Thursday, June 5, 2008

The cosmic play





I will be trying to post a few pictures that reveal how stupid, small and insignificant we are..in this macrospace..

1.Infrared eyes reveal a star-forming region, hidden to regular telescopes by thick dust clouds. Astronomers study images like this to learn about star birth. A cluster of three young stars makes up the bright center. The reddish bowl, or arc, traces the outer surface of the cloud encasing the young stars.

2.
Infant stars appear as pink and red specks in this infrared view from Spitzer. Newborn stars like these are usually hidden behind thick dust clouds so they cannot be seen with normal telescopes.Wisps of dust that hold organic molecules, or star-forming ingredients, are shown in green. Yellow stars are massive infant stars and the blue dots are older stars.

3.
A galaxy is like an extended family of a star. NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer studies these stellar families with ultraviolet light, which reveals young stars.
The blue regions in Messier 31 show where young, hot stars are forming along the galaxy's spiral arms. The central orange-white "bulge" of old, cooler stars formed long ago.
This image provides astronomers with a wonderful example of how galaxies develop.

4.
This image of the spiral galaxy Messier 101 shows how these type of galaxies develop. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer's ultraviolet view finds young stars - only 10 million years old - concentrated in the spiral arms.

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