brownspaceman

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Phobos silhouette over Mars via ISRO. It's so close to Mars that it orbits Mars 3x in one day!

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A team of astronomers found a galaxy that is almost entirely made up of dark matter. This galaxy is called Dragonfly 44 and it’s located in the Coma constellation. One piece of evidence that led to this discovery is the stars velocity. The faster the stars move the more mass its parent galaxy has. However, don’t we see fast moving stars in other galaxies? We actually do but what makes this one so exciting is the fact the galaxy itself is very dim as oppose to fast moving stars like in our bright Milky Way or Andromeda galaxy. The mass of Dragonfly 44 is estimated to be 1 trillion times the mass of our sun. In comparison that is the mass of our very own Milky Way! However, the weird part is 1/100th of that is actual matter and the 99% of it is in the form of dark matter.  Finding these dark galaxies is not something new in the astronomy community as many ultra-faint dwarf galaxies have been discovered before. Nevertheless, why this is particularly unique is those dwarf galaxies are 10,000 times less massive than Dragonfly 44. Currently, there is a race in the scientific community to understand dark matter and Dragonfly 44 may be the ticket to uncovering this cosmic mystery.   Credit: Pieter van Dokkum, Roberto Abraham, Gemini, Sloan Digital Sky Survey #astronomy #dragonfly44 #darkmatter #galaxies #galaxy #NASA #space

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Located 5,000 light years away from Earth in the constellation Cygnus is the Crescent Nebula or NGC 6888. This gorgeous nebula is fascinating because it has a Wolf-Rayet star (WR 136) which is shedding layers at unfathomable speeds. This star is nearing the end of it’s stellar life and approaching the end-result as a violent supernova. The wind-blown nebula is sculpting gasses such as oxygen which can be seen in the blue-greenish hues. It’s ejecting the equivalent of the Sun’s mass every 10,000 years! What’s even more amazing is that this nebula stretches 25 light years across! That would be around 250 trillion KM across, which would be one long trip. The closest start to Earth is about 4 light years away so you can imagine this trip is a bit longer than going to the grocery store. It truly is incredible the amount of gas a star expels as well as the enormous amount of energy it releases towards the end of its life. This is a beautiful snapshot of what it looks like when a star is about to die and give birth to new stars like our own.  Photo credit: J-P Metsavainio #astronomy #space #astrophotography #Cygnus #CrescentNebula #NGC6888 #NASA #nebula #wolfrayetstar #wr136

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A beautiful view from the ISS. One day in the not to distant future everyone will have a chance to see this in person. On that day the world may see that there are no borders and the vastness of space is only bearable through love. Credit: NASA #astronomy #space #Earth #iss #astrophotography #NASA

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Say hello to the beautiful Boomerang Nebula or also known as the Bow Tie Nebula. This is the coldest region we have found thus far in the  universe. I'm not sure if we could find any nebulae that are colder because it's literally 1 degrees  kelvin! Meaning one degree above absolute zero!  The reason it’s so cold starts with the core of the star (which is right in the middle of the bow) is collapsing on itself,  and causing an incredible outflow of gas. The speed of this expansion gas is travelling at an astonishing 164 km/s! Since it’s travelling so fast two things are happening here. One is the gas is cooling down much more efficiently and the other is that the star itself is losing 1/1000th of a solar mass each year. This is 100 times more than what an average star loses during this period.  We wouldn’t have to travel outside of our neighborhood either as it’s located right in our Milky Way 5,000 light years away from Earth in the constellation Centaurus.  Credit: Hubble Heritage Team, J. Biretta (STScI) et al., (STScI/AURA), ESA, NASA #Astronomy #BoomerangNebula #Nebula #NASA #ESA #BowTieNebula

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Good morning and happy Saturday! Here’s a fantastic photo of a group of galaxies playing gravitational tug of war located a staggering 320 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. These group of galaxies are what as known as Hickson Compact Group 91 or HCG 91. They are named so because a Canadian astronomer named Paul Hickson discovered 100 compact groups of galaxies. The tails of these galaxies are actually 100,000 light years long! Because of their “close” interaction the galaxies are triggering furious star formations. On a cosmic timescale these galaxies will merge together to form one larger galaxy which is how our very own Milky Way Galaxy formed. What is also impressive about this image is that it captures fainter galaxy interactions that are 2 billion light years away from Earth! Credit: CHART32 Team, Processing - Johannes Schedler #astronomy #apod #hcg91 #galaxy #universe #galaxies

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Happy Friday and welcome to #supernova remnant Simeis 147 or more famously known as a the "Spaghetti Nebula". This beauty is located about 3,000 light years away from Earth right in our own Milky Way. This incredible destructive supernova happened about 40,000 years ago and the remnant is expanding at an incredible 950 km/s! Credit: Emil Ivanov #astronomy #spaghettinebula #nebula #simeis147

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Oh wow! Here is an absolutely stunning photo of Mimas (a.k.a Death Star) and Prometheus orbiting along Saturn's rings. The rings are so incredibly sharp and thin that they are only about 10 meters thick! This photo was also taken by Cassini spacecraft which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004. It was also a huge collaboration been European Space Agency, Italian Space Agency, and NASA. Credit: NASA / ESA #astronomy #saturn #nasa #mimas #prometheus #moon

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The cosmic definition of "California dreamin'." Say hello to the gorgeous #CaliforniaNebula. This emission nebula is located 1,500 light years away from Earth. This nebula is one of the harder ones to view from binoculars or a low powered telescope. However, the star above it, Xi Persei, which is 30 times more massive than our sun, is actually lighting up the entire nebula! What's even more astonishing is the nebula is over 400,000 trillion kilometers wide! That's even more impressive that Xi Persei is illuminating so much. #astronomy #ngc1499 #nebula

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Imagine a star being born in a galaxy near you. Dust and gas fall towards this accretion disk as gravity and friction get to work at increasing temperatures within the newborn star causing the emission of electromagnetic radiation. Looking further out from the star we see gaseous and perhaps rocky planets in its wake with asteroids and comets bouncing off like a cosmic pinball. As a result of this star two cosmic beams, 5 trillion KM long, jet along the system's axis, piercing right through the interstellar gas. This wonderful image, taken by the Hubble Telescope, is a photo of Herbig-Haro 24, located 1,300 light years away from planet Earth. This is just one out of billions and billions of stars being born into this brilliant universe. This is where we all started from. Credit: NASA / ESA #astronomy #nasa #esa #stars #universe

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"So the work of art is singular in space and in time. Whereas, the work of the scientist, it may be a little ahead of its time, but its time will always come." - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Art Director: Courtney Kuhlman

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Good morning all! Hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend thus far. Here's a stunning photo of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in northern Colombia. These famous mountains are 5,700 m tall or 18,700 feet and were named for Christopher Columbus. They are so tall that they have permanent snow caps (on the far left) and even trees aren't able to grow! Just another small but beautiful part of our Earth. Credit: NASA / ISS #columbia #nasa #mountains #iss #earth #sierranevadadesantamarta

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Happy Saturday! Here is a gorgeous photo taken from the ISS. Delicate fingerprints of water imprinted on the sand. Just beautiful #EarthArt. Credit: NASA / ISS

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Merry Christmas and happy holidays everyone!

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Hope everyone is having an amazing Christmas Eve or spending their holidays in good spirits. This is a gorgeous photo of the Milky Way, taken by the VLT auxiliary telescopes. Credit: ESO Astronomy

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Sit down and focus on the details in this photo. What you are looking at is a massive collision between two galaxies that happened a very long time ago. The galaxy on the right, NGC 5291, is called the "Seashell" galaxy. These galaxies contain mostly young stars and if you look closely you can see a tidal tail that stretches out 100,000 light years. However, looking a little clsoer you'll see something more incredible... it's that these clumps are actually small dwarf galaxies! Astronomers believe that these dwarf galaxies were born in interstellar space and captured the left over debris from NGC 5291 itself. Credit: CHART32 Team, Processing - Johannes Schedler / APOD #astronomy #nasa #Ngc5291 #galaxies #universe #apod

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Say hello to the gorgeous #NGC281 located 10,000 light years away from Earth in the constellation #Cassiopeia.