Friday, March 2, 2012

Galaxy Quest

       Here's the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which contains thousands of galaxies (omg, galaxies!). Exposure
       time for this image was 11.3 days using the Hubble Space Telescope. Incredible stuff. Oh, and I know
       that the different colors are just due to artist rendering, but it's still amazing!
       Image and content source: Hubble Site.

       To give some perspective, here's our galaxy: the Milky Way. Earth is on the Orion-Cygnus Arm, aka the 
       Orion Spur. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, which means that it has a bar shaped center made up            of stars. There's a whopping 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy alone and on top of that, there are at least          that many planets to orbit some of those stars.
     
       Image and content source: Wikipedia. Yeah, I know but I was too lazy to search for a better reference.

       This photo is in reference to blue straggler stars, which are circled in green. However, I'm not interested  
       in that at the moment. I just thought this was a cool picture that gives a closer view of the stars in a 
       portion of the Milky Way.
     
       Image source: Science Daily.


No comments:

Post a Comment