Etiqueta: NASA

The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in a new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the centre of a sunflower. So the nickname for this cosmic object — the Sunflower Galaxy — is no coincidence. Discovered by Pierre Mechain in 1779, the galaxy later made it as the 63rd entry into fellow French astronomer Charles Messier’s famous catalogue, published in 1781. The two astronomers spotted the Sunflower Galaxy’s glow in the small, northern constellation Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs). We now know this galaxy is about 27 million light-years away and belongs to the M51 Group — a group of galaxies, named after its brightest member, Messier 51, another spiral-shaped galaxy dubbed the Whirlpool Galaxy. Galactic arms, sunflowers and whirlpools are only a few examples of nature’s apparent preference for spirals. For galaxies like Messier 63 the winding arms shine bright because of the presence of recently formed, blue–white giant stars, readily seen in this Hubble image.

Científicos del IPN y la UNAM crearán mapa del universo

CDMX #astronomía #Cinvestav #espacio exterior #galaxias #IPN #NASA #UNAM #universo

Ocho científicos mexicanos, de instituciones como la UNAM y el IPN, formarán parte del proyecto Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), que medirá 30 millones de galaxias para hacer un mapa tridimensional del universo. Los mexicanos […]

El ‘Poli’ te invita a vivir la Semana Mundial del Espacio

Ciudad #astronomía #espacio #IPN #NASA #Planetario #Planetario Luis Enrique Erro

El Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) celebrará la Semana Mundial del Espacio con talleres para hacer cohetes,  iluminar el traje de los astronautas, así como proyecciones en el Planetario Luis Enrique Erro y conferencias. El director […]

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture shows a galaxy named SBS 1415+437 or SDSS CGB 12067.1, located about 45 million light-years from Earth. SBS 1415+437 is a Wolf–Rayet galaxy, a type of starbursting galaxy with an unusually high number of extremely hot and massive stars known as Wolf–Rayet stars. These stars can be around 20 times as massive as the Sun, but seem to be on a mission to shed surplus mass as quickly as possible — they blast substantial winds of particles out into space, causing them to dwindle at a rapid rate. A typical star of this type can lose a mass equal to that of our Sun in just 100 000 years! These massive stars are also incredibly hot, with surface temperatures some 10 to 40 times that of the Sun, and very luminous, glowing at tens of thousands to several million times the brightness of the Sun. Many of the brightest and most massive stars in the Milky Way are Wolf–Rayet stars. Because these stars are so intense they do not last very long, burning up their fuel and blasting their bulk out into the cosmos on very short timescale ‒ only a few hundred thousand years. Because of this it is unusual to find more than a few of these stars per galaxy — except in Wolf–Rayet galaxies, like the one in this image.

Astrónomos comprobaron que el universo está envejeciendo

CDMX #Ciencia #espacio #NASA #Tierra #universo

Un estudio que midió 21 longitudes de onda de más de 200 mil galaxias, hecho por astrónomos internacionales con los telescopios más potentes del mundo, confirmó que el universo muere de manera lenta. De acuerdo […]