Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... In the center of the above image lies Barnard 163, a nebula of molecular gas and dust so thick that visible light can't shine through it. ... Finding Barnard 163 in an image of its greater emission nebula IC 1396 can be a challenge, but it's possible. ... NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings, and Disclaimers . ... Publications with keywords: molecular cloud - absorption nebula . Publications with words: molecular cloud - absorption nebula . ...

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2011 May 1 . Molecular Cloud Barnard 163 . ... In the center of the above image lies Barnard 163, a nebula of molecular gas and dust so thick that visible light can't shine through it. ... Finding Barnard 163 in an image of its greater emission nebula IC 1396 can be a challenge, but it's possible. ... About APOD | ...

Photon Scattering: Basic Principle of Photon Scattering . Audio Narration is available . No Scattering: Photon Source and Detector . ... For optical photons, scattering goes as wavelength to the -4 power. In the case of blue photons compared to red photons, this means that blue photons are about 10 times more likely to get scattered than red photons. ... Watch the blue photons scatter away from the detector . ... Interstellar dust make stars appear redder than they really are . ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Armagh Planetarium . ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... Although they look tranquil here, observed up close such young stars would seethe and glare violently. ... Once thought to be a satellite of our own galaxy, increasingly the Small Magellanic Cloud is believed to be an interloper from the intergalactic void which has wandered into its present location and will eventually recede away into the darkness. ... Your email address will not be published. ...

... A faint, dusty rose of the northern sky, emission nebula IC 410 lies about 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Auriga. The cloud of glowing hydrogen gas is over 100 light-years across, sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from embedded open star cluster NGC 1893. ... These "tadpoles" (seen just below center) are regions of denser, cooler gas, and more slowly resist the erosive radiation from the hot stars. ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

... STScI-PRC98-11A STARING INTO THE WINDS OF DESTRUCTION: HST/NICMOS IMAGES OF THE PLANETARY NEBULA NGC 7027 The Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) has captured a glimpse of a brief stage in the burnout of NGC 7027, a medium-mass star like our sun. ... The material settles into a wind of gas and dust blowing away from the dying star. ... During this phase, intense ultraviolet radiation from the central star lights up a region of gas surrounding it. ...

... self-absorption - the absorption of light shining on an object by a process similar to that which produced the light originally; if a cloud emits less light than it absorbs from other clouds behind it, this net loss of light, termed self-absorption , causes the foreground cloud to appear darker than the background field (the term is from spectroscopy, where small absorption dips sometimes occur in larger emission lines, making the latter look as if it is absorbing part of itself) . ... HISA Main ...

... Bad Astronomy . Misconceptions . ... Bad Astronomy : "We're light years more advanced than our competition!" ... Even the closest astronomical object, the Moon, is 400,000 kilometers away! ... A beam of light will travel 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers in one year. This distance is defined as a light year ; the distance light travels in a year. ... This is another example of Bad Astronomy; like a light year, a parsec is a unit of distance, not time (to be specific, it equals 3.26 light years) . ...

... ESO is building what will be the World's largest optical telescope array, The Very Large Telescope (VLT). The VLT Project organisation is responsible for the design and construction of the Unit Telescopes, including enclosures, optics, adapter-rotators and coating unit. ... Unit Telescopes Overview - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Secondary mirror (M2 Unit) - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Coating Unit - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ...

... All previous such superstars have been found along with many companion stars in the centres of crowded star clusters. The star is known as VFTS 682 from the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey catalogue of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) located at Paranal in Chile by means of the attached FLAMES instrument. ... Although VFTS 682 seems to be alone now it is not very far away from a very rich star cluster known as RMC 136 that contains several similar superstars. ...

... GSAOI Home . ... Science . ... Despite vast increase in our understanding of the evolutionary nature of planetary nebulae (PNe) during the last three decades, a central question remains: where is the missing mass? Theoretical evolutionary tracks predict that all stars with masses in the range 1.4-8 M Sun should become PNe. ... Clearly, much of the mass of the planetary nebula shell must remain un-ionized, and much of it may be in molecular form. ... The Magellanic Cloud PNe are ideal for this. ...

... In one situation, we can use light from quasars to probe the material between us and them because that light may pass through one or more galaxies or gas clouds on its way to us. The gas inside the galaxies or the intergalactic clouds acts then as a filter, absorbing selected wavelengths from the quasar light. ... Light from a quasar must pass through clouds of gas and even faint galaxies -- each leaving its imprint on the light -- before we receive it here on Earth. ... Gravitational lensing . ...

The APEX observations, made with its LABOCA camera, are shown here in orange tones, combined with a visible light image from the Curtis Schmidt telescope at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. The result is a dramatic wide-field picture that provides a spectacular view of CarinaтАЩs star formation sites. The nebula contains stars equivalent to over 25,000 Suns, and the total mass of gas and dust clouds is that of about 140,000 Suns. Credit: ESO/APEX/T. Preibisch et al. ...

... ATNF Home . ... Australia Telescope Steering Committee . ... Parkes radio telescope . ... During the descent and for the three hours that the probe continued transmitting after it landed on the surface, the ATNF radio telescopes - Parkes, the Compact Array and Mopra, along with the University of Tasmania's telescopes in Hobart and Ceduna and 12 other telescopes in the USA, China and Japan were used to track the trajectory of the descent using the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI)...

... The interstar media . The interstar media includes the rarefied substance (gas and dust) electromagnetic radiation, the space beams, neutrino and other kinds of materia which fill the space (see the circulation of gas and dust in the Universe ). ... The nebula of the Alter . ... The gas-dust nebulas. ... The gas nebulas galaxical are shining due to the transformation of the shot waved (ultraviolet) radiation of the very hot stars located in the nebula or near it into the visible light. ...

... Shustov B.M., Wiebe D.S. Dust expelling from the Galaxy ( abstract from the journal ). Astronomy Reports , 1995, 39 , 578-586 [AZh, 72 , 650-659]. Wiebe D.S., Shematovich V.I., Shustov B.M. Chemical and dynamical evolution of protostellar clouds: initial stages of collapse ( abstract from the journal ). ... Shustov B.M., Wiebe D.S., Tutukov A.V. Evolution of disk galaxies and loss of heavy elements into the intracluster medium. ... ApJ (Letters), 1998, 503 , L71-L74 ( astro-ph/9806155 ). ...

... Phase light curves of binary model that consists of a primary component with mass M 1 and a secondary component with mass M 2 . ... The input parameters of the problem are the accretion rate onto the binary components ( ), the component mass ratio q = M 2 /M 1 , the orbital inclination to the line of sight , the eccentricity e, the rotation angle of the apsidal line relative to the observer , and the parameter c characterizing viscosity. ...

... Spectrosc., 90 , 574-579. [ abstract (in English; ASCII file); paper (in Russian; PS file)] . ... Astronomy Letters, 26 , N 10, 679-690. [ abstract (ASCII file); paper (PDF file)] . ... 2001) . ... 72 , N 5, 607-612. [ abstract (ASCII file); paper (PS file)] . ... Scattering and polarization properties of the non-spherical particles. in: Smith W.L., Timofeyev Y.M. (eds.) IRS 2000: Current Problems in Atmospheric Radiation, A.Deepak Publ. (in press) [ abstract (ASCII file); paper (PS file)] . ...

... 1997: . The character of internal motions of gas in 7200 HI clouds in the outer region of our Galaxy was investigated according to the data of the HI survey with the RATAN-600. It turned out that the effect of turbulence, as the main mechanism of gas motion is not essential, while it was discovered that 36% of the clouds are rotating. ... Periodic variations of optical emission of the gamma, X-ray and radio pulsar GEMINGA were for the first time discovered from the observations with the BTA. ...

Class 1 Introduction, Background History of Modern Astronomy The Night Sky, Eclipses and the Seasons Kepler's Laws Newtonian Gravity General Relativity Matter and Light Telescopes Class 2 Solar System Characteristics Formation Exosolar Planets Class 3 Stars The Sun Stellar Evolution of Low and High Mass Stars Deaths of Stars Exotic Stars Class 4 Galaxies Galaxy Classification Formation of Galaxies Galactic Evolution ... So far, one planet has been studied by this method. ...