Notices by Kelly Lepo (kellylepo@astrodon.social), page 3

Check out this new #JWST image of the Crab Nebula 🤩

The milky smoke-like glow in the nebula's center comes from synchrotron radiation, light produced by charged particles, like electrons, moving around magnetic fields at relativistic speeds.

Curvy wisps outline the structure of the pulsar’s magnetic field, which sculpts and shapes the nebula. A faint ring of white material encircles the pulsar, a tiny white dot, at the very center.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-137

#astronomy #space #SupernovaRemnant

Earlier this week, we saw a new #JWST image of Cassiopeia A. Cas A has been observed with many other telescopes over the years. Let's take a multi-wavelenght tour of the supernova remnant across different types of light.

📷 https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/149/01HGH0SBY44A8SM23AGB1H06F7

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Uranus is an oddball planet — it spins on its side, tilted about 98 degrees so that its rotational axis is almost parallel to the plane of its orbit. This means that for about a quarter of its 84-year-long orbit, one pole gets all of the sunlight (summer), and the other is plunged into darkness (winter). Uranus is approaching its northern summer solstice, which will happen in 2028.

In this image, we can see the bright white northern polar cap and bright storms at lower latitudes.

Here is a new 4-color #JWST image of the planet Uranus, along with its rings and moons, adding two filters to the 2-color version released earlier this year.

The labeled blue, star-like things are Uranus' moons, including its five major moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. We also see a smattering of the smaller moons near the rings, named after characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope.

More: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-150

NASA's Winter 2024 Astrophoto challenge, featuring the Crab Nebula, is now on. Make your own images with real NASA data using a simple, online tool. Then, submit your image. Standout entries are featured on the website and get comments from expert judges.

I've been a guest expert in the past, and I find all of your technicolor space images delightful. Please go make some weird space pictures: https://mo-www.cfa.harvard.edu/OWN/astrophoto/index.html

A video introduction to NASA's Winter 2024 Astrophoto Challenge:
https://youtu.be/qtkHA2wBr0c

Here is my own psychedelic Crab Nebula image that I made in 5 minutes using the online Astrophoto Challenge tools.

#astronomy #nasa #NASAAstrophotoChallenge

From xkcd's What If?:
What if we aimed the Hubble Telescope at Earth?
https://youtu.be/2LSyizrk8-0

An interesting thing happens when you take the infrared light from an object, like this planet-forming disk, and spread out the light by wavelength into a spectrum. You sometimes get these regularly spaced peaks in brightness.

It turns out that this comes from the vibration of molecules, like carbon monoxide (CO).

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📷 https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/2023/152/01HFPT98RKZYQKV2YP2S6HNDZ3

#astronomy #chemistry #space

New #JWST image of the star-forming region Sagittarius C. It's about 300 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

The galactic center is a truly bizarre place. It's filled with turbulent, dense, magnetized gas clouds that are forming stars. There are also clusters of massive young stars that impact their environment with outflowing winds, jets, and high-energy light.
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https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-148

#Astronomy #Space #MilkyWay

Happy Halloween 🎃

Here are the pumpkins I carved this year: An active red dwarf star and its gas giant planet. I call it an exo-pumkin.

#pumpkin #JackOLantern #halloween #Astrodon #astronomy

Results out from Adam Riess, the Hubble Tension remains after observations of cepheid variable stars with JWST's clearer near-infrared view.

Measurements of the local value of the expansion rate of the universe (from the cosmic distance ladder) disagree with the rate you predict from measurements made in the early universe (CMB).

Blog post:
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/early-highlights/webb-confirms-accuracy-of-universes-expansion-rate-measured-by-hubble
#JWSTYearOne

One idea from the morning talks on supermassive black holes in galaxies in the early universe.

Do the black holes form from the direct collapse of massive gas clouds: "the heavy seed model", or from massive stars: "the light seed model"? The evidence now favors heavy seeds. But, it could be both, and they might look different.

I'm reminded of the debate about what makes white dwarf supernovas. Both of the two competing scenarios may happen, and one may make unusual supernovas.
#JWSTYearOne

A neat interdisciplinary science story from Olivier Berne and the PDRs4All project.

They saw this forrest of emission lines in their observations of the Orion Bar, a star forming region. After talking with some chemists, they found it was from the Methyl-Cation (CH3+).

Chemists had been studying it for years, but didn't have a great spectrum. The JWST data is better than anything that could be measured on Earth. With the new data, they were able to make a much better model.

#JWSTYearOne

Ooh! The first detection of clear signals of a compact object at the center of the supernova remnant SN 1987A! It's probably either a cooling neutron star or a pulsar wind nebula.
#JWSTYearOne

Conclusion after tonight's conference social hour: Astronomers' ability to pay attention to a science talk outside of their field is greatly enhanced if there are pretty pictures. Great for people studying nearby galaxies and nebulas. Sorry early galaxies folks, all of your objects are just red blobs. #JWSTYearOne

Lot of neat stuff about JWST observations of supernovas from Tea Temim this morning, including an update on the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant observations.

What are those bubbles in the area known as the "green monster?" The team's current thinking is that in the past, dense clumps of ejecta shot through the gas near the star, and now interactions between the gas and the supernova shocks are highlighting the "bullet hole" structures.

#JWSTYearOne

New observations of the debris desk around the star Beta Pictoris from Marshal Perrin. They see a new feature they are calling the "cat's tail" which may be dust being blow out of the system after a collision of two planetesimals.
#JWSTYearOne

I'll be at the First Year of JWST Science Conference this week at @spacetelescope.

If you want to follow along, there will be is livestream: https://cloudproject.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=ba3f9ab0-1572-4424-973c-b07a00f03f83
No registration is required.

Edit: New live stream link because of some technical difficulties with YouTube.
#JWSTYearOne #Astrodon

@spacetelescope And the YouTube link for the First Year of #JWST Science Conference is working now: https://www.youtube.com/live/pAPeLRl5rT0?si=OwuW37-p7oWbkwq4