[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / Rogelio Bernal Andreo] Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion’s well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA; Processing: Judy Schmidt] What will survive this battle of the galaxies? Known as Seyfert’s Sextet, this intriguing group …. actually contains only four interacting galaxies. Near the center of this Hubble Space Telescope picture, the small face-on spiral galaxy lies in the distant background […]
Most scientists would probably say that the concept of an afterlife is either nonsense, or at the very least unprovable. Yet one expert claims he has evidence to confirm an existence beyond the grave – and it lies in quantum physics. Professor Robert Lanza claims the theory of biocentrism teaches that death as we know […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Hubble, NASA] Stars, like bees, swarm around the center of bright globular cluster M15. This ball of over 100,000 stars is a relic from the early years of our Galaxy, and continues to orbit the Milky Way’s center. M15, one of about 170 globular clusters remaining, is noted for […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] The bright core and outer reaches of giant elliptical galaxy M60 (NGC 4649) loom large at the upper left of this sharp close-up from the Hubble Space Telescope. Some 54 million light-years away and 120,000 light-years across, M60 is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster. […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, CLICK ON IMAGE] / Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona] The beautiful, dusty nebula NGC 2170 shines at the upper left. Reflecting the light of nearby hot stars, NGC 2170 is joined by other bluish reflection nebulae, a compact red emission region, and streamers of obscuring dust against a backdrop of […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] / Bob Franke Beautiful barred spiral galaxy M109, 109th entry in Charles Messier’s famous catalog of bright Nebulae and Star Clusters, is found just below the Big Dipper’s bowl in the northern constellation Ursa Major. In telescopic views, its striking central bar gives the galaxy the appearance of the […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] What did the first galaxies look like? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope has just finished taking the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light. Pictured above, the XDF shows a sampling of some of the oldest galaxies […]
It’s easy to get lost following the intricate filaments in this detailed mosaic image of faint supernova remnant Simeis 147 (S147). Also cataloged as Sh2-240, it covers nearly 3 degrees or 6 full moons on the sky. That’s about 150 light-years at the stellar debris cloud’s estimated distance of 3,000 light-years. … This sharp composite […]
This weekend Looper, a gritty time-travel thriller from writer/director Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom) arrives in movie theaters across the United States. The story: Powerful crime organizations in the late 21st century can’t off their foes without getting caught, so they illegally send victims back in time to the year 2044 to be disposed […]