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|| April 26: 2016 || This new video from ESA’s Herschel space observatory reveals in stunning detail the intricate pattern of gas, dust and star-forming hubs along the plane of our Galaxy, the Milky Way. Our disc-shaped Galaxy has a diameter of about 100 000 light-years and the Solar System is embedded in it about half way between the centre and periphery. From our vantage point, this huge disc of stars, gas and dust appears as a circular strip winding around the sky, familiar as the Milky Way in the night sky. These billowing clouds are home to clusters of young stars that are shining brightly and driving powerful winds, which are in turn carving cavities in the surrounding material, while at the same time the nebulas are ceaselessly witnessing the birth of new stars within them. The image of RCW 120 tells another tale of relentless star formation: a star at the centre, invisible at these infrared wavelengths, has blown a beautiful bubble around itself with the mighty pressure of the light it radiates. Related scientific paper by S. Molinari et al. ‽: 260416 RCW 120, How Far are You: I'm 4, 300 Light-Years Away Title Herschel’s view of RCW 120: Released 22/04/2016 11:00 am: Copyright ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project
‽: 250416 Can You See the Galactic Centre, Herschel?
|| April 24: 2016 || Herschel’s view of the Galactic Centre:
Released 22/04/2016 11:00 am:
Copyright ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project ‽: 240416
What Did You See, Herschel: It's the Spectacle of the Eagle
And this is how we saw the Eagle Nebula: Herschel’s view of the Eagle Nebula: Released 22/04/2016 11:00 am: Copyright ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project
This is how Herschel saw the Eagle Nebula: Herschel’s view of the Eagle Nebula: Released 22/04/2016 11:00 am: Copyright ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project
P: 230416 Lone Planetary-Mass Object Found in Family of StarsWhitney Clavin Writing
|| April 20, 2016 || In 2011, astronomers announced that our galaxy is likely teeming with free-floating planets. In fact, these lonely worlds, which sit quietly in the darkness of space without any companion planets or even a host sun, might outnumber stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The surprising discovery begged the question: Where did these objects come from? Are they planets that were ejected from solar systems, or are they actually light-weight stars called brown dwarfs that formed alone in space like stars?
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Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech |
April 07, 2016: A festive portrait of our Milky Way galaxy shows a mishmash of gas, charged particles and several types of dust. The composite image comes from the European Space Agency's Planck mission, in which NASA plays an important role. It is constructed from observations made at microwave and millimeter wavelengths of light, which are longer than what we see with our eyes.
Planck is largely a cosmology mission with the goal of learning more about our universe -- everything from its age and contents to how it was born and how it will evolve in the future. The space telescope spent more than four years detecting the oldest light in the universe, which traveled billions of years to reach us. But that ancient light comes to us mixed together with light of similar wavelengths generated closer to home, within our Milky Way and other nearby galaxies. Scientists painstakingly subtract the Milky Way's light to isolate the ancient signals -- but this nearby light benefits astronomers too.
As the map demonstrates, Planck can detect a frenzy of activity in our Milky Way. Astronomers use maps like these to better understand the composition, temperature, density and large-scale structure of the material between stars, in addition to patterns of star formation throughout our galaxy and the role of magnetic fields.
In this view, different colors represent various materials and types of radiation. Red shows dust that gives off a thermal glow, and makes up the most abundant of the dust features shown. Yellow shows carbon monoxide gas, which is concentrated along the plane of our Milky Way in the densest clouds of gas and dust that are churning out new stars.
Blue indicates a type of radiation called synchrotron, which occurs when fast-moving electrons, spit out of supernovas and other energetic phenomena, are captured in the galaxy’s magnetic field. The electrons spiral along the magnetic field, travelling near the speed of light.
The green shows a different kind of radiation known as free-free. This occurs when isolated electrons and protons careen past one another in a series of near collisions, slowing down but continuing on their own way (the name free-free comes from the fact that the particles start out alone and end up alone). The free-free signatures are associated with hot, ionized gas near massive stars.
( Editor: Tony Greicius: NASA)
P: 080416
Trigger for Milky Way’s Youngest Supernova Identified
Molly Porter, Megan Watzke Writing
Supernova G1.9+0.3: Credits: NASA/CXC/CfA/S. Chakraborti et al. |
April 02, 2016: Scientists have used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NSF’s Jansky Very Large Array to determine the likely trigger for the most recent supernova in the Milky Way. They applied a new technique that could have implications for understanding other Type Ia supernovas, a class of stellar explosions that scientists use to determine the expansion rate of the Universe.
Astronomers had previously identified G1.9+0.3 as the remnant of the most recent supernova in our Galaxy. It is estimated to have occurred about 110 years ago in a dusty region of the Galaxy that blocked visible light from reaching Earth.
G1.9+0.3 belongs to the Type Ia category, an important class of supernovas exhibiting reliable patterns in their brightness that make them valuable tools for measuring the rate at which the universe is expanding.
“Astronomers use Type Ia supernovas as distance markers across the Universe, which helped us discover that its expansion was accelerating,” said Sayan Chakraborti, who led the study at Harvard University. “If there are any differences in how these supernovas explode and the amount of light they produce, that could have an impact on our understanding of this expansion.”
Most scientists agree that Type Ia supernovas occur when white dwarfs, the dense remnants of Sun-like stars that have run out of fuel, explode. However, there has been a debate over what triggers these white dwarf explosions. Two primary ideas are the accumulation of material onto a white dwarf from a companion star or the violent merger of two white dwarfs.
The new research with archival Chandra and VLA data examines how the expanding supernova remnant G1.0+0.3 interacts with the gas and dust surrounding the explosion. The resulting radio and X-ray emission provide clues as to the cause of the explosion. In particular, an increase in X-ray and radio brightness of the supernova remnant with time, according to theoretical work by Chakraborti’s team, is expected only if a white dwarf merger took place.
“We observed that the X-ray and radio brightness increased with time, so the data point strongly to a collision between two white dwarfs as being the trigger for the supernova explosion in G1.9+0.3,” said co-author Francesca Childs, also of Harvard.
The result implies that Type Ia supernovas are either all caused by white dwarf collisions, or are caused by a mixture of white dwarf collisions and the mechanism where the white dwarf pulls material from a companion star.
“It is important to identify the trigger mechanism for Type Ia supernovas because if there is more than one cause, then the contribution from each may change over time,” said Harvard’s Alicia Soderberg, another co-author on the study. This means astronomers might have to recalibrate some of the ways we use them as ‘standard candles’ in cosmology.”
The team also derived a new estimate for the age of the supernova remnant of about 110 years, younger than previous estimates of about 150 years.
More progress on understanding the trigger mechanism should come from studying Type Ia supernovas in nearby galaxies, using the increased sensitivity provided by a recent upgrade to the VLA.
A paper describing these results appeared in the March 1st, 2016 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Read More from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/chandra
Molly Porter: Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. 256-544-0034: molly.a.porter@nasa.gov
Megan Watzke: Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass. 617-496-7998: mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu
( Editor: Lee Mohon:NASA)
P: 030416
And What are You Going to Do With the Ribbon, Milky Way: I Think I'm Going to Put It Around My Star-Bloomed Hair
Herschel reveals a ribbon of future stars: Released 29/03/2016 11:47 am: Copyright ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/M. Juvela (U. Helsinki, Finland) |
March 29, 2016: Star formation is
taking place all around us. The Milky Way is laced with
clouds of dust and gas that could become the nursery of the
next generation of stars. Thanks to ESA’s Herschel space
observatory, we can now look inside these clouds and see
what is truly going on.
It may seem ironic but when searching for sites of future
star formation, astronomers look for the coldest spots in
the Milky Way. This is because before the stars ignite the
gas that will form their bulk must collapse together. To do
that, it has to be cold and sluggish, so that it cannot
resist gravity.
As well as gas, there is also dust. This too is extremely
cold, perhaps just 10–20 degrees above absolute zero. To
optical telescopes it appears completely dark, but the dust
reveals itselfat far-infrared wavelengths.
One of the surprises is that the coldest parts of the cloud
form filaments that stretch across the warmer parts of the
cloud. This image shows a cold cloud filament, known to
astronomers as G82.65-2.00. The blue filament is the coldest
part of the cloud and contains 800 times as much mass as the
Sun. The dust in this filament has a temperature of –259ºC.
At this low temperature, if the filament contains enough
mass it is likely that this section will collapse into
stars.
This image is colour-coded so that the longest infrared
wavelength, corresponding to the coldest region, is shown in
blue, and the shortest wavelength, corresponding to slightly
warmer dust, is shown in red.
The field of view on display here is a little more than two
times the width of the full Moon. It is one of 116 regions
of space observed by Herschel as part of the Galactic Cold
Cores project. Each field was chosen because ESA’s cosmic
microwave background mapper, Planck, showed that these
regions of the galaxy possessed extremely cold dust.
P: 300316
Milky Way Galaxy's Own Centrica: the Supermassive Black Hole Sagittarius A
Image credit: NASA/CXC/MPE/G. Ponti et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss
March 21, 2016: Three orbiting
X-ray space telescopes have detected an increased rate of
X-ray flares from the usually quiet giant black hole at the
center of our Milky Way galaxy after new long-term
monitoring. Scientists are trying to learn whether this is
normal behavior that was unnoticed due to limited
monitoring, or these flares are triggered by the recent
close passage of a mysterious, dusty object.
By combining information from long monitoring campaigns by
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton, with
observations by the Swift satellite, astronomers were able
to carefully trace the activity of the Milky Way’s
supermassive black hole over the last 15 years. The
supermassive black hole, a.k.a. Sagittarius A*, weighs in at
slightly more than 4 million times the mass of the Sun.
X-rays are produced by hot gas flowing toward the black
hole.
The new study reveals that Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short)
has been producing one bright X-ray flare about every ten
days. However, within the past year, there has been a
ten-fold increase in the rate of bright flares from Sgr A*,
at about one every day. This increase happened soon after
the close approach to Sgr A* by a mysterious object called
G2.
“For several years, we’ve been tracking the X-ray emission
from Sgr A*. This includes also the close passage of this
dusty object” said Gabriele Ponti of the Max Planck
Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. “A year
or so ago, we thought it had absolutely no effect on Sgr A*,
but our new data raise the possibility that that might not
be the case."
Originally, astronomers thought G2 was an extended cloud of
gas and dust. However, after passing close to Sgr A* in late
2013, its appearance did not change much, apart from being
slightly stretched by the gravity of the black hole. This
led to new theories that G2 was not simply a gas cloud, but
instead a star swathed in an extended dusty cocoon.
“There isn’t universal agreement on what G2 is,” said Mark
Morris of the University of California at Los Angeles.
“However, the fact that Sgr A* became more active not long
after G2 passed by suggests that the matter coming off of G2
might have caused an increase in the black hole’s feeding
rate.”
While the timing of G2’s passage with the surge in X-rays
from Sgr A* is intriguing astronomers see other black holes
that seem to behave like Sgr A*. Therefore, it’s possible
this increased chatter from Sgr A* may be a common trait
among black holes and unrelated to G2. For example, the
increased X-ray activity could be due to a change in the
strength of winds from nearby massive stars that are feeding
material to the black hole.
“It’s too soon to say for sure, but we will be keeping X-ray
eyes on Sgr A* in the coming months,” said co-author Barbara
De Marco, also of Max Planck. “Hopefully, new observations
will tell us whether G2 is responsible for the changed
behavior or if the new flaring is just part of how the black
hole behaves.”
The analysis included 150 Chandra and XMM-Newton
observations pointed at the center of the Milky Way over the
last 15 years, extending from September 1999 to November
2014. An increase in the rate and brightness of bright
flares from Sgr A* occurred after mid-2014, several months
after the closest approach of G2 to the huge black hole.
If the G2 explanation is correct, the spike in bright X-ray
flares would be the first sign of excess material falling
onto the black hole because of the cloud’s close passage.
Some gas would likely have been stripped off the cloud, and
captured by the gravity of Sgr A*. It then could have
started interacting with hot material flowing towards the
black hole, funneling more gas toward the black hole that
could later be consumed by Sgr A*.
A paper on these findings has been accepted by the Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A preprint is
available online. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in
Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials,
visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/chandrab
( Editor: Lee Mohon:NASA)
P: 210316
Hubble Watches Minkowski's Hen's Icy Blue Wings
Image credit: ESA (European Space
Agency)/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
In this cosmic snapshot, the spectacularly symmetrical wings
of Hen 2-437 show up in a magnificent icy blue hue. Hen
2-437 is a planetary nebula, one of around 3,000 such
objects known to reside within the Milky Way.
Located within the faint northern constellation of Vulpecula
(The Fox), Hen 2-437 was first identified in 1946 by Rudolph
Minkowski, who later also discovered the famous and equally
beautiful M2-9 (otherwise known as the Twin Jet Nebula). Hen
2-437 was added to a catalog of planetary nebula over two
decades later by astronomer and NASA astronaut Karl Gordon
Henize.
Planetary nebulae such as Hen 2-437 form when an aging
low-mass star — such as the sun — reaches the final stages
of life. The star swells to become a red giant, before
casting off its gaseous outer layers into space. The star
itself then slowly shrinks to form a white dwarf, while the
expelled gas is slowly compressed and pushed outwards by
stellar winds. As shown by its remarkably beautiful
appearance, Hen 2-437 is a bipolar nebula — the material
ejected by the dying star has streamed out into space to
create the two icy blue lobes pictured here.
Image credit: ESA (European Space Agency)/Hubble &
NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Text credit:
ESA
( Editor: Rob Garner: NASA)
P: 140216
Twinkle Twinkle Diamond Stars How I Wonder Deep and Far
Hubble Unveils a Tapestry of Dazzling Diamond-like Stars
Credit: NASA/ESA/J. Maíz Apellániz (Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain)
Resembling an opulent diamond tapestry, this image from
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows a glittering star
cluster that contains a collection of some of the brightest
stars seen in our Milky Way galaxy. Called Trumpler 14, it
is located 8,000 light-years away in the Carina Nebula, a
huge star-formation region. Because the cluster is only
500,000 years old, it has one of the highest concentrations
of massive, luminous stars in the entire Milky Way.
The small, dark knot left of center is a nodule of gas laced
with dust, and seen in silhouette.
Resembling an opulent diamond tapestry, this image from
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows a glittering star
cluster that contains a collection of some of the brightest
stars seen in our Milky Way galaxy.
Credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz (Institute of
Astrophysics of Andalusia, Spain), Acknowledgment: N. Smith
(University of Arizona)
These blue-white stars are burning their hydrogen fuel so
ferociously they will explode as supernovae in just a few
million years. The combination of outflowing stellar “winds”
and, ultimately, supernova blast waves will carve out
cavities in nearby clouds of gas and dust. These fireworks
will kick-start the beginning of a new generation of stars
in an ongoing cycle of star birth and death.
This composite image of Trumpler 14 was made with data taken
in 2005-2006 with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Blue, visible and infrared broadband filters combine with
filters that isolate hydrogen and nitrogen emission from the
glowing gas surrounding the open cluster.
For images and more information about Hubble, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble
http://hubblesite.org/news/2016/03
For additional information, contact:
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
410-338-4514
villard@stsci.edu
: Editor: Ashley Morrow: NASA
P: 220116
Runaway Stars Leave Infrared Waves in Space
Astronomers are finding dozens of the
fastest stars in our galaxy with the help of images from
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared
Survey Explorer, or WISE.
When some speedy, massive stars plow through space, they can
cause material to stack up in front of them in the same way
that water piles up ahead of a ship. Called bow shocks,
these dramatic, arc-shaped features in space are leading
researchers to uncover massive, so-called runaway stars.
"Some stars get the boot when their companion star explodes
in a supernova, and others can get kicked out of crowded
star clusters," said astronomer William Chick from the
University of Wyoming in Laramie, who presented his team's
new results at the American Astronomical Society meeting in
Kissimmee, Florida. "The gravitational boost increases a
star's speed relative to other stars."
Our own sun is strolling through our Milky Way galaxy at a
moderate pace. It is not clear whether our sun creates a bow
shock. By comparison, a massive star with a stunning bow
shock, called Zeta Ophiuchi (or Zeta Oph), is traveling
around the galaxy faster than our sun, at 54,000 mph (24
kilometers per second) relative to its surroundings. Zeta
Oph's giant bow shock can be seen in this image from the
WISE mission:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/pia13455.html
Both the speed of stars moving through space and their mass
contribute to the size and shapes of bow shocks. The more
massive a star, the more material it sheds in high-speed
winds. Zeta Oph, which is about 20 times as massive as our
sun, has supersonic winds that slam into the material in
front of it.
The result is a pile-up of material that glows. The
arc-shaped material heats up and shines with infrared light.
That infrared light is assigned the color red in the many
pictures of bow shocks captured by Spitzer and WISE.
Chick and his team turned to archival infrared data from
Spitzer and WISE to identify new bow shocks, including more
distant ones that are harder to find. Their initial search
turned up more than 200 images of fuzzy red arcs. They then
used the Wyoming Infrared Observatory, near Laramie, to
follow up on 80 of these candidates and identify the sources
behind the suspected bow shocks. Most turned out to be
massive stars.
The findings suggest that many of the bow shocks are the
result of speedy runaways that were given a gravitational
kick by other stars. However, in a few cases, the arc-shaped
features could turn out to be something else, such as dust
from stars and birth clouds of newborn stars. The team plans
more observations to confirm the presence of bow shocks.
"We are using the bow shocks to find massive and/or runaway
stars," said astronomer Henry "Chip" Kobulnicky, also from
the University of Wyoming. "The bow shocks are new
laboratories for studying massive stars and answering
questions about the fate and evolution of these stars."
Another group of researchers, led by Cintia Peri of the
Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy, is also using
Spitzer and WISE data to find new bow shocks in space. Only
instead of searching for the arcs at the onset, they start
by hunting down known speedy stars, and then they scan them
for bow shocks.
"WISE and Spitzer have given us the best images of bow
shocks so far," said Peri. "In many cases, bow shocks that
looked very diffuse before, can now be resolved, and,
moreover, we can see some new details of the structures."
Some of the first bow shocks from runaway stars were
identified in the 1980s by David Van Buren of NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He and his
colleagues found them using infrared data from the Infrared
Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), a predecessor to WISE that
scanned the whole infrared sky in 1983.
Kobulnicky and Chick belong to a larger team of researchers
and students studying bow shocks and massive stars,
including Matt Povich from the California State Polytechnic
University, Pomona. The National Science Foundation funds
their research.
Images from Spitzer, WISE and IRAS are archived at the NASA
Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing
and Analysis Center at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
More information about Spitzer is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer
http://spitzer.caltech.edu
More information about WISE is at:
http://www.nasa.gov/wise
Whitney Clavin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
818-354-4673
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov
( Editor: Martin Perez: NASA)
Posted: 07.01.16
The Magnetic Field Along the Galactic Plane of the Milky Way
The magnetic field along the Galactic plane. Copyright ESA/Planck Collaboration. Acknowledgment: M.-A. Miville-Deschênes, CNRS – Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale, Université Paris-XI, Orsay, France
While the pastel tones and fine texture of this image may
bring to mind brush strokes on an artist’s canvas, they are
in fact a visualisation of data from ESA’s Planck satellite.
The image portrays the interaction between interstellar dust
in the Milky Way and the structure of our Galaxy’s magnetic
field.
Between 2009 and 2013, Planck scanned the sky to detect the
most ancient light in the history of the Universe – the
cosmic microwave background. It also detected significant
foreground emission from diffuse material in our Galaxy
which, although a nuisance for cosmological studies, is
extremely important for studying the birth of stars and
other phenomena in the Milky Way.
Among the foreground sources at the wavelengths probed by
Planck is cosmic dust, a minor but crucial component of the
interstellar medium that pervades the Galaxy. Mainly gas, it
is the raw material for stars to form.
Interstellar clouds of gas and dust are also threaded by the
Galaxy’s magnetic field, and dust grains tend to align their
longest axis at right angles to the direction of the field.
As a result, the light emitted by dust grains is partly
‘polarised’ – it vibrates in a preferred direction – and, as
such, could be caught by the polarisation-sensitive
detectors on Planck.
Scientists in the Planck collaboration are using the
polarised emission of interstellar dust to reconstruct the
Galaxy’s magnetic field and study its role in the build-up
of structure in the Milky Way, leading to star formation.
In this image, the colour scale represents the total
intensity of dust emission, revealing the structure of
interstellar clouds in the Milky Way. The texture is based
on measurements of the direction of the polarised light
emitted by the dust, which in turn indicates the orientation
of the magnetic field.
This image shows the intricate link between the magnetic
field and the structure of the interstellar medium along the
plane of the Milky Way. In particular, the arrangement of
the magnetic field is more ordered along the Galactic plane,
where it follows the spiral structure of the Milky Way.
Small clouds are seen just above and below the plane, where
the magnetic field structure becomes less regular.
From these and other similar observations, Planck scientists
found that filamentary interstellar clouds are
preferentially aligned with the direction of the ambient
magnetic field, highlighting the strong role played by
magnetism in galaxy evolution.
The emission from dust is computed from a combination of
Planck observations at 353, 545 and 857 GHz, whereas the
direction of the magnetic field is based on Planck
polarisation data at 353 GHz.
Posted on: November 22, 2015
An Akari-view of the Cygnus Region in the Milky Way
An Akari-view of the Cygnus region in the
Milky Way: Released 04/05/2015 10:00 am: Copyright JAXA
The constellation of Cygnus is one of the
most recognisable in the northern hemisphere. During the
summer months, the stars of its long neck stretch along the
Milky Way and its wings sweep from side to side.
Switch to the invisible wavelengths of the far-infrared and
the Milky Way’s river of stars disappears to reveal tendrils
of cold dust. Shown here, in this image from Japan’s Akari
space observatory, are the central regions of Cygnus, and it
can be seen that the Milky Way displays a rich stock of
dust.
This dust is part of the interstellar medium, which also
contains gas. These infrared images reveal the detailed
distribution of the interstellar medium, highlighting areas
where bright, new stars are about to emerge in the Milky
Way.
Far-infrared light is the key wavelength range for
investigating stars and planet formation. When the
interstellar medium gathers together under the attraction of
its own gravity, it forms a giant molecular cloud. These can
be hundreds of light-years across. Denser parts, just a few
tenths of a light-year across, are known as molecular cloud
cores. These are where stars and planets form.
Akari images, such as this one, are the only images in which
scientists can closely examine the entire giant molecular
cloud with the resolution of a molecular cloud core.
This false-colour image, spanning 20x15°, is constructed
from three far-infrared bands: blue represents 65
micrometres, green shows 90 micrometres and red codes the
140 micrometre wavelength. The image is part of Akari’s
recently released all-sky survey.
The mission observed more than 99% of the entire sky over a
period of 16 months. The all-sky images have a resolution of
1–1.5 arcminutes, in four wavelengths: 65, 90, 140 and 160
micrometres.
Akari was a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
project with ESA’s participation.
P: 240116
The James Webb Space Telescope Ready for Ariane V Launch in October 2018
The James Webb Space Telescope will
launch on an Ariane 5 ECA in October 2018. The image here
shows an Ariane 5 ECA lifting off from Europe's Spaceport in
French Guiana on 25 July 2013, carrying Europe’s telecom
satellite Alphasat. Copyright ESA/CNES/ARIANESPACE
17 December 2015: The next great space observatory took a step closer this week when ESA signed the contract with Arianespace that will see the James Webb Space Telescope launched on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou in October 2018.
Ariane is part of the European contribution to the cooperative mission with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, along with two of the four state-of-the-art science instruments for infrared observations of the Universe.
The telescope’s wide range of targets includes detecting the first galaxies in the Universe and following their evolution over cosmic time, witnessing the birth of new stars and their planetary systems, and studying planets in our Solar System and around other stars.
With a 6.5 m-diameter telescope, the observatory must be launched folded up inside Ariane’s fairing. The 6.6 tonne craft will begin unfolding shortly after launch, once en route to its operating position some 1.5 million km from Earth on the anti-sunward side.
The contract includes a cleaner fairing and integration facility to avoid contaminating the sensitive telescope optics.
“With this key contract now in place with our long-standing partners, we are closer than ever to seeing the scientific goals of this next-generation space observatory realised,” says Jan Woerner, ESA’s Director General.
“This agreement is a significant milestone,” says Eric Smith, NASA’s JWST programme director. “The years of hard work and excellent collaboration between the NASA, ESA and Arianespace teams that have made this possible are testimony to their dedication to the world’s next great space telescope.”
“It is a great honour for Arianespace to be entrusted with the launch of JWST, a major space observatory which will enable science to make a leap forward in its quest of understanding our Universe,” said Stéphane Israël, Chairman and CEO of Arianespace.
“It is also an immense privilege to be part of such an international endeavour gathering the best of US, European and Canadian space technology and industry.”
JWST’s science module, with all four flight instruments, is undergoing final tests at cryogenic temperatures at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Assembly of the 18 mirror segments, which will unfold after launch, is also now underway.
“With the launch service agreement formally agreed, and with NASA’s continuing solid progress of integrating and testing JWST, we keep the steady pace towards the launch in October 2018,” says Peter Jensen, ESA’s project manager.
Posted: December 18, 2015
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