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With a mass of more than 10 000 suns packed into a volume with a diameter of a mere three light-years, the massive young star cluster in the nebula NGC 3603 is one of the most compact stellar clusters in the Milky Way and a natural lab to test theories for their formation,  revealing whether the stars were in the process of drifting apart, or about to settle down.

The cluster, formally known as the NGC 3603 Young Cluster, is about 20 000 light-years from the Sun which makes these measurements extraordinarily difficult. It is necessary to compare images that were made years or even decades apart. The telescope and camera used must give very sharp images and be extremely stable over long periods.

Read more: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/06/10000-suns-most-dense-star-cluster-in-milky-way-located.html

An international team of scientists, led by a NASA-funded researcher, announced today, they observed a nearby head-on collision of two galaxy clusters. The clusters smashed together thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars. It is one of the most powerful events ever witnessed. Such collisions are second only to the Big Bang in total energy output.

Read more, view videos and images of this event: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0831galaxymerger_media.html

There are 2 explanations for the bright spot apparent at the center of large galaxies: one local to the center and one due to our perspective at a distance.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used satellite data to stitch together detailed scans of every square kilometer of the planet. And now, they just released an animated version of our spinning globe.

Read more: http://io9.com/5484889/most-detailed-image-of-our-planet-ever-now-brought-to-life-as-an-animation

The Milky Way galaxy‘s most massive star has been spotted in a “glowing stellar nursery” in space.

The picture (see below) of the massive Milky Way star was captured by the European Southern Observatory’s aptly named ‘Very Large Telescope,’ which measures 27 feet in diameter.

The telescope, located at Cerro Paranal, Chile, combined data from violet, red and infrared filters to create the image of the Milky Way.

This massive star is housed in the NGC 3603 nebula, in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, which is known as one of the luminous and most compact star clusters. It is located 22,000 light-years away from Earth.

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/04/milky-ways-most-massive-s_n_449359.html

NASA’s images of the faraway ex-planet will help to calibrate the New Horizons spacecraft, which will pass Pluto in 2015. They will use Hubble’s images to set the exposure on board New Horizons, as it races past it. So fast, in fact, that it will only be able to photograph one of the hemispheres up close. [NASA]

Read more: http://gizmodo.com/5464428/most-detailed-view-of-pluto-to-date

Image via Wikipedia

There are numerous comets orbiting through the inner solar system, but where this huge amount of objects comes from is largely unknown. Now astronomers have suggested that many short orbit comets could in fact be fragments of much larger objects that break up into multiple pieces as they enter the inner solar system and interact gravitationally with the planets.

Short-period comets originate in the Kuiper belt of objects located beyond the orbit of Neptune, most of which have orbital periods less than 200 years. Some of these objects will eventually interact gravitationally with one of the outer planets and will be pushed towards the central region of the solar system. But observations reveal that there are a few objects in the Kuiper belt that actually have vulnerable orbits which will eventually send them towards the Sun, and even the population of comets that we’ve mentioned above is very likely to be routinely cut down by the heat of the Sun and eventually ejected out of the solar system.
Read more: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Most-Comets-Could-be-Fragments-of-Larger-Objects-90868.shtml

If someone was completely ignorant of modern science and had never been exposed to the discoveries of the last thousand years or so and they were to sit down and read the six day creation story in Genesis they would come away with a view of the universe in which stars were just ornamental little lights to make the sky a little prettier and the sun and the moon would just serve the purpose of providing plenty of light in the daytime and just a little light at night so it would be easier to go to sleep. The earth would be at the center of everything and what we recognize as the universe wouldn’t even exist. In reality the universe is so massive that we really don’t know how big it is but we know that it’s at least 14 billion years old because that’s how long it took the light from the furthest stars we can detect to reach the earth. The earth itself is just a tiny speck in space and is not the center of anything.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 5, 2010) — NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before.

Source:

Hubble Reaches ‘Undiscovered Country’ of Most Distant Primeval Galaxies