The Strangest Creature in Space Called Cometary Globule CG4     This is one of the strangest looking “creature” objects in space. It almost looks like this is about to gobble up a galaxy. This is known as a cometary globule or CG4. This is a star forming region that could produce several suns like our own. Cometary Globule CG4 is located 1,300 light years away from Earth and its head is about 1.5 light years across. The actual size including the tail is about 8 light years long. The head is illuminated by the stars that are forming. The red that is glowing in the head is super charged hydrogen. The galaxy you see on the right is actually at least 100 million light years away from CG4. The cometary globule in this image has ruptured and reasons for this are still unknown. Even though CG4 looks like a comet it is certainly much different. There isn’t a lot of...

From Scientist to Mission: The Rise and Death of the Kepler Mission     The Kepler mission is one of the most exciting and important missions to astronomers. Its main objective is to discover habitable planets like Earth orbiting around other stars. The mission was launched in March of 2009 and has collected 3,548 candidates of which 150 planets are confirmed (as of September 1st). 150 confirmed planets is certainly no where near the 3,548 candidates so you can imagine this will take several years to process the data. The initial plan was for Kepler to run for 3.5 years and collect data from a particular area in the sky. Here is an image to depict what Kepler is targeting.     Kepler’s camera was one of the largest at the time of launch with a makeup of 42 CCDs at 2200 x 1024 pixels. If you thought your 24 megapixel camera was awesome well it’s not much...

  This is a gorgeous image of a sunset over Dione (pronounced die-OH-nee). Dione is one of Saturn’s moons and is the 15th largest moon in the solar system. If you combine all the smaller moons together it would still not be bigger than Dione. It has a 1:2 orbital mean resonance with Enceladus which means that for every orbit Dione completes (2.7 Earth days), Enceladus will have completed 2 by then. Dione is mostly made up of ice and has a diameter of 1122 km. It is also the third densest Saturnian moon and has the distance of 377,000 km from Saturn (or about the same distance from the Earth to the Moon). An interesting observation of Dione is that it’s front side is facing all the debris that it plows through but it’s backside actually has MORE impacts than its front side. Scientists have speculated that an impact could have spun the moon around 180 degrees...

What is a Kilonova?   NASA astronomers have found an intense cosmic event called a “kilonova.” A kilonova is an explosion so powerful that it’s 1000 times stronger than a normal supernova. To help put this in some perspective think about this. The amount of energy a Sun (like the size of our own) produces in its 10 billion life time equals to the amount of energy an average supernova produces. Still not helping? Well think about the amount of energy of the atomic bomb Little Boy outputs (the one dropped on Hiroshima) which is 15 kilotons (6 x 1013 joules) of TNT. During the cold war the United States developed a hydrogen bomb with a max theoretical yield of 25 megatons or 1015 joules. To equal that of a supernova you would need about 10 trillion of the most destructive hydrogen bombs. Now that your brain is barely hanging on let’s move away from the...

  For most people they have only heard of cool space terms like black holes, supernovas or maybe even quasars. Well blazar isn’t a common term you’ll hear a lot and it’s actually not very different from a quasar. The picture above is essentially a blazar. It has an intensely bright central nucleus (or part of a classification called “active galactic nuclei” or AGN) containing a supermassive black hole. What’s really crazy about blazars is that the emitted light which sometimes includes extremely high energy gamma rays, can be over a hundred million times more energetic than the highest energy X-rays that the Chandra X-ray Observatory can study. Now just imagine a swirling disk filled with massive amounts of energy. We are talking about high energy gamma rays shooting out at 99% the speed of light! Also to make you feel even more uneasy, blazars...