A stunning space image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows a spooky cosmic wolf, in a structure fittingly named the Dark Wolf Nebula. Captured using ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope in Chile, the full image has 283 million pixels and shows the nebula located 5,300 light-years away.
Many of the most striking structures you see in space images are nebulae, which are clouds of dust and gas that often host forming stars. Often, these nebulae will be illuminated in beautiful colors due to radiation from the young stars inside them, which ionizes gas and makes it glow. But this nebula is the opposite, being a type called a dark nebula. In these nebulae, the dust that makes up the cloud is so thick and dense that it prevents visible light from passing through it, appearing like a dark smudge.
“If you thought that darkness equals emptiness, think again,” ESO explains. “Dark nebulae are cold clouds of cosmic dust, so dense that they obscure the light of stars and other objects behind them. As their name suggests, they do not emit visible light, unlike other nebulae. Dust grains within them absorb visible light and only let through radiation at longer wavelengths, like infrared light. Astronomers study these clouds of frozen dust because they often contain new stars in the making.”
To capture this image, a series of different separate images had to be taken using different filters. Each filter captures a particular wavelength of light, and when the data is put together, it forms the colorful and detailed image we see. The original images were taken as part of a survey called the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge, which focuses on the main part of the galaxy as seen from the southern sky. It has also taken previous beautiful images of objects like the Lagoon Nebula and a striking area of the sky called Baade’s Window.
The survey was completed in August 2018, but data from the 500 million objects it covered in our Milky Way is still being used for scientific discovery and for creating beautiful images like this one. If you fancy going digging through the data for yourself, the full trove of images is viewable using the ESO Archive Science Portal.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.