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An Astronomy Blog

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Don't be afraid to ask astronomy questions! One of the four members will respond. -Emily, Melissa, Jenn, and George

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subatomiconsciousness:

motion of a newly-discovered gas cloud that is falling rapidly towards the central black hole.
video
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thenewenlightenmentage:

Warped Light Reveals Most Massive Distant Galaxy Cluster
The most massive faraway cluster of galaxies has been found, thanks to a fortuitous astrophysical alignment that helped astronomers detect the mammoth grouping.
The galaxy cluster is located a staggering 10 billion light-years away from Earth, and researchers spotted the behemoth because its gravitational field is so strong that it is warping the light coming from a galaxy behind it.
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thenewenlightenmentage:

“Look North of the Big Dipper”: A Tiny Field of View Yields 50,000 Galaxies
For over a decade astronomers have been probing a region of the northern sky, not far from the handle of the Big Dipper, that is relatively free of bright stars and the diffuse glow of the Milky Way. The scientists want to take advantage of the clarity of the sky there to peer beyond our galaxy to study remote galaxies in the distant universe. This region, about half the angular size of the full moon, is now known to have over 50,000 galaxies.
Continue reading “”Look North of the Big Dipper”: A Tiny Field of View Yields 50,000 Galaxies” »
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fyeahuniverse:

Sun lighting up Titan’s atmosphere from behind, by NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft
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ikenbot:

Sombrero Galaxy & a Swarm of Globular Clusters
Orbiting the Sombrero galaxy is one of the largest known populations of globular clusters, containing up to 1900 members. In comparison our own Milky Way galaxy has only around 150-200 such clusters.
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ikenbot:

Universe’s 1st Objects After Big Bang Possibly Seen by NASA Telescope

New observations from a NASA space telescope have spotted what may be the very first objects created in the universe in unprecedented detail, scientists say.

The faint objects, imaged in infrared light by NASA’s Spitzer space telescope, might be hugely massive stars or black holes, but are too distant to see individually.

The Big Bang is thought to have kick-started the universe about 13.7 billion years ago. At first, the universe was too hot and dense for particles to be stable, but then the first quarks formed, which then grouped together to make protons and neutrons, and eventually the first atoms were created. After about 500 million years, the first stars, galaxies and black holes began to take shape.
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the-star-stuff:

Hold on tight: in 4 billion years, we’re due for a galactic collision!
The galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, is a large spiral galaxy that lives in a small cluster of other galaxies called the Local Group. The other big member is the Andromeda galaxy, located about 2.5 million light years away. That’s a long way off, but we’ve known for a long time that Andromeda is heading more or less toward us at a speed of roughly 100 km/sec (60 miles/second).
The question is, is it headed directly at us, or does it have some “sideways” motion and will miss us?New results announced today by astronomers using Hubble show that — gulp! — Andromeda is headed right down our throats!
But don’t panic. It won’t happen for nearly 4 billion years.
Watch the video here.
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thenewenlightenmentage:

H3+ —The Molecule that Lit Up the Universe
The molecule known as H3+ is believed to have had a vital role in cooling down the first stars of the universe, and may still play an important part in the formation of current stars. The unassuming molecule known as a triatomic hydrogen ion, or H3+, may hold secrets of the formation of the first stars after the Big Bang.
Continue reading “H3+ —The Molecule that Lit Up the Universe” »
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New Ultradense Planet Found; Astronomers Baffled

sense-of-innocence:

CoRoT-20b is so compact it defies planet-formation theory, study says.

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alchymista:

Quasar Jets
An artist’s rendering, made using data collected by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows a quasar galaxy with a jet of high-energy particles extending more than 100,000 light-years from the supermassive black hole at its center. The object, located 12 billion light-years from Earth, is the most distant such jet ever detected. These quasar jets are formed when electrons emitted from a black hole impact with cosmic background radiation left by the big bang, giving astronomers clues about the conditions in the early universe.
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What causes rogue planets to run away from their stars?
We now estimate that every star in the galaxy has at least one planet, but that is leaving aside the potentially billions more planets that were ejected from their solar system and are now hurtling through the universe all alone.
We know that these rogue planets exist - indeed, they could outnumber all the other planets in the galaxy by a factor of two or three to one, and our own solar system possibly once had a fifth gas planet that went walkabout. The question, then, is why all these planets form around stars and then up and leave their home solar systems. The most common explanation had been that their orbits became gravitationally unstable, and while that’s likely still a part of the story, some rather more unusual possibilities are now being considered, thanks to some nifty new computer simulations by researchers at Cambridge and the University of Bordeaux.
Artist’s conception of rogue planet via NASA/JPL.
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the-star-stuff:

The Dumbbell Nebula
The Dumbbell Nebula (M27) is by far the most famous object in the constellation Vulpecula the Fox. It’s so famous, in fact, that it boasts several other proper names: the Apple Core Nebula, the Diablo Nebula, and the Double-Headed Shot. This deep-sky object owes its common names to a twin-lobe shape common among planetary nebulae. Even through binoculars, this magnitude 7.3 object is easy to spot. 
Photo by Bill Snyder from Connellsville, Pennsylvania