Cocoon Nebula Wide Field

When does a nebula look like a comet? In this crowded starfield, covering over two degrees within the high flying constellation of the Swan (Cygnus), the eye is drawn to the Cocoon Nebula. A compact star forming region, the cosmic Cocoon punctuates a nebula bright in emission and reflection on the left, with a long trail of interstellar dust clouds to the right, making the entire complex appear a bit like a comet. Cataloged as IC 5146, the central bright head of the nebula spans about 10 light years, while the dark dusty tail spans nearly 100 light years. Both are located about 2,500 light years away. The bright star near the bright nebula's center, likely only a few hundred thousand years old, supplies power to the nebular glow as it helps clear out a cavity in the molecular cloud's star forming dust and gas. The long dusty filaments of the tail, although dark in this visible light image, are themselves hiding stars in the process of formation, stars that can be seen at infrared wavelengths.

from NASA https://ift.tt/92Wz0R6

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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...

NGC 1365: Majestic Island Universe

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across. Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the faint but heated constellation Fornax , NGC 1365 is a dominant member of the well-studied Fornax Cluster of galaxies. This sharp color image shows the intense, reddish star forming regions near the ends of the galaxy's central bar and along its spiral arms. Seen in fine detail, obscuring dust lanes cut across the galaxy's bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers think NGC 1365's prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy's evolution, drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole . from NASA https://ift.tt/A0ESVno

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...

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