27 Million Pixels of Space Porny Joy

Nivair H. Gabriel — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 09:00:00 PST

This gorgeous image — which you can bet is beastly in size at full resolution — features the endless parade of faraway stars that occupy our universe. It's the deepest photograph of its kind ever taken from a ground-based telescope, enabling us to see constellations from Earth that are a billion times too faint for us to detect with the naked eye. For 55 hours, astronomers from the European Organization for Astronomical Research (ESO) focused their Very Large Telescope at the sky and developed this rich composite image. In the process, they discovered a plethora of new galaxies — and the trippy thing is, we're seeing them as they were when the universe was a sprightly 2 billion years old.

Staring at even a small portion of this image is hypnotic. While it looks like a collection of multicolored dots and tiny UFO-shaped lights, this picture is really showing us what the ESO calls "island universes" — galaxies just like our own Milky Way, with who knows what inside them. To get an idea of just how insignificant we are (you never get tired of that, right?), take a gander at that superbright star in the center of the close-up below. Then shift your eyes to the left, to the smaller light that looks like an upside-down red lightbulb with a neon green base. That's one of the only things in this photo that's in our galaxy, and the reason it looks so funky is because it moved while the Very Large Telescope was capturing its image.

Here's the best part: ESO has a Zoomify setup of the image that you can play with all day. By dinnertime, you'll be more familiar with the Chandra Deep Field South than anyone you know.

A Pool of Distant Galaxies: the deepest ultraviolet image of the Universe yet [via ESO]

Hardcore X-Ray Death from Massive Binary Star System

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:48:08 PDT

You are looking right into the burning, hydrogen gas-shrouded heart of one of the biggest star nurseries that Earth astronomers have ever seen. This image was created by the European Organization for Astronomical Research (ESO), and shows part of the Gum 29 region, which researchers say is probably about 1-2 million years old (making it possibly younger than some of our hominid ancestors). Gum 29 is about 26,000 light years from Earth, at the edge of the Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. And within its bright heart are two of the most massive stars we've ever seen, in a tight orbit around each other. Want to see that binary system up close?

There it is, indicated by the two lines. It looks like one enormous blob, but that's actually two stars. According to the ESO:

The two stars have masses of 82 and 83 times that of our Sun and rotate around each other in approximately 3.7 days. They are amongst the most massive stars known to astronomers.
Detailed observations of this intriguing pair have also shown that they are both Wolf-Rayet stars. These are massive stars nearing the end of their lives, expelling vast quantities of material as their final swansong. Observations made in X-rays have subsequently shown that streams of material from each star continually collide, creating a blaze of X-ray radiation.

The really cool part? This was taken from a ground observatory in Chile, not a satellite telescope. Amazing clarity for a ground-based system.

Claret-Colored Cloud with a Massive Heart [via ESO]

io9: eso

27 Million Pixels of Space Porny Joy

Hardcore X-Ray Death from Massive Binary Star System