun displays surface activity -- another is flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that expel particles out into the Solar System . Since these particles can affect astronauts and electronics, tracking surface disturbances is of more than aesthetic value . Conversely, solar activity can have very high aesthetic v...

Peculiar Galaxies of Arp 273

The colorful, spiky stars are in the foreground of this image taken with a small telescope on planet Earth . They lie well within our own Milky Way Galaxy . But the two eye-catching galaxies in the frame lie far beyond the Milky Way, at a distance of over 300 million light-years. The galaxies' twisted and distorted appearance is due to mutual gravitational tides as the pair engage in close encounters. Cataloged as Arp 273 (also as UGC 1810 ), these galaxies do look peculiar , but interacting galaxies are now understood to be common in the universe. Closer to home, the large spiral Andromeda Galaxy is known to be some 2 million light-years away and inexorably approaching the Milky Way. In fact the far away peculiar galaxies of Arp 273 may offer an analog of the far future encounter of Andromeda and Milky Way. Repeated galaxy encounters on a cosmic timescale ultimately result in a merger into a single galaxy of stars. From our perspective , the bright cores of the Arp 273 galaxies...

Alpha News

Search This Blog