January's Stellar Space Pictures
The planetary nebula ESO 577-24, captured in pale hues of pink and blue by ESO's Very Large Telescope.
(Inside Science) -- To ring in the new year, we've collected pictures that look into stellar history. In some, artists help capture our imaginations through illustrations. In others, spacecraft have snapped pictures of distant worlds. From a fleetingly beautiful dying star, to an ancient quasar from the early universe, these pictures capture the beauty that surrounds us throughout space-time.
This is a photo of the planetary nebula ESO 577-24, captured by ESO's Very Large Telescope. These pale pink and blue stellar tufts are the glowing remnants of a dying star that has thrown off its outer layers, leaving behind a bright dwarf star in its center. Eventually it will expand, cool, and grow dimmer as it slowly fades out of sight. Its light will persist for only around 10,000 years -- an effervescent flash in astronomical terms. (ESO)
In June 2018, astronomers observed a mysterious explosion -- one that was unusually bright for a supernova but gone in a flash. As of this month astronomers still don't know its exact nature. They have two leading theories: Either the explosion is a new type of supernova, or it represents a star being shredded as it passes by a black hole. This artist's impression depicts the latter concept, wherein a black hole in the center is pulling in a disk of material, radiating energy and propelling jets from its poles. (Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF)
Earlier this month, the New Horizons spacecraft snapped a photo of Ultima Thule, a Kuiper Belt object that had previously only been imagined in paintings. In the top left is a painting from 1978; in the top right, one from 1980 and in the bottom left, one from 1996 -- all by artist Bill Hartmann. The bottom right is the first photo of the "contact binary" asteroid, an object that results from two asteroids merging via a low-velocity collision. (PSI)
It took 20 years for astronomers to find this gem -- the brightest quasar in the early universe. This ancient celestial object harkens back to a time when the universe was less than a billion years old. Its brightness equates to that of about 600 trillion Suns, and the supermassive black hole powering it is several hundred million times as massive as our Sun. Due to its distance in space-time, astronomers were only able to locate it through strong gravitational lensing, using data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This artist's impression imagines how this powerful galactic nucleus might look up close. (ESA/Hubble, NASA, M. Kornmesser)
This month, Hubble released its second-largest image ever, starring our local neighbor the Triangulum Galaxy. This showstopper is a giant mosaic consisting of 54 separate images from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, making it the most detailed portrait we have of the spiral galaxy. Through this image we can view almost 40 billion stars located 3 million light-years away. (NASA, ESA, UW)
