Stardust

🌍🌑🌠✨👽

[unimatrix-420]

Jupiter glowing, as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.

[sjoongki]

New images of a planetary nebula and five galaxies as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (07.12.2022)

[babyfoxcollectionthings]

[zespaceblog]

The Crab Nebula M1

This star is thought to have gone supernova in 1054 AD, and collapsed into a pulsar, a fast spinning neutron star with jets of particles that create a light house like beacon as the object rotates.

In the upper image, x-rays reveal the pulsar at the heart, with a ring of matter around it, and the jet protruding outwards. There will also be one heading in the opposite direction.

Neutron stars are produced when a large star collapses, crushing down on the remaining matter until it fuses together into an object not much larger than a city, but with the mass of 1-2 times that of our Sun.

Any less mass, gravity wouldn't be able to crush the carbon/oxygen atoms any further and a white dwarf would be created, any more .. and physics goes on holiday and a black hole is formed (or at least, physics as we know it).

There is a theoretically quark star, where an object is crushed and neutrons are split into quarks, but such an object has never been found, and it's not known if any such object could provide a counter balance to the gravitational crushing that would ultimately form the black hole.

[aspaceinthecosmos]

the new composite james webb image is so beautiful ive been staring at it for 10 minutes straight

featuring jupiters rings, europa (along with a bunch of other moons), the northern and southern auroras, and the great red spot

[aesthetics-core]

Look at Her ♡

[vangoghcore]

Van Gogh's Starry Night with the first image taken by the James Webb telescope by alpgenart (via astronomy_eye)

[assassin1513]

✨The Beauty of Jupiter ✨

[itscolossal]

NASA’s Webb Space Telescope Reveals Astounding, Unprecedented Views of the Universe

[taohun]

seeing the photos from Webb up against photos from Hubble just makes me… I don’t even know like, wow! Look at that!

[apod]

2022 August 9

Leaving Earth Video Credit: NASA/JHU Applied Physics Lab/Carnegie Inst. Washington

Explanation: What it would look like to leave planet Earth? Such an event was recorded visually in great detail by the MESSENGER spacecraft as it swung back past the Earth in 2005 on its way in toward the planet Mercury. Earth can be seen rotating in this time-lapse video, as it recedes into the distance. The sunlit half of Earth is so bright that background stars are not visible. The robotic MESSENGER spacecraft is now in orbit around Mercury and has recently concluded the first complete map of the surface. On occasion, MESSENGER has continued to peer back at its home world. MESSENGER is one of the few things created on the Earth that will never return. At the end of its mission MESSENGER crashed into Mercury’s surface.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220809.html

[zespaceblog]

NGC 4567 & NGC 4568 - Butterfly Galaxies

In 5 billion years from now, a species located 60 Million light years away from our galaxy, may record a similar image of our own galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy colliding or at least in the process of starting to.

Galaxy collisions are dramatic, but they are so in slow motion, the whole thing could take 500 million to 1 billion years to complete, and when it does, the new galaxy will likely begin to form an elliptical galaxy, as all the hydrogen is heated up and stripped out by the new supermassive black hole at the centre, that too will take time to settle.

The image was recently taken by the Gemini Observatory and posted on their Twitter account @GeminiObs, it's of NGC 4567 and NGC 4568 merging galaxies, just under 60 million light years from Earth in the constellation of Virgo.

[apod]

2022 August 19

Saturn: 1993 - 2022 Image Credit & Copyright: Tunc Tezel (TWAN)

Explanation: Saturn is the most distant planet of the Solar System easily visible to the unaided eye. With this extraordinary, long-term astro-imaging project begun in 1993, you can follow the ringed gas giant for one Saturn year as it wanders once around the ecliptic plane, finishing a single orbit around the Sun by 2022. Constructed from individual images made over 29 Earth years, the split panorama is centered along the ecliptic and crossed by the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Saturn’s position in 1993 is at the right side, upper panel in the constellation Capricornus and progresses toward the left. It returns to the spot in Capricornus at left in the lower panel in 2022. The consistent imaging shows Saturn appears slightly brighter during the years 2000-2005 and 2015-2019, periods when its beautiful rings were tilted more face-on to planet Earth.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220819.html

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

Hubble has captured the most detailed image to date of the open star cluster NGC 265 in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The brilliant open star cluster, NGC 265, is located about 200,000 light-years away and is roughly 65 light-years across.

Credit: European Space Agency & NASA

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

The Trifid Nebula, cataloged by astronomers as Messier 20 or NGC 6514, is a well-known region of star formation lying within our own Milky Way Galaxy. It is called the Trifid because the nebula is overlain by three bands of obscuring interstellar dust, giving it a trisected appearance as seen in small telescopes. The Trifid lies about 9,000 light-years (2,700 parsecs) from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

Saturn: image taken by the Cassini spacecraft on June 4, 2011 from a distance of 3.8 million km.

Credit: Mike Malaska

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

Io and Jupiter

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Jason Major