#constellation perseus

[star-dust777]

So many stars it’s overwhelming🌌

[brightestofcentaurus]

NGC 1333

"Located 1,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, a reflection nebula called NGC 1333 epitomizes the beautiful chaos of a dense group of stars being born. This image is from NASA Spitzer Space Telescope."

Image and information from NASA.

[cosmicmermaidsblog]

Constellation Perseus

Perseus was one of the legendary Greek heroes, like Hercules and is featured in many an adventure. He is immortalised in the heavens next to his beloved Andromeda . Perseus led an eventful life right from conception. His mother Danae, had been imprisoned by her father in an underground cell, lit only by a barred window in the ceiling. But the king of the gods, Zeus, desired her, and went to her in a shower of gold that fell as rain through the window. She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy-child, Perseus. Mystified and furious, her father locked them in a chest and cast them into the sea. To make a long story short, a fisherman saved them.

Later Perseus was tricked into going after the head of Medusa, one of the hideous Gorgon sisters. Medusa had snakes for hair, and her gaze would turn people into stone. But the gods were with Perseus, giving him a shining shield, a helmet that made him invisible, sword, and winged sandals so that he could fly,. Thus equipped, he flew to where the Gorgons lived. Finding Medusa, he looked at her only as a reflection in his shield. Then he sliced off her head and flew away with it. It was on his way home that he came across Andromeda chained to the to rocks, and killed the sea monster, Cetus that was about to eat her. He later married Andromeda.

The winking demon

In the sky, Perseus is depicted holding Medusa's head. The constellation lies within the Milky Way and so is a delight to sweep with binoculars. The brightest star, Alpha, is also known by its Arabic name Mirphak.

Perseus's second brightest star, Beta is located in Medusa's head. Its Arabic name is Algol, meaning demon's head and it has long been known as the Demon Star.

For most of the time, Algol shines steadily at a magnitude of about two. But about every three days, it dims noticeably. It is a kind of variable star known as an eclipsing binary. A binary is an object that looks like one star, but Is actually two, orbiting around each other. In Algol's case, one star is large and dim, the other small and bright. About every three days as we view the pair from Earth, the large, dim one covers up the small bright one, and so we see the overall brightness fall. When the dim star passes by, the former brightness returns.

Source book: " Tales of the Night Sky" by Robin Kerrod

Constellation picture from Pinterest

(click to read about Andromeda constellation )

[brightestofcentaurus]

GK Persei

GK Persei is a classical nova located about 1,530 light years away towards the constellation Perseus. A classical nova occurs when material builds up on the surface of a white dwarf star, accumulated from a binary companion star. Once enough material, particularly hydrogen gas, accumulates, nuclear fusion reactions can occur and intensify into huge hydrogen bomb blasts that blow off material from the white dwarf star.

Novas are sometimes considered similar to supernova explosions- while those are much more massive, destroying entire stars, some of the physics remain the same. Both involve explosions and fast moving shock waves. Since novas are much smaller, their remnants tend to evolve quickly, and so are important for the study of cosmic explosions. GK Persei was observed twice, once in 2000 and once in 2013, between which it expanded at about 700,000 miles per hour, meaning its shock wave moved about 90 billion miles.

Image and information from Chandra.

[chrisinmaryville]

Extra-spectacular Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight

Extra-spectacular Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight

By Emily Chung

CBC News

August 11, 2016

  Extra-spectacular Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight Outburst means up to 200 meteors per hour may be visible on night of Aug. 11-12

  A meteor from the Perseid meteor shower streaks above Shenandoah National Park in Virginia on Aug. 13, 2015. This year’s peak for the annual meteor shower is Aug. 11-12, and astronomers are expecting double the usual…

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[customstoday]

Astronomers make multiple-star system in first stages of formation

Astronomers make multiple-star system in first stages of formation

LONDON: The discovery and the first-ever observations of a multiple-star system during the earliest stage of formation supported one of several suggested mechanisms to the production of such systems.

Researchers of the study, led by Jaime Pineda of the Institute for Astronomy (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland, discovered the quadruple star system by studying a dense core of gas called Barnard 5 (B5) in…

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[spaceplasma]

Menkhib and the California Nebula

This infrared image from NASA’s WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) features one of the bright stars in the constellation Perseus, named Menkhib (the bright star in the upper left near the red dust cloud) along with a large star forming cloud catalogued as NGC 1499, or more commonly called the California Nebula (running diagonally through the image).

Menkhib is one of the hottest stars visible in the night sky; its surface temperature is about 37,000 Kelvin (about 66,000 degrees Fahrenheit – over 6 times hotter than the Sun). Because of its high temperature it appears blue-white to the human eye (almost all stars appear bluish to WISE).  It has about 40 times the mass of the Sun and gives off 330,000 times the amount of light. Menkhib is a runaway star, and the fast stellar wind it blows is piling up in front of it to create a shock wave in the gas and dust surrounding it in the space between the stars. This shock wave is heating up the dust within and WISE sees it as the red cloud in the upper left of the image.

Menkhib is part of an association of very hot stars that were born from the California Nebula only a few million years ago. These stars are lighting up the nebula; heating and ionizing it. In visible light, the ionized gas glows red, while in infrared light we see the heated dust (which appears in green and red in this image from WISE). The California Nebula gets its name due to a resemblance to the shape of the U.S. State of California (which you can just make out as outlined by the green dust if you rotate the image by a little more than 90 degrees clockwise). The entire California Nebula stretches across about 100 light-years, and we see about 80% of it in this view.

Menkhib and the California Nebula are about 1,800 light-years away from Earth. This is within the same spur of the Orion spiral arm of the Milky Way in which we are located.

All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this image. Color is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is dominated by light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team