Astronomy Picture of the Day 5-01-02

NASA ^ | 5-01-02 | Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell

[petuniasevan]

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2002 May 1

In the Center of the Omega Nebula
Credit: ACS Science & Engineering Team, NASA

Explanation: In the depths of the dark clouds of dust and molecular gas known as the Omega Nebula, stars continue to form. The above image from the Hubble Space Telescope's newly installed Advanced Camera for Surveys shows unprecedented detail in the famous star-forming region. The dark dust filaments that lace the center of Omega Nebula were created in the atmospheres of cool giant stars and in the debris from supernova explosions. The red and blue hues arise from glowing gas heated by the radiation of massive nearby stars. The points of light are the young stars themselves, some brighter than 100 Suns. Dark globules mark even younger systems, clouds of gas and dust just now condensing to form stars and planets. The Omega Nebula lies about 5000 light years away toward the constellation of Sagittarius. The region shown spans about 3000 times the diameter of our Solar System.

[petuniasevan]

The Omega Nebula is also referred to as M17, being the seventeenth object listed in Charles Messier's catalog of things not to be confused with comets.

Get on the APOD PING list!

[petuniasevan]

APOD PING!

[CJ Wolf]

thanks! bttt

[Slip18]

That doesn't even look real. What an awesome photo.

[BlessedAmerican]

Thanks for the ping! The heavens declare the glory of God.

[aomagrat]

That orange thing in the lower left hand corner looks like the "Nexus" from the movie "Star Trek Generations".

[RightWhale]

Is that the type of region that would be worth taking the prospector ship to and look for gold and rare gems? It's huge, but if you were actually in it would you see much or would it just look like normal empty space to the eye?

[Vigilantcitizen]

AWESOME!!!

Definite winner for wallpaper of the month.

[petuniasevan]

That area encompassed by the photo is about 3000 times the diameter of the solar system. Definitely it's mostly empty space. Let's say that the solar system is 10 billion miles across. That makes the area in the image about 30 trillion miles across - approximately 5 light years!

Even the thickest-looking parts of the nebula are a harder vacuum than you can create on Earth.

[RightWhale]

That makes sense since some stars are visible through the dust, which might be a light year thick and yet is less effective at blocking light than a small cloud on earth.

[petuniasevan]

Most of the material you would find, apart from the resident stars, would be tenuous hydrogen gas.

Astronomers refer to heavier elements than hydrogen and helium as "metals".
These heavier elements, these metals, would indeed be more likely to be found in star-forming regions, especially where there have occurred several supernovae throwing out metals into surrounding space.

For reasons too detailed to go into here, no ordinary star produces any fusion product metal heavier than iron.
Thus, only supernovae produce lead, gold, silver, platinum, uranium, iridium, etc.
The explosion that creates these elements spreads them to the surrounding interstellar regions.
There they can be swept up in star formation and give birth to planets.
That's where to prospect, if you will.
Find the new planets (let them cool for an eon or two; they'll be hot for a while), and prospect all you like!

[petuniasevan]

see post #11 too

I gotta quit talking to myself...

[2Trievers]

Thanks 'tunia ...stunning .... &;-)

 
 

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The Star-Splitter

By Robert Frost

---

You know Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains, And rising on his hands, he looks in on me Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something I should have done by daylight, and indeed, After the ground is frozen, I should have done Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney To make fun of my way of doing things, Or else fun of Orion's having caught me. Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights These forces are obliged to pay respect to?" So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming, Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming, He burned his house down for the fire insurance And spent the proceeds on a telescope To satisfy a life-long curiosity About our place among the infinities. "What do you want with one of those blame things?" I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!" "Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything More blameless in the sense of being less A weapon in our human fight," he said. "I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it." There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move, Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years Trying to sell his farm and then not selling, He burned his house down for the fire insurance And bought the telescope with what it came to. He had been heard to say by several: "The best thing that we're put here for's to see; The strongest thing that's given us to see with's A telescope. Someone in every town Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one. In Littleton it may as well be me." After such loose talk it was no surprise When he did what he did and burned his house down. Mean laughter went about the town that day To let him know we weren't the least imposed on, And he could wait--we'd see to him to-morrow. But the first thing next morning we reflected If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving. Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us, We don't cut off from coming to church suppers, But what we miss we go to him and ask for. He promptly gives it back, that is if still Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of. It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad About his telescope. Beyond the age Of being given one's gift for Christmas, He had to take the best way he knew how To find himself in one. Well, all we said was He took a strange thing to be roguish over. Some sympathy was wasted on the house, A good old-timer dating back along; But a house isn't sentient; the house Didn't feel anything. And if it did, Why not regard it as a sacrifice, And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire, Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction? Out of a house and so out of a farm At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn To earn a living on the Concord railroad, As under-ticket-agent at a station Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets, Was setting out up track and down, not plants As on a farm, but planets, evening stars That varied in their hue from red to green. He got a good glass for six hundred dollars. His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing. Often he bid me come and have a look Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside, At a star quaking in the other end. I recollect a night of broken clouds And underfoot snow melted down to ice, And melting further in the wind to mud. Bradford and I had out the telescope. We spread our two legs as it spread its three, Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it, And standing at our leisure till the day broke, Said some of the best things we ever said. That telescope was christened the Star-splitter, Because it didn't do a thing but split A star in two or three the way you split A globule of quicksilver in your hand With one stroke of your finger in the middle. It's a star-splitter if there ever was one And ought to do some good if splitting stars 'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood. We've looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night to-night And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different from the way it ever stood?

---

Robert Frost (1874-1963) was born in San Francisco, and his father, a newspaper editor, died when he was 10. His mother then took him to live with his Grandfather in Massachusetts. He married his high school sweetheart in 1895, and for the next twenty or so years made a living through a combination of farming, teaching and writing. The Frosts lived in England between 1912 and 1915; and it was from about this time on that Robert Frost was able to make a full-time living as a writer. This poem was published in 1923. Honours, awards and prizes followed Frost from then on, and he died in Boston in 1963.

[RightWhale]

We are made of stuff that was once inside a star, which star is long gone having exploded. We are made of former starstuff, the clinkers in the stove. [Beatific Saganistic gaze into past millenia]