An image from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) shows a striking celestial sight: the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, a gorgeous face-on galaxy that is one of the closest and brightest barred spiral galaxies in the sky. Also known as Messier 83, the galaxy is bright enough that it can even be seen with binoculars, but this image from a 4-meter Víctor M. Blanco Telescope shows the kind of stunning detail that can be picked out using a powerful instrument.
“This image shows Messier 83’s well-defined spiral arms, filled with pink clouds of hydrogen gas where new stars are forming,” explains NOIRLab from the National Science Foundation, which released the image. “Interspersed amongst these pink regions are bright blue clusters of hot, young stars whose ultraviolet radiation has blown away the surrounding gas. At the galaxy’s core, a yellow central bulge is composed of older stars, and a weak bar connects the spiral arms through the center, funneling gas from the outer regions toward the core. DECam’s high sensitivity captures Messier 83’s extended halo, and myriad more distant galaxies in the background.”
The galaxy is around 15 million light-years away, and appears in the constellation of Hydra. It has famously been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope as well, thanks to its large size and distinctive spiral shape. It is not to be confused with the Pinwheel Galaxy, another spiral galaxy that has a similar name due to its similar shape, but which is located in a different area of the sky — 110 million light-years away in the constellation of Ursa Major.
The Southern Pinwheel is particularly visible even though it is not that large at around 50,000 light-years across. That’s about half the width of the Milky Way. However, the Southern Pinwheel glows brightly because it is a busy place for star formation, with many new stars being born and glowing brightly in the pink streaks seen in the image.
As well as new stars being born, this is also a region where old stars are dying, and the galaxy has been host to six supernova explosions seen in the last century. There is also evidence of hundreds of thousands of supernova remnantse, which are the ghostly structures left behind by previous supernova explosions. Astronomers study these bubble-shaped structures to learn more about the stars that once lived there before they came to the end of their lives and exploded, throwing out material into the space surrounding them.
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.