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Crashing In//Oregon July 2016

Jupiter’s Galilean Moons

Io - Jupiter’s volcanic moon

Europa -  Jupiter’s icy moon

Ganymede - Jupiter’s (and the solar system’s) largest moon

Callisto -  Jupiter’s heavily cratered moon

Made using: Celestia, Screen2Gif & GIMP Based on: @spaceplasma‘s solar system gifs Profile sources: http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/joviansatfact.html

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a beautiful new image of the open star cluster Messier 7.  This new view of a middle-aged star cluster (also known as “M7”) comes in the form of an ESO photo release.  Using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile, the image was taken with the Wide-Field Imager and shows a window of sky about 1° across, or twice as wide as a full Moon. The cluster stars are the big, (mostly) blue ones in the foreground, about 1000 light years away; the thousands of other, fainter stars are many times more distant as the line of sight in this view is one of the most dense through our Galaxy’s disk.  

At 200 million years old, Messier 7 is a snapshot in the middle of the evolution of a typical star cluster: the gas and dust from which the stars formed are long gone, but the resulting stars are still near each other in space.  The blue stars are evolving rapidly and will be the first to disappear, while the longer-lived cluster stars will slowly drift apart over the next billion years or so.  According to the photo release, “As they age, the brightest stars in the picture — a population of up to a tenth of the total stars in the cluster — will violently explode as supernovae. Looking further into the future, the remaining faint stars, which are much more numerous, will slowly drift apart until they become no longer recognisable as a cluster.”

Auroras Larger Than Earth Spotted Over Jupiter

Above It All // Heather Ingram

daniiux

The Invisible Galaxy

A new form of diffuse galaxy has been discovered inside the Coma Cluster. This place is made 99.99% of dark matter, totally invisible as it doesn’t interact with light.

The galaxy is known as Dragonfly 44 and was discovered by astronomers Pieter van Dokkum and his colleagues.

The way star systems orbit around the center of a galaxy is inexplicable with “normal” physics. To account for the velocity variations and patterns we need to add a new ingredient to the gravitational pot: dark matter.

Dragonfly 44 in particular has so few stars that were the dark matter to be taken away, the galaxy would fly apart the same way you’d go flying if the cord holding the swing to a swing set were severed.

(Image credit: NASA, JPL-CalTech and L. Jenkins)