#eight-burst nebula

[verseinfinity]

[quiltofstars]

The Eight-Burst Nebula, NGC 3132 // Philip Bartlett

[of-stars-and-dust]

Astronomy Picture of the Day

2005 February 6

NGC 3132: The Eight Burst Nebula

Credit: Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI /NASA)

It's the dim star, not the bright one, near the center of NGC 3132 that created this odd but beautiful planetary nebula. Nicknamed the Eight-Burst Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, the glowing gas originated in the outer layers of a star like our Sun. In this representative color picture, the hot blue pool of light seen surrounding this binary system is energized by the hot surface of the faint star. Although photographed to explore unusual symmetries, it's the asymmetries that help make this planetary nebula so intriguing. Neither the unusual shape of the surrounding cooler shell nor the structure and placements of the cool filamentary dust lanes running across NGC 3132 are well understood.

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (USRA)

NASA Official: Jay Norris.

A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC

& Michigan Tech. U.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Hubble captures a pale blue supernova in galaxy LEDA 22057

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features the galaxy LEDA 22057, which is located about 650 million light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Like the subject of a previous Picture of the Week, LEDA 22057 is the site of a supernova explosion.

This particular supernova, named SN 2024PI, was discovered by an automated survey in January 2024. The survey covers the entire northern half of the night sky every two days and has cataloged more than 10,000 supernovae.

The supernova is visible in the image: Located just down and to the right of the galactic nucleus, the pale blue dot of SN 2024PI stands out against the galaxy's ghostly spiral arms. This image was taken about a month and a half after the supernova was discovered, so the supernova is seen here many times fainter than its maximum brilliance.

SN 2024PI is classified as a Type Ia supernova. This type of supernova requires a remarkable object called a white dwarf, the crystallized core of a star with a mass less than about eight times the mass of the sun. When a star of this size uses up the supply of hydrogen in its core, it balloons into a red giant, becoming cool, puffy and luminous.

Over time, pulsations and stellar winds cause the star to shed its outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf and a colorful planetary nebula. White dwarfs can have surface temperatures higher than 100,000 degrees and are extremely dense, packing roughly the mass of the sun into a sphere the size of Earth.

While nearly all of the stars in the Milky Way will one day evolve into white dwarfs—this is the fate that awaits the sun some five billion years in the future—not all of them will explode as Type Ia supernovae. For that to happen, the white dwarf must be a member of a binary star system.

When a white dwarf siphons material from a stellar partner, the white dwarf can become too massive to support itself. The resulting burst of runaway nuclear fusion destroys the white dwarf in a supernova explosion that can be seen many galaxies away.

[world-beauty]

NGC 3132: The Eight Burst Nebula

Credits: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team, STScI, AURA

[notmadebyhumanhands]

Letters to a Starstill

Of my birthing came forth from an ylem The unforeseen result of careless frivolity And sometime soon, this tensile realm Beckons to burst with dreamers free

Where no northern arrow Has ever pierced; no hemisphere To divide a sinking so shallow Be the guiding point in a vast sheer

Let there be no visible scars A shadow of some broken countenance False lovers illuminated by the stars Henceforth runs a patulous arrogance

A cluster luculent only underneath Layers of nebula and atmosphere Celestial equivalent of a human heartbeat A tellurian affair down below gazes up here

Sans doubt, degust it now, ever so gently Yielding only to ensorcell upon which it looms This unattainable reality, yet so vivid an imagery Appearance of starry erubescent blooms

And thus herewith I constellate A chiliad made for praising you Gleaming points of light forever oscillate But the sensuality of touch to eschew

In the sanctuary of nighttime's soul Should the conscious state lie in half-wake When zephyr flutters by remembrance's goal They twinkle way above high for your sake

But shall it turn the eight-burst furious Speed of dark descends in eviternity The lightpoints then to sleep in fuscous Loveheart locked in velleity

[constelladream]

Let me spice it up a bit and ask how many shots for way of wanderlust, sumin of nebula, and diaz of varsity for Kazuo, ario, turkey boy pavo, and yeong 🤭👀

"TURKEY BOY PFTT-" Ario bursts into laughter. The older boy grumbles.

"I dislike that so many of our Spanish fans keep calling me that..." Pavo mumbles. He clears his throat as he thinks about his answer, ignoring Ario's laughs. "But anyways, Yeong is out doing practice so it'll just be us three. So let's see...Way sunbae...oh, Kazuo is a really big fanboy of him, aren't you?" He asks the younger boy besides him. Kazuo blushes shyly.

"Uhm...y-yeah...I'm...a big fan of Wanderlust sunbaenims..." He answers a bit quietly, covering his blushing cheeks with his hands. Ario giggles.

"He really likes Way more than the others," The brunette adds. Kazuo groans.

"Don't spread that information!"

"He's not wrong," Pavo laughs. "Honestly, probably seven shots. I'd need to be very drunk if I were to sleep with him. Sumin from Nebula sunbaes...I don't think any...she's not really my type. No offense." He smiles.

"Sumin sunbae is pretty," Ario smiles. "But yeah, she's not really my type either. But she's nice to be friends with!" Pavo nods in agreement.

"And for Diaz sunbaenim? Probably six shots. He's cool and all, but I probably need a lot to be bold to ask him." He hums. He turns to Kazuo, noticing how the raven head has calmed down a bit. "What about you Kazuo?"

"Oh uhm...for Sumin sunbae...maybe eight shots?" Kazuo says.

"That's a lot," Ario comments. Kazuo shrugs.

"I'd probably have to do it while I'm drunk," Kazuo says. "But for Diaz sunbaenim...I mean he's kinda cool...probably four shots."

"And for Way sunbae?" Ario smirks. The raven head goes quiet, his cheeks turning red again as he thinks.

"U-uhm...I...kinda would say I could sleep with him sober but...I'd be really nervous so...maybe five."

"Damn, alright," Ario laughs lightly. "For Way sunbae, I'd probably go with three shots. He's pretty cute hehe. Diaz sunbae is kinda hot, not gonna lie...Jooha hyung is so lucky~ But honestly, if they weren't together, I'd probably do one shot."

[foolishprince]

My aethers are finally finished... and they'll be up to nest as soon as i write lore for them. they're both named after both celestial bodies AND have musical references [the eight burst nebula, but also similar to 8bit or 8tracks] [cassiopeia, or or the song Casio by Gorrilaz].

i think i'm going to make them weird edm artists...

[cipher-fresh]

"Are you ready, Skip?" the Doctor asked, trying to contain his smile. "Oh, it's going to be beautiful. Ranked one of the most beautiful places in this galaxy four times by three different civilizations." "I'm sure it'll be beautiful, but I don't think it'll be the right place." Skip deadpanned. The Doctor held back a choice retort and held his hand out, which Skip took. With his other hand he gestuered for her to close her eyes.

"I'm bringing you over to the doors. One more step. Opening the doors. See, what did I tell you. Open your eyes." Skip felt for the door and then opened her eyes. The air was cold. The sky outside the doors was a light, hazy purple. Cosmic phenomena hung in the sky- on the horizon were two ringed planets at a considerable distance, a moon, a multicolored nebula, a spattering of constellations. Underneath was a white field with no trees, roads or bodies of water in sight. The white ground was faintly illuminated by the many sources of light from the sky. In the distance- the far, far distance on the planet's surface- was a range of mountains. The Doctor burst away from the TARDIS doors and skipped a pace away from Skip. "My god, smell that salt breeze!" the Doctor exclaimed, his arms raised in the air. Skip walked at a slow pace behind him, following him to his new spot. "S' a salt flat." the Doctor explained. "Incredible. Especially at night. They don't exist on every habitable planet. Quite a rarity in your area of the galaxy, actually. Well, this planet is always 'nighttime', 'cos it doesn't rotate. No one's stepped on this salt flat for sixteen thousand years." Wow. Long time. "What are the people like on this planet?" she asked, facing away from him. "Oh, wonderful lot. Three arms. They don't migrate to this continent for another millenia. It's the last island to be found by explorers on the planet. Nine hundred and twenty-eight years from now, a long-term living ship crashes onto a beach eight hundred miles from here. Finds this place. Names it. People move in. The salt flats become a tourist destination. But right now, silent and empty, I think it's prettier." The Doctor kept speaking, but Skip walked a few again away from him and squatted down to examine the ground of the salt flat. She dipped two webbed fingers into a small pile of salt and tasted a couple of small grains. She stood back up and looked back at the Doctor, who had trailed off and was now looking at her, a slight smile.

Skip licked the inside of her cheeks where she had swallowed the salt. She struggled to reallly imagine how a place could be abandoned for so long. This place probably used to be a saltwater bay, or even a beach. The water would have evaporated a long time ago. Skip reached her hands to her shoulders and rubbed them. "I want to leave." The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "You're alright, Skip?" "I'm fine. I want to leave." He made a face, but the Doctor turned back around and opened the doors.

Skip sat in one of the soft recliner chairs that were in the Doctor's spacious console room. He disappeared to somewhere, which Skip appreciated. She gritted her teeth and then wetted her lips. He returned shortly afterwards with two cups of tea. The Doctor sipped quietly. Skip broke eye contact when she noticed he was watching.

"I'm amazed you got to the right place." Skip said eventually, tasting some of the tea. The Doctor didn't appreciate the evasion. "Something's clearly bothering you." Skip pressed her knees together tightly, making her boots clack with the sound of metal on metal. "It's nothing. I just didn't- I thought it was cold. Will it be warmer during the day?" "This planet doesn't have a day-night cycle." Skip made an exaggerated expression. "Serves it right." "Skip, if you don't want to say what's wrong-" "Nothing is fucking wrong!" she shouted, getting up from the chair. She dropped the cup of tea and stormed off into the TARDIS. She had half a mind to walk out the TARDIS doors, but it was decidedly unpragmatic. She had a room she could sleep in. Maybe the Doctor would give her the sense to leave her alone.

Her room was actually quite pleasant- way better than the worker's housing she used to live in. It had a high ceiling, at least two stories tall, and a quarter of the room was a significantly-sized water tank. Not big enough to be someone's rejuvination room, but sizeable and still inside a bigger room that was just hers. The walls came with bookshelves, holding books from galaxies Skip couldn't even dream of. She'd skimmed some of the book titles of the shelf near her eyeline and many of them were about aquatic planets and underwater anatomy. Whether that was the Doctor or the TARDIS' doing she couldn't tell. She'd decorated the place with a few souvinirs from their travels, but nothing of her personal posessions from home. Not that she could consider work-subsidized housing that much of a home when all of her coworkers looked at her the way they did. Why did every place have to be like…home? If it didn't come with the wonderful surprise present of suffocation and then popping like a balloon in the vacuum of space she'd live on a gas giant. She hated being reminded of both of them. She just wanted a place nothing like that god damn planet at war with itself. It was getting hard to breathe.

Skip let out a scream of frutration, and reached into a drawer for the injection gun. The process was simple, really. The gel pack was loaded into the container, switched into the body of the gun and closed shut, then pierced by an internal needle and injected into a vein to travel along her bloodstream the fastest. She was in an oxygenated environment, so the blue gel pack it was. She could have just gotten into the water tank and slept, but then she would have needed to do a gray oxygenation pack later. Skip thought her bed with the fluffy blankets was comfortable anyway.

She wetted her lips with her tongue and went over to the lightswitch- not an electrical switch as she'd become accustomed to on land but a green, slimy ball on the wall she pushed her hand into. When the light had retreated to a dark enough percentage, she took her hand back out, and it felt cleaner than it had before. She took a deep breath and went to her bed.

Not to be given too much by the Corals of Luck, she couldn't fall asleep. She rubbed her fingers against her cleaner hand and felt the healing callouses and rough skin. Every mindless day of manual labor back home rolled into one in her mind. She primarily moved packages onto land back into water to be delivered to means of faster transportation. Everything was waterproof. The tension between the two desposited species on her home planet meant there were almost no open beaches- one needed special permission to cross the barrier between aquatic and mammal territory in highly populated areas on either side. This treaty had been established shortly after she was born, and was what kept the two species from ripping each other's heads off. How dare this other species live with us when we were the ones invaded and had our home planet demolished! They're going to use our resources! both of them said.

She'd been a part of the first generation born on this co-habitated planet, and certainly one of the first mixed-species children of the planet. They didn't have injection guns when she was a kid, she'd slept in a pool at her father's house before moving to a small town off the coast. She'd be worried about running out now but the TARDIS supplied them eagerly and in great quantity.

Maybe she just needed to find a planet that wasn't land and wasn't ocean. Live on her own. Grow her own food. Live in her own house with no one else. Never move another box. Never get another comment about her skin of her gills or her webbed fingers. Never answer people's questions. Never hear any sound but her own footsteps and her own singing.

That would be nice. But there was no way there was a place like that. Certainly not for her.

Skip gripped the blanket tighter. She'd apologize to the Doctor in the morning.

[mystarypi-astronomy]

This is the Eight Burst Nebula! 🌈🌈🌈

The bright white dwarf at the center of this planetary nebula results in this rainbow glow from its intense ultraviolet radiation. The beautiful structure of this nebula is known to arise from the death of a Sun-like star, but its asymmetry draws questions to this day! 💖💖💖

Taken by me (Michelle Park) using the Slooh Chile Two telescope on December 27th, 2021 at 05:03 UTC. 

[therealuniverse]

The Southern Ring Nebula This photo from the Hubble Space Telescope captures NGC 3132, which is nicknamed either the Southern Ring Nebula or the “Eight-Burst” nebula. It is located about 2000 light years from Earth and is visible to amateur astronomers.

This is a planetary nebula. As required in all posts about planetary nebulas, I should first note that a planetary nebula has nothing to do with planets. Planetary nebulas form around stars as they are dying, they’re made of gas and dust shed off the star’s outer layers. The name has been passed down from early astronomy when astronomers instead mistook these layers for places where planets were forming. See the little star? This is a binary system, and that star is the one that is at the end of its life. It has burned through most of its fuel and is shedding off its outer layers. The larger star is still active, putting out energy that is lighting up the dust cloud and blowing out a stellar wind that is spreading out the gas cloud into this ring. The different colors represent gas that has reached different temperatures due to that star. One of the most interesting features of this nebula is the pair of stringers of dust that seem to cross-cut this nebula, going through the center of the ring. Scientists working to understand this nebula recently suggested that the larger star is one of a handful of stars that is putting out a jet of dust and gas. While a number of stars, including ones associated with planetary nebulas do this, these dust trails curve through the nebula, suggesting that the jets might not be fixed along the poles of the star. Instead, the position of the jets may be wobbling like a top about to fall over, making this larger star a rare case of a star with “Precessing Jets” (precession is that top-like spinning motion) -JBB Image credit: Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA/ESA) Reference: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201936845 https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/335/4/1100/962887

[spinningblueball]

NGC 2132 - Eight Burst Nebula

[quiltofstars]

The Southern Ring Nebula, NGC 3132 // Sergei

[the-wolf-and-moon]

NGC 3132, Eight-Burst Nebula

[world-beauty]

NGC 3132: The Eight Burst Nebula

Credits: Hubble Heritage Team, AURA, STScI, NASA

[mysticstronomy]

WHY IS JWST SO SPECIAL??

Blog# 213

Wednesday, July 27th, 2022

Welcome back,

On 12 July, the first set of full-resolution science images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was released. This set included astonishingly sharp pictures of the Carina Nebula, the Eight-Burst Nebula, a group of galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet and a galaxy cluster stretching the light of the objects behind it, as well as an analysis of the composition of an exoplanet named WASP-96b.

Here’s everything you need to know about the telescope that took these pictures and what it may be able to reveal next.

What is so special about these images? Didn’t we have the Hubble Space Telescope before JWST?

We did and do have Hubble, which produces so many gorgeous images of space. But JWST is way bigger, so its pictures are more detailed. It also observes in different wavelengths than Hubble, which allows it to see things – particularly super distant things – that Hubble can’t.

How close to the edge of the observable universe will JWST be able to see? I’ve seen 13.5 billion light years quoted – that seems very close to the age of the universe at about 13.8 billion years.  

JWST should be able to see between 100 and 250 million years after the big bang! But while that is up to about 13.7 billion years ago, it’s not 13.7 billion light years away – it is much further than that, because of the expansion of the universe.

Will JWST study supermassive black holes? Can it produce an image similar to the one from the Event Horizon Telescope?

JWST can’t make an image of a supermassive black hole like the Event Horizon Telescope did – that’s a different kind of telescope – but it will study them. In fact, the picture of Stephan’s Quintet that was just released is providing some interesting information on one already.

Is it possible for gravitational lensing [like that seen in JWST’s first deep-field image] to be strong enough to see yourself? Like, light does a U-turn?

Yes! Black holes can have a feature called a photon sphere, where gravity’s pull is so strong that light orbits the black hole. So if you aim a light just outside the photon sphere you could, in theory, see that light come around the other side of the black hole.

If JWST can see 13.5 billion years back, could we one day make a telescope that can “see” further than the beginning of time?

I wish! Unfortunately, there’s a fundamental limit to how far back we can see, because up until a little less than 380,000 years after the big bang, the universe was completely filled with hot plasma and was therefore opaque.

Can we see further back than 380,000 years after the big bang with gravitational waves detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) or the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA)?

Love this question! Unfortunately, the answer is no, because gravitational waves come from the motion of masses, and there just weren’t any structures big enough to create measurable gravitational waves until about 100 million years after the big bang.

With the data and imagery collected, is it possible (or even probable) that scientists will revise the currently accepted age of the universe to be much much older than a mere 13.7 billion years?

It is possible that the data from JWST will cause us to revise the age of the universe based on new measurements of its expansion, but if so, it will probably go down rather than up. 

Was there anything unexpected about the spectra of the galaxy and exoplanet obtained so far?

I don’t think there was anything particularly shocking in the data that’s come down so far. The images are all of systems that are already very well studied, but we just have far more detail now than ever before. So, we are seeing new things, but I don’t think those are very unexpected.

Why did the JWST crew choose WASP-96b as the first exoplanet to analyse the composition of? What was special about it?

What’s special about WASP-96b is that it isn’t cloudy – the new spectrum shows some evidence of clouds and haze, but not much. That’s good because it allows the starlight to shine right through the atmosphere and for us to analyse it without being blocked by lots of clouds.

How will astronomers decide what to take a picture of [with JWST] next?

The first year of science has actually already been planned out. Researchers made more than 1000 proposals for what to observe, and they were selected by panels of scientists. 

Originally published on www.newscientist.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, July 30th, 2022)

“WHAT IS INSIDE THE BLACK HOLE??”