trillion pixels, and makes up a
petabyte of data a thousand terabytes, or a million gigabytes.
Oh, it also has over
a billion galaxies in it. A. Billion.
Like I said: Vast.
It s the result of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, maps of the sky made by the three observatories (the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey, the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey, and the Mayall zband Legacy Survey, in combination with the orbiting WISE infrared observatory). They mapped the northern sky in seven colors, covering a third of the entire sky 14,000 square degrees, or the equivalent area of 70,000 full Moons on the sky.
lot a lot.
A new paper has come out showing how magnetic fields can be used to extract huge amounts of energy from a black hole, and may power some astrophysical phenomena we see around them. It’s not exactly easy, and it’s not like you’ll be able to charge up your phone or heat your house with this technique (more like you’d vaporize them down to their constituent subatomic particles which would then be accelerated outwards at very near the speed of light ), but it’s still extremely cool.
Video of Black Holes: Crash Course Astronomy #33
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StDr 56, a possible planetary nebula in the constellation of Triangulum. It’s about the same size as the full Moon on the sky. Credit: Robert Pölz, Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner
See? I told you. Absolutely breathtaking.
But. what
is it?
The quick version is, I don t know. The slightly more lengthy version is, it s a nebula, and probably a planetary nebula, but I have never seen one like this, and there are some baffling aspects of it I cannot explain.
StDr 56 was discovered by amateur astronomers Marcel Drechsler and Xavier Strottner, who comb through surveys of the sky looking for planetary nebulae (or PNe) winds of gas that flow from stars like the Sun when they die, blown when the star turns into a red giant. Eventually the outer layers blow away entirely, revealing the core of the star: a hot dense white dwarf. Ultraviolet light from the white dwarf excites the gas, causing it to glow.
WASP-107b was discovered in 2017, and quickly found to be weird. It’s a hot Jupiter, a gas giant orbiting its star very closely, at a distance of only 9 million kilometers. Mercury orbits the Sun at roughly 60 million kilometers, so WASP-107b is
close. The host star, WASP-107, is an orange dwarf, smaller and cooler than the Sun, but still not something you want to be that close to unless baking your entire planet is your goal. The temperature of WASP-107b is likely around 1,000° C (1,800°F).
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Artwork of a hot Jupiter , an exoplanet the size of Jupiter but orbiting its host star at a small fraction of Earth s distance to the Sun. Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick
About 200,000 years ago, a massive star in a nearby companion galaxy to the Milky Way exploded. Blasting octillions of tons of debris outwards at high velocity, the explosion has been expanding into space ever since. Today it looks like a swirl of cirrus clouds, its huge velocity diminished almost to motionlessness by distance.
But the actual expansion is measurable, and by using a clever technique that runs the clock on it backwards, astronomers have determined when the light of the explosion first reached Earth: 1746 years ago, give or take 175 .
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A wide field of view Hubble image of the supernova remnant 1E 0102.2-7219 (below center, blue) shows it lies just a few dozen light years from the huge star-forming nebula N76 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to the Milky Way. Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)