Three from the Hubble

[james_davis_nicoll]

Images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal 14 young, runaway stars plowing through regions of dense interstellar gas, creating brilliant arrowhead structures and trailing tails of glowing gas.

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Brown dwarfs, objects that are less massive than stars but larger than planets, just got more elusive, based on a study of 233 nearby multiple-star systems by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble found only two brown dwarfs as companions to normal stars. This means the so-called "brown dwarf desert" (the absence of brown dwarfs around solar-type stars) extends to the smallest stars in the universe.

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This composite color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years.

Comments

[soon_lee]

Wow.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Oh, my - I want that last one on my wall, blown up as big as I can get it. Fabulous.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Beautiful.

It says much about me that I at first assumed the bottom picture was a demotivator, which made the caption pretty darn confusion for a few moments.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The top left panel in the first image looks like a really indistinct fetal ultrasound. I think it's just the presence of grainy arc-shaped structure within a sort of conical envelope, but it makes me want to try to distinguish a face and limbs.

[johnreiher.livejournal.com]

It's just a Starchild taking a little trip through local star group.

[wdstarr.livejournal.com]

I like that your alt-tag for the first photo is "run away stars" rather than "runaway." Run away! Run away!