8k Wallpaper of Images from HST and ESO

Dr. Stuart Robbins created this wallpaper graphic from images from the public archives of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Pretty darned incredible! I think I'll be using it for a while on my own desktop. You can find an 8k version on his website.

Looking Back Upon Me

I looked into the eye of the divine, 

   Driven.

That flaming jewel in the depths of the cosmos,

Set amid a blanket of starry darkness,

   Vast and beautiful.

I looked out to see where I fit,
And found the universe looking back upon me.

Get Deep With the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field Image
(NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; & HUDF09 Team)

The Hubble Space Telescope has had a remarkable impact on space science and humanity. From observations of the outer planets of our solar system to exploring other stars and nebulae in our galaxy, Hubble has been an impressive mission and has produced some of the most incredible images of the cosmos to date. One series of incredible images are the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), and the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (HXDF).

The picture above shows the HXDF in all of its glory. Released in 2012, this picture shows a smattering of galaxies, something in the range of 5,500 of them, and some of them are as far away as 13.2 billion lightyears (meaning that some of those blobs of colored light in this image sent their shine our way some 13.2 billion years ago!).

Just looking at this image should make one wonder about the immense vastness of our universe and the potential things that may be happening in any of those thousands of galaxies far, far away. Now that have evidence to show that many stars in our galaxy have planets, it makes me wonder about how many worlds are out there in just this one region of space from the HXDF alone. Could there be other inhabited worlds? Are there species of beings out there who are turning their own instruments our way and seeing our light from long ago flashing at them? I'd like to think so. 

Crabby, Crab, Crabby, Crab, Crab.

There's a neutron star in the middle of the Crab Nebula, and that sucker is spinning 30 times every second!

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester (ASU), and M. Weisskopf (NASA / MSFC)

The above image was released on Astronomy Picture of the Day recently. It shows the illumination of the Crab Nebula from the Crab Pulsar (the rightmost of the two bright stars in the image). A pulsar is a neutron star which is highly magnetized and spins rather quickly, emitting radiation. The Crab Nebula itself is made up of the remnants of a large star that collapsed long ago, blowing off lots of material and forming the Crab Pulsar neutron star. The spinning of the pulsar drives the illumination of the nebula. 

The image of the Crab Nebula above comes from a composite of x-ray and optical light data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The video below shows the two different types of image (x-ray in blue, optical in red) in seven different sets of images from November 200 to April 2001. Those images have been looped many times to create a video, where you can see the swirling stellar winds moving through the nebula from the pulsar.

The Crab Nebula is beautiful, but that beauty can find new meaning when we consider the processes that formed the nebula and are affecting it today.

Here's a wider image showing the Crab Nebula in all of its glory. Let this one sink in...

Crab Nebula (NASA)