This gorgeous image shows a fiery stunner called the Rosette Nebula that’s located 5,000 light-years away from Earth. Imaged by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile, this cloud of dust and gas acts as a stellar nursery and houses a young star cluster at its center.
Unlike other telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, which looks in the infrared wavelength, the DECam looks in the optical wavelength, so it sees similar colors to what the human eye would perceive. The colors in this image are so bright and vivid due to the starlight from the massive young stars in the cluster, which give off large amounts of ultraviolet radiation, thereby ionizing nearby hydrogen gas. The ionized gas glows brightly, giving the nebular its striking appearance.
“The billowing red clouds are regions of H-alpha emission, resulting from highly energized hydrogen atoms emitting red light,” NOIRLab explains. “Along the walls of the central cavity, closer to the massive central stars, the radiation is energetic enough to ionize a heavier atom like oxygen, which glows in shades of gold and yellow. Finally, along the edges of the flower’s petals are wispy tendrils of deep pink glowing from the light emitted by ionized silicon.”
The nebula is huge, at 130 light-years across, but you can see there is a hollow area at its center where there is a lack of red or yellow, indicating the presence of gas. This central region has been hollowed out by the process of star formation, as the dust and gas has formed into clumps that have gradually attracted more and more matter through gravity until these clumps collapse into a core that forms the basis of a new star.
These stars formed a cluster named NGC 2244 around 2 million years ago, and as the stars, evolve they produce stellar winds that blow away nearby dust and gas and prevent more stars from forming nearby.
These winds carved out the hollow at the center of the nebula and, eventually, they will bring about the end of the nebula as well. In around 10 million years’ time, the radiation from these stars will have pushed away so much of the dust and gas that the nebula will disappear, leaving just the stars remaining without their rose-shaped cloud around 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.