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Geminid Meteor
Photograph by Wally Pacholka, TWAN
December 13, 2009--Like a silver spear cast from the heavens, the bright streak of a Geminid meteor pierces the night sky over California's Mojave Desert during the annual meteor shower's 2009 peak.
Geminids are slower than other shooting stars and are known to make beautiful long arcs across the sky. This could be because they're born of debris from a dormant comet and so are made mostly of hard, sun-baked rock that takes longer to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, experts suggest.
(Get more 2009 Geminids facts.)December 15, 2009
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Stellar Cluster R136
Image courtesy NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O'Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee
December 15, 2009--Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have created their version of a holiday wreath: a new picture of the young stellar cluster R136. The festive grouping sits in a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy.
In the image, garlands of red (hydrogen) and green (oxygen) gas surround icy blue "diamonds" that are actually some of the most massive stars known--several are more than a hundred times the mass of our sun.December 15, 2009
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Iapetus's Twin Faces
Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
December 10, 2009--That's no shadow over Saturn's moon Iapetus: The so-called leading hemisphere (left) is much darker than the opposite side, due to a combination of migrating ice and dark red dust, astronomers have found.
Possibly solving a 300-year-old mystery, two recent studies suggest a likely mechanism behind Iapetus' two-faced nature. To start, infalling dust from an external source--maybe another moon or Saturn's newest known ring--darkens the leading side of Iapetus, which therefore absorbs more sunlight and heats up enough to evaporate ice near the equator.
The evaporating ice recondenses on the colder, undusted poles and on the trailing hemisphere. Meanwhile, loss of ice on the leading hemisphere makes the surface even darker, triggering a feedback loop that keeps Iapetus' extreme contrasts in place.December 15, 2009
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The Flame Nebula
Image courtesy ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA
December 11, 2009--A crisp new picture of the Flame Nebula is among the first to be released from the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), which started operations this week.
Based at the European Southern Observatory's site on Cerro Paranal in Chile, VISTA is now the world's largest telescope dedicated to mapping the sky.
The telescope's three-ton camera sees in infrared light. This allows VISTA to penetrate otherwise opaque clouds of dust to capture stars being born and to see objects both too distant and too cold for their visible light to reach Earth.December 15, 2009
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Protoplanetary Disks
Image courtesy NASA/ESA and L. Ricci (ESO)
December 14, 2009--Each dusty blob featured in this newly released mosaic represents a never before seen protoplanetary disk--a circle of planet-forming dust around a newborn star--in the Orion Nebula.
Orion is the closest star-forming region visible to the naked eye, due to the fact that its stars are massive enough to heat up--and light up--their surrounding gas. The 30 disks seen above are among 42 spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope during a multiyear survey of the well-known nebula.December 15, 2009
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