For many across North America, this is a holiday weekend. Canada celebrated its confederation on Wednesday, and the United States celebrates its independence tomorrow. As a reminder, we won’t be streaming next week and will be both taking some time off and using the week to update our websites and plan future content.

Holidays are, for better or worse, a favorite time for missions to do amazing things and for press releases on thematic topics to be released. This weekend we can celebrate the anniversary of New Horizons passing Pluto, of the Pathfinder rover reaching Mars, and of a lot more events timed to allow the most Americans possible to enjoy the science, while forcing the maximal number of scientists and science communicators to work through a holiday. 

This year, we don’t have any big events, but when it comes to seasonally chosen press releases, the big observatories did not disappoint. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory released a spectacularly weird radio image of the star-forming cluster. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), researchers captured images of filaments of gas streaming into this system. These turbulent streams are fragmenting into dense cores that will ultimately create individual stars. The largest stars in this system have already formed and are visible in a Hubble Telescope image, and the light of these stars is also blasting out gas, making this a chaotic and dynamic system of star formation. In the composite image, the radio image is colored purple and appears as dramatic fireworks over the ruddy Hubble image of star formation.

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory folks also got in on the holiday with the release of an amazing image of the spiral galaxy NGC 925 that highlights the myriad star-forming regions in this system. Each of these open clusters appears as bright pink knots of fireworks in this optical light image, taken with the 4-meter Mayall Telescope.

More Information

NRAO image release 

“Gas Kinematics of the Massive Protocluster G286.21+0.17 Revealed by ALMA,” Yu Cheng et. al., 2020 May 8, Astrophysical Journal (Preprint on arxiv.org)

“Stellar Variability in a Forming Massive Star Cluster,” Yu Cheng et. al., 2020 July 1, Astrophysical Journal (Preprint on arxiv.org)

NOIRLab press release