Spooky Pics of the Week: A dead star's still-beating heart
Meteorologist/Science Writer
Friday, October 28, 2016, 2:02 PM - A dead star's still-beating heart, spinning "pumpkin" stars in space, and the hidden face of the monster that is our Sun. Just in time for Halloween, here are some of the latest spooky and fascinating science pictures from the past week!
The dead heart of the Crab Nebula beats still...
Stars live and stars die, but even dead stars - or at least their remnants - can persist with an eerie kind of life of their own.
This is the Crab Nebula, formally known as Messier Object 1 (M1) or NGC 1952, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1999 and 2000.
Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
This "pulsar wind nebula" was produced by the explosive demise of a massive star, roughly 6,500 light years away from us, in the constellation Taurus. The light from this fiery death apparently reached Earth in the year 1054, and it has been one of the most studied astronomical objects since then.
Credits: NASA and ESA, Acknowledgment: M. Weisskopf/Marshall Space Flight Center
Recent images, like the green-filtered view above, have peered into the heart of this expanding cloud of gas, looking to study the dead remnant of that star - a rapidly-rotating "pulsar" - and they have found it still has a heartbeat, of sorts...
Credits: NASA and ESA, Acknowledgment: J. Hester (Arizona State University)
According to NASA:
This time-lapse movie of the Crab Nebula, made from NASA Hubble Space Telescope observations, reveals wave-like structures expanding outward from the "heart" of an exploded star. The waves look like ripples in a pond. The heart is the crushed core of the exploded star, or supernova. Called a neutron star, it has about the same mass as the sun but is squeezed into an ultra-dense sphere that is only a few miles across and 100 billion times stronger than steel. This surviving relic is a tremendous dynamo, spinning 30 times a second. The rapidly spinning neutron star is visible in the image as the bright object just below center. The bright object to the left of the neutron star is a foreground or background star. The movie is assembled from 10 Hubble exposures taken between September and November 2005 by the Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Jack-o-lanterns in space?
The more astronomers look out into space and the more data they collect on the universe, the stranger and stranger things seem to get.
Case in point, the Kepler Space Telescope and the Swift X-Ray Telescope have teamed up to reveal a type of star that takes on a special significance around this time of year... these large, rapidly-rotating red/orange stars bear a striking resemblance to pumpkins!
Beneath a seemingly calm exterior...
The Sun is putting on its angry face, perhaps to get into the Halloween spirit.
Credit: NASA SDO/S. Sutherland
In these images, taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) on October 28, 2016, the surface of the Sun (the first frame of the animation) appears quite calm, with only a few tiny sunspots just right of centre. The frames that follow, though, reveal the activity that happens behind that "calm mask". SDO's 193 Angstrom view shows off the bright regions of the active corona, the even brighter active regions, where sunspots produce very strong coronal loops and other activity, and the dark regions that denote coronal holes.
The thing is, when you slap on a pair of eyebrows, the pattern of corona and coronal holes looks a lot like an angry face!
Happy Halloween!
