Scientists are not able to find the reason for the lighting of IRAS 05437+2502, a small and faded Nebula, which spins only 1/18th of a full moon near the constellation of the Taurus. The upper edge of this floating mountain of interstellar dust is particularly defined by the bright upside down V.
Mostly filled up with star dust, this ghost like Nebula is involved in the star forming region and the images were taken by the IRAS satellite in infrared light in 1983. This image recently taken from the Hubble space telescope, gives many details. But in this image, experts were unable to find out the cause for this sharp curve arc.
The entire earth-facing side of the sun exploded in a tumult of activity on August 1st, 2010. This image was taken from the solar dynamics observatory and this made the news on august 1st, which shows a solar tsunami (wave-like structure, upper right), c-3 class solar flare (white area on upper left), large scale shaking of the solar corona, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, a coronal mass ejection and more, radio bursts and more.
This snap-shot from the solar dynamics observatory having multi wavelength extreme ultraviolet shows the northern hemisphere in mid-eruption. Different gases at different temperatures can be seen in this image. The magnetic field of the earth is still reverberating due to the solar flare on august 3rd, 2010, which sparked lowa in the united states and aurorae as far south as Wisconsin. Experts believe that there will be a second flare following the first flare and can re-energize the vanishing geomagnetic storm and spark a new round of Northern lights.
This is lo moon on the Jupiter, made by the Galileo space craft. Called as volcanically dynamic object in the solar system, the lo moon has three dozen active volcanoes. Some are even taller than the Mt. Everest, the highest point on the earth. Experts said that there are no impact craters and the surface must be constantly recycled by the volcanism and is almost not less than a million years old.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured high definition views of the SUN at a variety of wavelengths and snapped an X-ray photo of the Sun, on Sunday, august 1st 2010.
A dark arc was recorded by the satellites and identified as a large filament of cool gas extending towards the SUN’s northern hemisphere and exploded in the space.
This explosion is called as Coronal mass ejection and was aimed directly to the Earth, which immediately sent a “solar tsunami” racing at 93 million miles athwart space. This solar Tsunami reaches the Earth’s magnetosphere and may cause the geomagnetic storms.
Usually the SUN’s activity recedes on a fairly predictable cycle. Normally one cycle lasts for 11 years, roughly taking five and half years to move from a solar minimum, the period when we can find few sunspots, to peak at the solar maximum, when the activity of sunspot is amplified.
The final solar maximum occurred in 2001, which was weak but lasted long. The recent solar eruption is a sign that the sun is waking up and going towards another maximum. Experts said that when it touches the magnetic shield, it is likely to flash fabulous displays of the aurora or southern and northern lights.
Solar Tsunami that lasted for 35 minutes in the year 2007. The same thing happened again on 3rd August 2010.
Can you guess the name of this planet? Even though it seems something out of The Little Prince, this is our planet Earth. Don’t be shocked….it’s a small part of the earth integrated into a four image stereographic little planet projection. The fisheye image located at the central part points down; at the same time the neighboring wide angle images were taken at 30 degree tilts and digitally added later.
Some items like green grass, trees and dark shadows are surrounded at the image center near and far. At the top of the image, is a well lit Parkes Radio Telescope dish, in New South Wales, Australia. You can also see many jewels surrounding the sky at the night including the moon at 9pm, the small Magellanic cloud galaxy at 5pm and also the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy at 1:30 pm. You can see the complete picture HERE.
What happens when a star’s nucleus contains an enormous quantity of matter? The neutron star’s interior can not support its own weight, so it begins to compress into itself and collapses even further. But unlike the other processes in a star’s evolution, in this case a surprising thing happens. The star is condemned to totally collapse under its own weight. Its diameter begins to reduce at the same time that its density increases. There is nothing known in nature that is capable of opposing such an intense gravitational force.
How does this process end? Surprisingly, it can be said that it never ends. When the force of gravity is very intense, the effects predicted by the theory of relativity become important, particularly the shrinking time. We see that the process continuously becomes slower, in such a way that we can never see it end. There are other curious effects that have to do with this theory. At a certain point, gravity is so intense that even light can not escape from star in contraction. This is called a black hole.
Although black holes have never been observed, it is believed that they exist. If in the case of a binary star system, where two stars are close together, one of the objects is a black hole and the other is a giant, a part of the giant’s matter will be trapped by the black hole. The matter will begin falling toward the black hole and will heat up considerably and emit x-rays.
When a supernova explodes, most of the star is destroyed. However, the stars nucleus can survive the explosion. What remains after the explosion is so compressed that it is like an enormous nucleus of an atom. It is called a neutron star, since it is primarily made up of neutrons. A teaspoon of this matter would weigh more than a million tons. A neutron star has about the same amount of matter as the sun, but its diameter measures only about 6miles (10kilometers).
Neutron star does not give off visible light, but they transmit radio waves (another form of electromagnetic radiation, on a wavelength much longer than light). These tars spin very fast on their own, emitting a beam of radiation that spins along with the star, exactly as a light house’s lamp does. Each time the beam points towards the earth, we receive a pulse of radiation. This is what is known as a pulsar.
Pulsars were first discovered by chance in 1967by two British radio astronomers. At that time the existence of neutron stars was only a theory. Today we know of hundreds of pulsars in our galaxy, and every year more are discovered. Astronomers hope one day to discover the pulsar that was probably formed after the 1987 supernova explosion in the great Magellanic Cloud. The pulsations from pulsars are normally repeated in periods of less than a second. As a pulsar ages, its speed of rotation slows and the pulsations become less frequent. The youngest known pulsar is the center of the Crab Nebula, which is all that remains of the star that exploded in 1054.The Crab’s pulsar, has a period of 0.033 second, which means that the neutron star rotates 30 times per second. Recently faster pulsars have been discovered, which reach speeds of 500 rotations per second.
