Latest Orion Arm Stories
Once every 50 years, more or less, a massive star explodes somewhere in the Milky Way. The resulting blast is terrifyingly powerful, pumping out more energy in a split second than the sun emits in a million years. At its peak, a supernova can outshine the entire Milky Way.
Stars that are just beginning to coalesce out of cool swaths of dust and gas are showcased in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS).
The prevailing theory on star cluster formation states that gravity causes a giant cloud of gas and dust to condense to concentrations that trigger the ignition of stars at the center of the cloud.
WASHINGTON, May 7, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared telescopes, astronomers have made an important advance in the understanding of
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) found that some protostars in the Orion Nebula are doomed from the beginning.
Messier 7, also known as NGC 6475, is a brilliant cluster of about 100 stars located some 800 light-years from Earth. In this new picture from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope it stands out against a very rich background of hundreds of thousands of fainter stars, in the direction of the center of the Milky Way.
In the spirit of Halloween, scientists are releasing a trio of stellar ghosts caught in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Astronomers presented research on Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) about how the Cat's Paw Nebula is experiencing a "baby boom."
The Hubble Space Telescope has provided one of the most detailed images of the Ring Nebula so far, allowing scientists to construct a model of the nebula in 3D.
Astronomers have unveiled a new image of recently formed bright blue stars in the cluster NGC 2547.
Trifid Nebula -- Discovered by Charles Messier in 1764. Charles Messier discovered this object on June 5, 1764, and described it as a cluster of stars of 8th to 9th magnitude, enveloped in nebulosity. The Trifid Nebula M20 is famous for its three-lobed appearance. This may have caused William Herschel, who normally carefully avoided to number Messier's objects in his catalog, to assign four different numbers to parts of this nebula: H IV.41 (cataloged May 26, 1786) and H V.10, H V.11,...
Owl Nebula -- Dicovered by Pierre Mchain in 1781. The Owl Nebula M97 is one of the fainter objects in Messier's catalog, discovered by Pierre Mchain on February 16, 1781. In his description of this object, Charles Messier also mentions two other nebulous objects that he (and Mchain) have seen at about the same time, but which he had not added in his printed catalog version of 1781 (in the Connaissance des Temps for 1784). As the description is obvious and he added positions by...
Cone Nebula -- The Cone Nebula is a famous nebula in the Orion Arm surrounding the NGC 2264 star cluster. The 'cone' is a triangular dark nebula near the bottom of the nebula. The bright star at the centre of this picture is 15 Monocerotis (or 'S Monocerotis') - it is a quadruple star system consisting of four brilliant blue-white stars (classes O7, B7, B8 and A6) and it is partly responsible for causing the nebula to glow. The distance to the Cone Nebula is well-known, because it has...
- A poem in which the author retracts something said in an earlier poem.