hydrocyanic acid and a meow

spacettf: “ First four images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 by Hubble Heritage on Flickr. Via Flickr: These four images are among the first observations made by the new Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the upgraded NASA Hubble Space Telescope. The...

spacettf:

First four images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 by Hubble Heritage on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
These four images are among the first observations made by the new Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the upgraded NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

The image at top left shows NGC 6302, a butterfly-shaped nebula surrounding a dying star. At top right is a picture of a clash among members of a galactic grouping called Stephan’s Quintet. The image at bottom left gives viewers a panoramic portrait of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of Omega Centauri, a giant globular cluster. At bottom right, an eerie pillar of star birth in the Carina Nebula rises from a sea of greenish-colored clouds.

cwnl:

8 Beautiful Bioluminescent Creatures From the Sea

While a handful of land animals can create their own light, homemade luminescence is the rule rather than the exception in the open ocean’s dark waters.

Researchers estimate that between 80 and 90 percent of deep-dwelling animals are bioluminous, creating light by mixing the pigment luciferin with luciferase, the enzyme that makes it glow. The light tends to green and blue, colors that travel far in seawater. Glowing helps attract mates, lure prey or confound predators.

Many of these animals live thousands of meters deep and are difficult for scientists to find and study. Here are some of the prettiest — and strangest — glowing creatures of the seas.

unknownskywalker:

Dissecting a turbulent black hole’s surroundings

An international team of astronomers using five different telescopes has uncovered striking features around a supermassive black hole in the core of the distant galaxy Markarian 509 (Mrk 509). They found a very hot corona hovering above the black hole and cold gas “bullets” in hotter diffuse gas, speeding outward with velocities over 1 million miles per hour.

This corona absorbs and reprocesses the ultraviolet light from the accretion disk encircling the black hole, energizing it and converting it into X-rays. This discovery allows astronomers to make sense of some of the observations of active galaxies that have been hard to explain so far.

The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph aboard Hubble reveals that the coolest gas in the line of sight toward Markarian 509 has 14 different velocity components at various locations in the innermost parts of this galaxy.

Hubble’s data, combined with X-ray observations, show that most of the visible outflowing gas is blown off from a dusty gas disk surrounding the central region more than 15 light-years away from the black hole. This outflow consists of dense, cold blobs or gas bullets embedded in hotter diffuse gas.

Images: (1) Image of Mrk 509 taken in April 2007 with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. (2) In this artist’s illustration, turbulent winds of gas swirl around a black hole. Some of the gas is spiraling inward toward the black hole, but another part is blown away.