Spark Your Imagination

thefuuuucomics:

Posted on Saturday, 24 December with 16,104 notes.

Posted on Saturday.

Reblog

Posted on Saturday.

Reblog

Posted on Saturday.

Reblog

(Source: engulfingsky)

Posted on Saturday, 17 December with 11 notes.

Posted on Saturday.

Reblog

dextrae:

skyrim planets (by Luca Biada)

Posted on Saturday.

Reblog

Posted on Saturday.

Reblog

unknownskywalker:

The Cat’s Eye Nebula
NGC 6543, nicknamed the Cat’s Eye Nebula, is one of the most complex of the planetary class nebula, stars that throw of spheres of gas at the end of their lives. It is located in the constellation Draco and is thought to have been created 1000 years ago by two stars orbiting each other.
This image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula or NGC 6543 was obtained using the Wide Field Camera on the Isaac Newton Telescope. It is a three-colour composite made from data collected using filters to isolate the light emitted by hydrogen alpha (H-alpha), doubly ionised oxygen (OIII) and ionised sulfur (SII) atoms, and coded in the image as red, green and blue respectively.

Posted on Saturday.

Reblog

unknownskywalker:

Herschel links star formation to sonic booms
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has revealed that nearby interstellar clouds contain networks of tangled gaseous filaments. Intriguingly, each filament is approximately the same width, hinting that they may result from interstellar sonic booms throughout our Galaxy.
The filaments are huge, stretching for tens of light years through space and as much as a hundred of newly-born stars are often found in the densest parts of them. Herschel shows that, regardless of the length or density of a filament, the width is always roughly the same. Astronomers analysed 90 filaments and found they were all about 0.3 light years across, or about 20 000 times the distance of Earth from the Sun.
The filaments are probably formed when slow shockwaves dissipate in the interstellar clouds. These shockwaves are mildly supersonic and are a result of the copious amounts of turbulent energy injected into interstellar space by exploding stars. They travel through the dilute sea of gas found in the Galaxy, compressing and sweeping it up into dense filaments as they go.
Interstellar clouds are usually extremely cold, about 10 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, and this makes the speed of sound in them relatively slow at just 0.2 km/s. These slow shockwaves are the interstellar equivalent of sonic booms. As the sonic booms travel through the clouds, they lose energy and, where they finally dissipate, they leave these filaments of compressed material.
Above: Dense filaments of gas in the IC5146 interstellar cloud.

Posted on Saturday.

Reblog

unknownskywalker:

Hubble serves up a holiday snow angel
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope presents a festive holiday greeting that’s out of this world. The bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched “wings” of the nebula record the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder medium.
Sharpless 2-106 lies nearly 2,000 light-years from us. The nebula measures several light-years in length. It appears in a relatively isolated region of the Milky Way galaxy. Twin lobes of super-hot gas — glowing blue in this image — stretch outward from the massive, young star IRS 4, creating the “wings” of our angel.
A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, cinching the expanding nebula into an “hourglass” shape, with ripples and ridges in the gas interacting with the cooler interstellar medium. Dusky red veins surround the blue emission from the nebula. The faint light emanating from the central star reflects off of tiny dust particles. This illuminates the environment around the star, showing darker filaments of dust winding beneath the blue lobes.
Infrared observations of the nebula have also uncovered more than 600 brown dwarfs with weighs less than a tenth of our Sun. Because of their low mass, they cannot produce sustained energy through nuclear fusion like our Sun does. They encompass the nebula in a small cluster.
Watch video: Three-dimensional view of Sharpless 2-106