Seven Sisters
In astronomy, the Pleiades (1885 The Pleiades by symbolist painter Elihu Vedder), or Seven Sisters (Messier object 45), is an open star cluster containing middle-aged hot B-type stars located in the constellation of Taurus.
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Future astronomers could still deduce the Big Bang
One trillion years from now, alien astronomers in our galaxy will have a difficult time figuring out how the universe began. They won’t have the evidence that we enjoy today.
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Celestial fireworks from dying stars
This picture of the star formation region NGC 3582 was taken using the Wide Field Imager at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. The image reveals giant loops of gas ejected by dying stars that bear a striking resemblance to solar prominences.
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Sunrise with Venus and Jupiter
These two celestial beacons shining brightly in the east before sunrise are actually children of the Sun, the planets Venus and Jupiter. Photograph Babak Tafreshi
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Most massive distant object
Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientists have discovered the most massive distant cluster known, SPT-CLJ2106-5844, weighing in at 1.3 thousand trillion solar masses (more than about a thousand times the Milky Way‘s mass).
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Sun’s spiraling active region in profile (video)
Cascades of spiraling magnetic loops observed in extreme ultraviolet light by SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory) danced and twisted above an active region on the Sun (Apr. 3-5, 2011).
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Merged black hole eagerly shreds stars
A galaxy’s core is a busy place, crowded with stars swarming around an enormous black hole. When galaxies collide, it gets even messier as the two black holes spiral toward each other, merging to make an even bigger gravitational monster.
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Sunspot in ultraviolet
The Sun’s surface is a busy place. Shown in ultraviolet light, the relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius.
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Red giant star echoes
A journey to the center of a red giant star is very firmly in the realm of science fiction. But the science of asteroseismology can explore the conditions there.
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Mysterious Space Blob
Astronomers using a suite of telescopes including the W. M. Keck Observatory have discovered a giant gas object that may be one of the earliest ancestors of a forming galaxy. This object, dubbed an extended Lyman-Alpha blob and identified as Himiko, sits nearly 13 billion light years from Earth and spans 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time.
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