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| The Lagoon Nebula, as seen by NASA's WISE infrared imaging spacecraft. |
This colorful picture is a mosaic of the Lagoon nebula taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
Normally, you would expect a lagoon to be filled with water, but this nebula is composed of clouds of gas and dust in which new stars are forming. Also known as Messier 8, or simply M8, the Lagoon nebula is seen here as a large circular cloud in the center of the image, surrounded by innumerable stars.
This view is looking toward the center of the Milky Way, which is our home galaxy. The Solar System is located on one of the spiral arms, about halfway out from the center of the disk-shaped Milky Way Galaxy.
When we view the Milky Way from Earth, we are looking into the disk of the Galaxy where stars are so numerous that they appear to us as a cloudy band of light stretching across the sky.
The center of the Milky Way is located in the constellation Sagittarius, which is where the Lagoon nebula can be found. M8 is a favorite target for amateur astronomers because it can be easily seen with binoculars or a small telescope.
Getting WISE
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| Monoceros |
Astronomers across the globe can now sift through hundreds of millions of galaxies, stars and asteroids collected in the first bundle of data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission.
"Starting today thousands of new eyes will be looking at WISE data, and I expect many surprises," said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the mission's principal investigator.
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| NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) |
WISE launched into space on Dec. 14, 2009 on a mission to map the entire sky in infrared light with greatly improved sensitivity and resolution over its predecessors. From its polar orbit, it scanned the skies about one-and-a-half times while collecting images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light. It took more than 2.7 million images over the course of its mission, capturing objects ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids relatively close to Earth.
Like other infrared telescopes, WISE required coolant to chill its heat-sensitive detectors. When this frozen hydrogen coolant ran out, as expected, in early October, 2010, two of its four infrared channels were still operational. The survey was then extended for four more months, with the goal of finishing its sweep for asteroids and comets in the main asteroid belt of our solar system.
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| The Siding Spring Comet |
The mission's nearby discoveries included 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and 133 near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 28 million miles (about 45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun. The satellite went into hibernation in early February of this year.
Today, WISE is taking the first major step in meeting its primary goal of delivering the mission's trove of objects to astronomers. Data from the first 57 percent of the sky surveyed is accessible through an online public archive. The complete survey, with improved data processing, will be made available in the spring of 2012.
A predecessor to WISE, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, served a similar role about 25 years ago, and those data are still valuable to astronomers today. Likewise, the WISE legacy is expected to endure for decades.
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| The Messier 74 Spiral Galaxy |
"We are excited that the preliminary data contain millions of newfound objects," said Fengchuan Liu, the project manager for WISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "But the mission is not yet over -- the real treasure is the final catalog available a year from now, which will have twice as many sources, covering the entire sky and reaching even deeper into the universe than today's release."
Astronomers will use WISE's infrared data to hunt for hidden oddities, and to study trends in large populations of known objects. Survey missions often result in the unexpected discoveries too, because they are looking everywhere in the sky rather than at known targets. Data from the mission are also critical for finding the best candidates for follow-up studies with other telescopes, including the European Space Agency's Herschel observatory, which has important NASA contributions.
"WISE is providing the newest-generation 'address book' of the infrared universe with the precise location and brightness of hundreds of millions of celestial objects," said Roc Cutri, lead scientist for WISE data processing at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE continues the long tradition of infrared sky surveys supported by Caltech, stretching back to the 1969 Two Micron Sky Survey."
So far, the WISE mission has released dozens of colorful images of the cosmos, in which infrared light has been assigned colors we see with our eyes.
The entire collection can be seen at http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/gallery_images.html.
I highly recommend looking at the awesome beauty of all of these new photos taken of this incredible place that we are each a part of and live in, without fully appreciating it most of the time.
Andromeda
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| The Andromeda Galaxy |
The immense Andromeda galaxy, also known as Messier 31 or simply M31, is captured in full in this new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The mosaic covers an area equivalent to more than 100 full moons, or five degrees across the sky. WISE used all four of its infrared detectors to capture this picture (3.4- and 4.6-micron light is colored blue; 12-micron light is green; and 22-micron light is red). Blue highlights mature stars, while yellow and red show dust heated by newborn, massive stars.
Andromeda is the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy, and is located 2.5 million light-years from our sun. It is close enough for telescopes to spy the details of its ringed arms of new stars and hazy blue backbone of older stars. Also seen in the mosaic are two satellite galaxies, known as M32, located just a bit above Andromeda to the left of center, and the fuzzy blue M110, located below the center of the great spiral arms. These satellites are the largest of several that are gravitationally bound to Andromeda.
The Andromeda galaxy is larger than our Milky Way and contains more stars, but the Milky Way is thought to perhaps have more mass due to its larger proportion of a mysterious substance called dark matter. Both galaxies belong to our so-called Local Group, a collection of more than 50 galaxies, most of which are tiny dwarf systems. In its quest to map the whole sky, WISE will capture the entire Local Group.
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| Andromeda Blue |
This image highlights the Andromeda galaxy's older stellar population in blue. It was taken by the shortest-wavelength camera on WISE, which detects infrared light of 3.4 microns. A pronounced warp in the disk of the galaxy, the aftermath of a collision with another galaxy, can be clearly seen in the spiral arm to the upper left side of the galaxy.
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| Andromeda Orange |
This image highlights the dust that speckles the Andromeda galaxy's spiral arms. It shows light seen by the longest-wavelength infrared detectors on WISE (12-micron light has been color coded orange, and 22-micron light, red).
The hot dust, which is being heated by newborn stars, traces the spidery arms all the way to the center of the galaxy. Telltale signs of young stars can also be seen in the centers of Andromeda's smaller companion galaxies, M32 and M110.
The Beauty of Creation
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| The Berkeley 59 star cluster |
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| The Southern Cross |
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| Camelopardalis |
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| The Rose Nebula |
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| The Rho Opuichi Cloud |
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| Zeta Opiuchi |
The Milky Way
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| The enormous place we call home - The Milky Way Galaxy |
This breathtaking composite image shows just how huge the Milky Way really is.
Amateur astronomer Juan Carlos Casado stitched together this extraordinary shot from nine photos of the night sky. All were taken in a national park in the Canary Islands away from light pollution, resulting in images of astounding clarity.
You can read more about this here.
Viewed as one digitally-fused image, as they are here, the result is a 360-degree panorama.
The faint band of light that stretches across the sky is the disc of our spiral galaxy. It appears to encircle Earth - this is because we are inside the disc.
Our galaxy contains between 100 billion and 400 billion stars, as well as an estimated 50 billion planets
The stars that the human eye can distinguish in the night sky are relatively near us and are all part of the Milky Way.
Read that last sentence again, and really think about it.
We only see a tiny fragment of the universe, yet even that tiny fragment is still more than our little eyes and minds can possibly begin to comprehend. I find this very humbling, and yet comforting at the same time.
God's power and reach are infinite, just as His Love for us is greater than we can possibly imagine or understand yet.
There is no greater love. Believe it.
All Original Content (C) Copyright 2011 LVB Research. All Rights Reserved.
