New Images from Apex Camera   Credit: ESO   This is a brand new image of star formation region called NGC 6334 or called the Cat Paw nebula, taken by the new Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) camera. Actually APEX isn’t new but a camera called ArTeMiS, a new wide-field submillimetre-wavelength camera, was installed and can bring more in depth details to the images. The telescope is a 12 meter diameter telescope located high in the Atacama Desert. It operates at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths which is between infrared light and radio waves in the electromagnetic spectrum. The camera completed the tests and will now take a trip to Saclay in France in order to install the additional detectors in the instrument. According to the ESO (European Southern Observatory),”The new generation detector array of ArTeMIS acts more like a CCD camera than the previous...

Hubble Finds Densest Nearby Galaxy     Hubble finds new evidence for densest galaxy in nearby galaxy. Well nearby in astronomical terms which is 54 million light years away from Earth. The galaxy M60-UCD1 is located near a massive elliptical galaxy known as NGC 4649 or M60. The galaxy weighs more than 200 million times the mass of our own sun or if you took all the matter within 80 light years of us it would equal that much weight. The density of the stars in that region weigh 15,000 times more than found in the Milky Way neighborhood. They describe this galaxy as an ultra compact dwarf galaxy. The stars are also 25 times closer than typical stars in a galaxy so you can start to see a sense of how close the stars are. With further observations astronomers found an interesting x-ray emitting energy source at its center. Finding it at the center wasn’t the interesting...

Young Stars are Born in the Prawn Nebula     This image is one of the latest news releases from the VLT or Very Large Telescope which is operated by the European Southern observatory. This is the Prawn Nebula located 6,000 light years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius. This is a star forming region with heavy amounts of gas and dust that are being condensed into new stars as well as planets. What causes these clouds to glow is the ultraviolet light that is given off from the stars. The radiation strips the electrons from the hydrogen atoms, then later recombines and emits the bright light you see here. The Prawn nebula is 250 light years across or 4 times the size of a full moon in our sky. The Prawn Nebula is also located within our Milky Way. The VLT is supported by 15 countries and has been focusing on studying nebula’s within the Milky Way. The Prawn...