Official Space is Awesome Thread

[Argonne69]

Barred spiral galaxy M91 is ~55 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. The supermassive black hole at the center of it weighs up to 38 million solar masses.

 

 

Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team

 

[Argonne69]

The Hickson Compact Group 40 includes 3 spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular galaxy. Caught in a gravitational dance, the whole group is so crowded that it could fit within a region of space that is less than twice the diameter of our Milky Way's disk. It is located in the constellation Hydra.

 

 

Full size image: https://stsci-opo.org/STScI-01FYSBAV6GZR4CXY22M25CFX8P.png

Image: ESA/Hubble, SASA, STScl, A. Pagan
 

[Argonne69]

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this dramatic footage of Phobos, Mars’ potato-shaped moon, crossing the face of the Sun.

 

 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI

 

[Argonne69]

M82, the Cigar galaxy, shines brightly at infrared wavelengths and is known for its star formation activity. It is located 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major.

 

 

Image: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Gallagher, M. Mountain, and P. Puxley

 

[Argonne69]

Another view of spiral galaxy Caldwell 12 (NGC 6946), the "Fireworks Galaxy". The Milky Way averages 1.5 supernovas per century, but the Fireworks Galaxy has had 10 in the last century. At 50,000 light-years across, it's roughly half the size of the Milky Way. It is 15 million light-years away on the border between the Cepheus and Cygnus constellations.

 

 

Image: NASA, ESA, L. Ho, G. Kober 

[Argonne69]

VV-689, also known as the Angel Wing, is located in the constellation of Leo. The two galaxies in VV-689 are in the midst of a collision.

 

 

Image: NASA, ESA, Hubble, W. Keel, J. Schmidt
 

[Argonne69]

The ultra-diffuse galaxy GAMA 526784 is located in the constellation Hydra, roughly four billion light-years away. 

 

 

Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. van der Burg, L. Shatz
 

[oz dee cee]

I appreciate the thread. It hurts my brain, but it’s awesome… 

[Jim53]

The more I look at these pictures the more I believe it is foolish to think we are alone, and sadly we as humans have proved to not be all that smart about things in the big picture of life.

[Argonne69]

4 hours ago, Jim53 said:

The more I look at these pictures the more I believe it is foolish to think we are alone, and sadly we as humans have proved to not be all that smart about things in the big picture of life.

 

Trillions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Most stars appear to have a handful of planets. Most planets have several moons. The odds of there being life on some of them are very good. 

 

I want to see humans land on Mars before I kick the bucket. I'd really like to see us find life on one of Jupiter's or Saturn's moons. 

 

[Argonne69]

Cool animation. Watching Jupiter makes me dizzy.

 

 

 

Edited May 3, 2022 by Argonne69

[Argonne69]

Two interacting galaxies, the compact elliptical galaxy NGC 1510 and the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512. The pair are located ~39 million light-years away in the constellation of Horologium. “The starry stream of light that connects the two galaxies is evidence of the gravitational interaction between them. NGC 1512 has been in the process of merging with NGC 1510 for 400 million years".

 

 

Image: Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL, DECam, CTIO, NOIRLab, NSF, AURA, T.A. Rector, Univ. of Alaska Anchorage & NSF’s NOIRLab, J. Miller, Gemini Observatory & NSF’s NOIRLab, M. Zamani, D. de Martin, NSF’s NOIRLab
 

 

[Argonne69]

Hubble has taken over 1.4 million images during its 32+ years in space. Physicist Casey Handmer combined these observations into a single image to see how much of the sky Hubble had captured. "Hubble was not designed to carry out wide-field surveys, and actually, it’s about 1.4 million observations cover lower than 0.8% of the sky,” Handmer said.

 

Image: C. Handmer
 

[Argonne69]

NGC 2525 is a barred spiral galaxy located in the constellation Puppis. It is ~70 million light years away, and is ~60,000 light years across. 

 

 

Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess and the SH0ES team, M. Zamani
 

[Argonne69]

The Webb Space Telescope inches closer to full operation. NASA released a test image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, that was imaged by the retired Spitzer Space Telescope a few years back. The difference in detail is stunning.

 

 

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech (left), NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI (right)

 

Edited May 11, 2022 by Argonne69

[Argonne69]

The Event Horizon Telescope project, a collaboration of more than 300 scientists from 13 institutions that operates a global network of telescopes that compose one large telescope as big as Earth, has produced the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. The black hole is roughly 4 million times the mass of the Sun. By comparison, the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, imaged by the project in 2019, is ~1500 times larger than Sagittarius A*, or 6.5 billion solar masses. 

The black hole's event horizon is ~7.5 million miles in radius, or 1/10th the radius of Earth's orbit. The accretion disk appears to extend out ~40 million miles, or roughly the distance that Mercury orbits the Sun.

 

 

Image: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration/National Science Foundation
 

[Argonne69]

M99 (NGC 4254) lies ~42 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. 

 

Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Kasliwal, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
 

Edited May 15, 2022 by Argonne69

[Argonne69]

The giant elliptical galaxy, UGC 10143, is at the heart of galaxy cluster, Abell 2147. It is 486 million light-years away the constellation Serpens.

 

 

Image: NASA, ESA, W. Harris, G. Kober 
 

[Argonne69]

The Milky Way above the Canary Islands.

 

 

Image: E. Goryachev

 

[Argonne69]

Streaks of some of the Perseid meteor shower accent the Milky Way over the Julian Alps on the border of Italy and Slovenia.

 

 

Image: U. Fink
 

[Argonne69]

Another image of M51 (NGC 5194), the Whirlpool Galaxy. It is located 31 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici.

 

 

Image: O. Penrice
 

[Argonne69]

Humble beginnings. Eleven years before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit, the U.S. captured this view of Earth from a suborbital flight of a V-2 rocket launched from the White Sands Missile Range. The rocket snapped this photo from an altitude of 65 miles. 

 

 

Image: U.S. Army, White Sands Missile Range, Applied Physics Laboratory

 

[Argonne69]

The elliptical galaxy NGC 474 is located ~100 million light-years from Earth. Measuring ~250,000 light-years across, NGC 474 is 2.5 times larger than othe Milky Way.

 

 

Image: NASA, ESA, D. Carter, DSS, G. Kober
 

[Argonne69]

Globular cluster NGC 6558 is closer to the center of the Milky Way than Earth is, and lies about 23,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Globular clusters are tightly bound collections of tens of thousands to millions of stars.

 

 

Image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Cohen
 

[Argonne69]

The Hidden Galaxy Caldwell 5 (IC 342). This nearby neighbor is only 10 million light-years from the Milky Way. It's roughly half the diameter of the Milky Way at 50,000 light-years. It's considered "hidden" because it sits near the plane of our galaxy, and its light is blocked by the cosmic dust near the equator. Caldwell 5 is actually one of the brightest galaxies we've observed.

 

 

Image: NASA, ESA, P. Sell, P. Kaaret, G. Kober

 

[Argonne69]

On August 23rd, 1966, NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1 was the first spacecraft in history to capture a view of Earth from the vicinity of the Moon.

 

 

Image: NASA

 

[Argonne69]

The Grand Design Spiral (NGC 3631) is located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. The spiral arms are filled with newly formed stars.

 

 

Image: NASA, ESA, A. Filippenko, D. Sand, G. Kober
 

[Argonne69]

Earthrise was captured on December 24, 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon.

 

 

Image: NASA
 

[Soloman1]

Sub-surface material brought back to earth by the Japanese probe Hayabusa2 that landed twice on the asteroid Ryugu has shown to contain amino acids, the basic building block of life. The material was protected from contamination by sunlight and cosmic rays, and was delivered back to earth without exposure to the atmosphere.

[Argonne69]

IC 4271, a pair of superimposed spiral galaxies also known as Arp 40, is located 800 million light-years away in the constellation of Canes Venatici.

 

 

Image: NASA, ESA, B. Holwerda, G. Kober