Tea Leaves LA

“Spitzer captured the range of activities happening in this violent cloud of stellar birth. We have evidence that the massive stars are triggering the birth of new ones in the dark filaments, in addition to the pillars, but we still have more work to do.”
                                  —Joseph Hora
                                 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a new view of an area in our galaxy called Cygnus X. It is the most active area for star formation in the Milky Way.

The lower left and right boxes on the bottom image show brand new stars, which show up as red dots due to the heat they emit that burns up the surrounding dust cloud. The lower right box also shows a luminous blue variable, visible as a blue dot within the red orb.

The European Southern Observatory recently captured the sharpest image of the Omega Nebula ever taken from the ground.

The Omega Nebula is one of the most well-known stellar nurseries, a birthplace for stars which are visible in the new image.

The first drawing of the nebula was by John Herschel in 1833.

Gordan Ugarkovic’s Space Portraits

Many amateur astronomers spend countless hours compiling raw photographic data from probes and satellites to create beautiful images of our solar system. Gordan Ugarkovic is a well-known space photo creator, and his Flickr account boasts hundreds of images depicting the moons of Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and our own planet. 

CONSPIRACY FRIDAY*: A PHOTOGRAPHIC CHRONICLE OF THE PEOPLE’S TEMPLE

Jim Jones’s People’s Temple is one of the most famous religious cults in American history, largely due to the 1978 mass suicide that claimed the lives of most of its members.

A Flickr account containing over 70 pages of photos chronicles the story of the People’s Temple, from its popularity rise in the 60s to the massacre in Guyana. It also contains recent photos of survivors and memorials held for the victims of the massacre.

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE: GALACTIC COLLISIONS

The Spitzer photo atlas of “galactic train wrecks” is a new attempt to catalog merging galaxies in order to give astrophysicists a better understanding of the phenomenon. Lauranne Lanz of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used photos from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft to create the atlas.

It takes millions of years for two or more galaxies to merge into one, so scientists have never been able to study the complete cycle. Lanz hopes that by creating an atlas of all galactic collisions in various stages of merging, scientists will be able to study and characterize each phase of the process.

Our own galaxy will merge with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in the next three to five billion years. No need to worry about the fate of your future relatives. By then, the Earth’s surface will be devoid of water and too hot to sustain life.

Further reading: Stephan’s Quintet, Mayall’s Object, Andromeda/Milky Way collision

NASA has released millions of photos taken by its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) which discovered of 30,000 new comets and asteroids during its mission.

Scientists and astronomers will spend the next few years examining the data collected by WISE. Amateurs can view the data too on this site, though I found the search engine a bit difficult to navigate. An easy-to-navigate version of the gallery can be found here.