Stars & Nebulae Archives - Escape Velocity Space News

Topic: Stars & Nebulae

Closer Look: Sometimes Dust is Beautiful

by Pamela Gay | Jul 3, 2024 | Galaxies & Cosmology, Stars & Nebulae

Gaia galaxy map, image credit: ESA The interstellar medium is not my favorite topic in astronomy. Fundamentally, it is the study of interstellar dust bunnies - those clumps of gas and dust that clog up our skies and block our ability to see more distant stars and galaxies. They don’t vary like the pulsating stars I love most. They don’t have stories that alter how we understand our universe like galaxies and galaxy clusters. The gas and dust between stars are just transient blobs of material - sometimes bright and sometimes dark - that are either released during stellar death or waiting to...

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Black Hole & Baby Star Formation – It’s the Same Science

by Pamela Gay | Jul 2, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae, Uncategorized

One of the great rules of astronomy is that the same rules of physics we see here, in our corner of the universe are the same rules of physics that control all of space and time. Mostly… some forces only work on tiny scales, so at the atomic level it feels like things...

Ep. 2.23: Planning to go back to the Moon

by EVSN | Jun 19, 2024 | Galaxies & Cosmology, Podcast, Rockets, Stars & Nebulae

Let's take a quick tour of the latest news, including updates on the Hubble Space Telescopes and single gyro operations, EUCLID's image release, an amazing new image of Io by LBT, and new calculations of Pluto's oceans. We also look in detail at plans to return humans...

The butterfly that was actually a planet forming disk

by Pamela Gay | Jun 3, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

Object IRAS 23077+6707 The sky is littered with small fuzzy blobs that are chock full of science waiting to be understood. And one such fuzzy blob looks surreally like a butterfly. Discovered in 2016, this object, cataloged as IRAS 23077+6707, is located about...

Stellar Winds Spotted on Three Sun-like Stars

by Pamela Gay | May 8, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

Infrared image of the shockwave (red arc) created by the massive giant star Zeta Ophiuchi in an interstellar dust cloud. The tenuous winds of sun-like main-sequence stars are much more difficult to observe. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team...

Massive Object Detected Via Gravitational Puppetry

by Pamela Gay | May 8, 2024 | Galaxies & Cosmology, Stars & Nebulae

A screenshot from a visualization of the orbit of the Gaia BH3 system as a whole through the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC- CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgments: Stefan Jordan with Gaia Sky. The universe we see doesn’t always reflect the universe that is out there....

Stars are Messy Cannibals

by Pamela Gay | May 8, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

This image, taken with the VLT Survey Telescope hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, shows the beautiful nebula NGC 6164/6165, also known as the Dragon’s Egg. The nebula is a cloud of gas and dust surrounding a pair of stars called HD 148937. Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team....

It’s a Star-Eat-Planet Universe Out There

by Pamela Gay | Apr 10, 2024 | Solar Systems, Stars & Nebulae

Artist's impression of a terrestrial planet being captured by a twin star. Credit: intouchable, OPENVERSE Data, at the end of the day, is our first and last source of understanding. We look, build models to match what we see, predict things we haven’t seen yet, and...

Closer Look: We are Space Stuff

by Pamela Gay | Feb 28, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

Courtesy TeePublic It is possible to buy stickers, sweatshirts, mugs, and all manner of other stuff and things emblazoned with the simple phrase, “We are star stuff”. Carl Sagan popularized this phrase, and it serves as a gentle reminder that all the complex atoms -...

Early Universe Clues Found Locally

by Pamela Gay | Feb 21, 2024 | Galaxies & Cosmology, Stars & Nebulae

A portion of the dwarf galaxy Wolf–Lundmark–Melotte (WLM) captured by the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera. The image demonstrates Webb’s remarkable ability to resolve faint stars outside the Milky Way. Color translation: 0.9-micron light is shown in...

Closer Look: Supernovae Reveal Galactic Expansion

by Pamela Gay | Feb 14, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

An artist’s impression of a Type Ia supernova – the explosion of a white dwarf locked in a binary system with a companion star. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab/C. Carreau As a scientist, I get a lot of weird hate mail. There are the folks telling me relativity is wrong....

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