new NASA image 'Cosmic Question Mark'

April 21, 2009—
Call it a Freudian picture. Even as the fate of the Hubble Space Telescope is in question, astronomers are celebrating the famed observatory's 19th year conducting science in space with this image of a galactic mixer that seems to trace a giant glowing question mark.


This latest picture released by the Hubble team shows a group of interacting galaxies, collectively known as Arp 194. The upper portion is a cluttered, deformed mix of galaxies, some of which seem to be in the process of merging. The lower "dot" is a single large spiral galaxy. Streaming from the upper galactic jumble is a structure NASA has dubbed a "fountain of youth"—bright blue stellar superclusters, each of which may contain dozens of young star clusters, totaling millions of stars.


The Helix Nebula called Eye of God (also known as NGC 7293) is About 650 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, it is one of the closest planetary nebulae to Earth. This is one of, if not the, most amazing hubble telescope picture taken. The Spitzer Space Telescope has a new view of the Helix nebula shows colors as seen in infrared. The dusty dead star appears as a dot in the middle of theHelix Nebula The Nebula was created when the outer gasses of its star expelled into space as the star ended its life violently. According to astronomers when the star died, expelling its outer layers, dust in the system should have been blown away, but instead a dusty disk was observed creating the familiar eye-like shape. According to new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a bunch of comets are colliding and kicking up dust around a dead star which is then heated up by radiation from the dead star's hot core making it glow in vivid colors. Sadly, the eye of god won't last long. In about 10,000 years, its shiny clouds will fade, leaving the white dwarf and its circling comets to cool down alone in empty space.

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• NASA
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• Cosmic
• Question
• Mark

[yournotrandom]

Cool

[serialkillingwickedc]

That's pretty tight