VLT Snaps An Exotic Exoplanet “First”

Horsehead Nebula 

Next level backyard astrophotography!

“Amateur astrophotographer David Ellison captured this image **from his backyard** in Chattanooga, Tenn. Located approximately 1,500 light years from Earth in the constellation Orion, the Horsehead Nebula is simple to spot due to its unique shape resembling a horse’s head. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). This image is a narrow band photograph of four hours of exposure using a QSI camera and a 4-inch telescope. The star seen just above the Flame nebula is Alnitak. Goodnight, Earthlings! Credit and Copyright: David Ellison.“

A nebulous sky

The incredibly dark and transparent sky of Paranal, in the Atacama Desert, Chile, is the perfect place to see the bright emission of various nebulae. The white dome of the Residencia occupies the bottom of the image. La Residencia hosts those working at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The hotel represents an oasis in the dry and harsh conditions of the Chilean Atacama desert.

Credit: ESO/M. Claro

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Amazing. Hubble’s Deep Field image in relation to the rest of the night sky.

The Galactic Core over Sharkfin Cove, CA.

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Blood Red Suwannee River.

The water is stained by decaying vegetation (similar to how tea is made), giving it this amazing blood red color (photo not edited) that looks like its out of a horror movie.

Upper Suwannee River, FL

An EPIC View of Earth

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” 

Carl Sagan wrote those words in his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision For The Human Future In Space. His now-famous ode to our home planet (listen to the full passage here, in animated form) is perhaps our most poignant and humble reminder of the exquisite beauty and shared fragility of this planet we call home. 

NASA is now bringing us a daily reminder of that message, thanks to the EPIC camera (a very appropriately named camera, in my opinion) on board NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. You can see some of its handiwork in the image sequence above.

DSCOVR’s official space job is to observe weather on and around the sun, to extend its mechanical finger into the solar wind and measure how strongly that stream of charged particles is gusting toward Earth. It does this job from a special spot in space called the L1 Lagrange point. If you were to draw a line between us and the sun, DSCOVR would be sitting along it, like so (not to scale):

That’s a convenient place to put a spacecraft, especially one whose job it is to stare at the sun. See, DSCOVR is nestled inside a pocket where it’s tugged equally by the Earth’s and Sun’s gravity, like a stalemate in an orbital game of tug-o-war. Gravity does all the work, and the spacecraft doesn’t need to maneuver much to stay in position. There’s a few of these gravity-neutral Lagrange points out there, as you can tell in the image above, and we’ve got spacecraft residing at all of them. 

As a side effect of its sun-staring mission, DSCOVR’s backside happens to be looking back at Earth full-time. In a way, I think that makes it a different sort of moon. 

NASA doesn’t like to let any opportunity go un-scienced, of course, so they decided to slap a camera on DSCOVR’s rear, the one named EPIC, and use their stable perch to keep a regular eye on us. Good lookin’ out, NASA.

A little change in perspective can do a planet good. In 1990, from a vantage point beyond Pluto, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward home to take one last look, giving us the image that inspired Carl Sagan’s ode to ol’ Dotty Blue:

This was not an easy shot to take. Voyager’s camera wasn’t the fancy digital type like most of us have in our phones. It was essentially an old-fashioned black and white tube TV in reverse, relying on colored filters held in front of the camera to highlight different wavelengths of light. Voyager stored its image data on magnetic tape, and each of the shots took more than five hours to reach Earth. Sagan and NASA’s planetary science team had to practically move the heavens (since they were unable to move the Earth) in order to take that picture. 

Now consider the effect this picture has had. That’s home. That’s us. Even if you weren’t born in 1990, everyone and everything that made you is in and on that hazy blue speck. I hope you never lose sight of how amazing it is to view our planet from this perspective. 

Luckily, you can get a reminder every day. The DSCOVR satellite is now sending roughly a picture an hour back to Earth, 24/7/365. That’s a near real-time view of our home. Go take a look. It’s pretty epic.

To see a daily look at what a day on Earth looks like, check out EPIC’s daily updates here.

“Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups (HCGs). This sharp telescopic image captures one such galaxy group, HCG 91, in beautiful detail. The group’s three colorful spiral galaxies at the center of the field of view are locked in a gravitational tug of war, their interactions producing faint but visible tidal tails over 100,000 light-years long. Their close encounters trigger furious star formation. On a cosmic timescale the result will be a merger into a large single galaxy, a process now understood to be a normal part of the evolution of galaxies, including our own Milky Way. HCG 91 lies about 320 million light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. But the impressively deep image also catches evidence of fainter tidal tails and galaxy interactions close to 2 billion light-years distant.”

Olympics Meme

A room with a view

Taken near the entrance to Paranal site’s Residencia hotel, ESO’s motivation behind building advanced telescopes in such remote and challenging locations could not be clearer. The spectacular sky, free from light pollution, reveals the secrets usually hidden in areas populated by humans. Strict regulations are in place to maintain these conditions, and the lights on the left are needed to mark the sides of the road (known as the stairway to heaven), because cars are not allowed to use their headlights. Palm fronds are not a typical part of the desert skyline, but this particular one was replanted outside after it grew too large to remain inside la Residencia. Unfortunately, the harsh conditions of the Atacama desert prooved too much, and it did not survive long.

The splash of the Milky Way to the left dwarfs the little blotches of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds to the right.

Credit: H. Sommer/ESO

What is so special about Saturn’s moon Titan?

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon and the only natural satellite in our solar system known to have a dense atmosphere. But there is something much more amazing about the Saturnian orbiter.

Titan has a vast system of oceans, lakes, and huge mountain ranges. How, though, could a body whose average temperature is -290°F (-179°C) contain liquid water on its surface? It doesn’t.

The oceans and lakes on Titan are made of liquid methane (CH₄) and ethane (C₂H₆). The mountains are made of water ice. That’s right. The “waters” of titan are made of not water, but hydrocarbons, and its mountain ranges are made of not minerals like calcium, iron, and cobalt, but ice.

Could, then, there be not water-based, but hydrocarbon-based life on Titan? Astrobiologists (scientists who study possible extraterrestrial life forms) are hoping to send rovers there one day to sample the oceans and answer that question.

If it turned out that there is life somewhere else in the solar system, it would be so much more than just a cool scientific discovery. For two hundred thousand years, we humans have thought that we were alone in the universe. We thought that only our blue and green home harbored life. If life turned up elsewhere, we would know that we were wrong all along.

(pictured: Titan; source: NASA, Cassini spacecraft, 2006)