Astronomy is awesome

[Lord Relvenous]

Oh, here's a cool exoplanet discovery.

Cannibal star devouring planet.

It's pretty awesome what kind of information they're able to derive from the smallest details.

[Buritot]

Here's a presentation that makes me wish Earth had one of its own.

[Surlethe]

More awesome astronomy!



From Bad Astronomer. His explanation:

I mean, I know a lot of what I’m seeing in general, but specific objects are totally impossible to identify. That’s because this image is hugely removed from visible light. It’s a three-color image composed of separate shots in the wavelengths (think of them as colors) of 100, 350, and 540 microns. For comparison, the longest wavelength of light our eyes can see is about 0.7 microns or so; these Planck images are therefore way the heck and gone in the infrared.

What we’re seeing is very cold dust, and by very cold I mean very cold: much of it is a frigid 12 Celsius above absolute zero. In Fahrenheit, that’s -438°. Yes, four hundred thirty eight degrees below zero.

This represents dust far away from the warming light of stars, dust that is sitting in deep space, radiating away feebly in the far infrared. Mapping this dust tells us much about it, like how stars make dust and fling it into space, and how the dust behaves when it’s out there.

See that bright line right down the middle? That’s the dust located in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy itself. Our galaxy is a flat disk 100,000 light years across, but maybe only 1% of that in thickness. We’re located inside that disk, so that when we look in that direction we see it projected as a line across the sky. That’s where most of the gas and stars in the galaxy are located, so that’s where most of the dust is as well.

But I’m fascinated by the structure of the dust above the galactic plane. There are swoops and swirls, filaments and ribbons. I’m drawn to the long thin line on the right that must be dozens or hundreds of light years long; it appears to end in a swirl of dust. What the heck could be causing that? I’m not sure. There’s so much going on here that it’ll be some time before astronomers can sort it all out.

Does anybody know of any composite images of the sky (or MW) at many different wavelengths?

[Gil Hamilton]

I don't know, but I bet you could do some pretty slick microwave spectroscopy off such clouds. In fact, there are probably people pointing their telescopes that way right now.

[starslayer]

Does anybody know of any composite images of the sky (or MW) at many different wavelengths?

Not quite what you asked for, but here you go (MW) and here (all sky).