Pic of the Week: Spiral Arm of Galaxy M51

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): View of an arm of the Messier 51 galaxy from both JWST and the Hubble Space Telescop. (ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Pedrini, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team)

This week’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Hubble Space Telescope, which together scanned about 9,000 star clusters in the four galaxies. What you are looking at above comes from the spiral arm of one of the galaxies – Messier 51 (M51).

Here is a description from the European Space Agency (ESA) regarding what you are seeing in the image:

A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.

Pic of the Week: Spiral Galaxy NGC 3137

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 3137, located 53 million light-years away. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker and the PHANGS-HST Team

This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows spiral galaxy NGC 3137 in all its glory. We are getting a nice inclined view of the galaxy, allowing us to see multiple arms of stars.

The European Space Agency (ESA) describes what we are seeing in this way:

A spiral galaxy seen close up and tilted at an angle, so that its disc fills the view from corner to corner. Its disc is yellow near to the centre and pale blue farther out, showing cooler and hotter stars, respectively. Thin brown clouds of dust, glowing pink spots of star formation, and sparkling blue patches filled with star clusters swirl through the galaxy. Behind it, small orange dots are very distant galaxies.

Pic of the Week: Hubble and the Crab Nebula

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): A 2024 image of the Crab Nebula captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, STScI, William Blair (JHU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is an image of the Crab Nebula taken 25 years after the Hubble’s first image of the nebula. If you want to learn more about this history, a paper titled The Crab Nebula Revisited Using HST/WFC3 can be found in The Astrophysical Journal.

Here is a little more from NASA on earlier sightings of the nebula:

This new Hubble observation continues a legacy that stretches back nearly 1,000 years, when astronomers in 1054 recorded the supernova as an impressively bright new star that, for weeks, was visible even during the day. The Crab Nebula is the aftermath of SN 1054, located 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus…

The supernova remnant was discovered in the mid-18th century, and in the 1950s Edwin Hubble was among several astronomers who noted the close correlation between Chinese astronomical records of a supernova and the position of the Crab Nebula. The discovery that the heart of the Crab contained a pulsar — a rapidly rotating neutron star — that was powering the nebula’s expansion finally aligned modern observations and ancient records.

Pic of the Week: Multiple Views of Saturn

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit):Two views of Saturn, one from NASA’s JWST and the second from the Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC), Michael Wong (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))

This week’s images of Saturn from 2024 were just released by NASA. They show the planet in a variety of ways, depending on the telescope and instruments being used. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) and Hubble Space Telescope each have their own unique abilities that can bring the distant gas giant to life.

In its comments on the two images above, NASA noted:

Together, scientists can effectively ‘slice’ through Saturn’s atmosphere at multiple altitudes, like peeling back the layers of an onion. Each telescope tells a different part of Saturn’s story, and the observations together help researchers understand how Saturn’s atmosphere works as a connected three-dimensional system. Both complement previous observations done by NASA’s Cassini orbiter during its time studying the Saturnian system from 1997 to 2017...These 2024 observations, taken 14 weeks apart, show the planet moving from northern summer toward the 2025 equinox. As Saturn transitions into southern spring, and later southern summer in the 2030’s, Hubble and Webb will have progressively better views of that hemisphere.

Pic of the Week: A Protostar in the Cepheus A Region

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Cepheus A region, including a protostar causing much of this region’s illumination. (NASA, ESA, and R. Fedriani (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

This week’s image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the star-forming region Cepheus A in the constellation of Cepheus. This region is about 2,400 light-years away.

Here is more from NASA about this region:

The high-mass star-forming region Cepheus A hosts a collection of baby stars, including one large and luminous protostar, which accounts for about half of the region’s brightness. While much of the region is shrouded in opaque dust, light from hidden stars breaks through outflow cavities to illuminate and energize areas of gas and dust, creating pink and white nebulae. The pink area is an HII region, where the intense ultraviolet radiation of the nearby stars has converted the surrounding clouds of gas into glowing, ionized hydrogen.