Starsglaxiesspace - SPACE

Although August’s total solar eclipse was over in minutes, analysis of the 50,000 photos uploaded to the Eclipse Megamovie website is a time-consuming job, so team leaders are asking citizen scientists for help.

The images have been put online at Zooniverse so that the public can scan and categorize them, a project dubbed Megamovie Maestros I.

Initially, volunteers are being asked to determine what the project’s photographers actually captured by identifying eclipse phases, diamond rings, Baily’s beads and other interesting phenomena.

The photos, snapped by thousands of recruited volunteers, have already been stitched together once by Google to create a first round extended view of the eclipse (aka the Megamovie). The Zooniverse project will help the team improve the Megamovie, and ultimately, better understand the behavior and mechanisms of the solar corona. Analysis of individual images will provide even more scientific data, according to the project team.

People who are more technically inclined are invited to dive into the project’s entire image database to see what they can discover or create (see instructions here). That could mean constructing a collage, spotting an unusual phenomenon or even making a better Megamovie.

“It’s a great way to relive the eclipse and see some stunning eclipse imagery, thanks to our oh-so-talented volunteers,” said Dan Zevin, who is with the Multiverse education team that is leading the Eclipse Megamovie project at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

IMAGE….Volunteers are asked to classify photographs of the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse, including whether other objects - like the star Regulus - appear in the image.

The Horsehead Nebula in H-Alpha and OIII

Source: astroturtle (flickr)

Hubble-X in galaxy NGC 6822

The saying 'X' marks the spot holds true in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image where Hubble-X marks the location of a dramatic burst of star formation, very much like the Orion Nebula in our Milky Way galaxy, but on a vastly greater scale.

(ESA/Hubble)  Hubble-X is a glowing gas cloud, one of the most active star-forming regions within galaxy NGC 6822. The name Hubble-X does not refer to the shape of the gas cloud, but rather is derived from a catalog of objects in this particular galaxy.

Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

About the Object Name: Barnard’s Galaxy, Hubble-X, NGC 6822 Type: Local Universe : Nebula : Type : Star Formation           Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Barred           Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Irregular Distance: 2 million light years ConstellatioSagittarius Category: Galaxies

Coordinates

Position  (RA):19 45 5.03 Position (Dec): -14° 43’ 20.00" Field of view: 1.09 x 1.01 arcminutes Orientation: North is 305.8° left of vertical

Source

“Most Distant Supermassive Black Hole Discovered”

 An international group of astronomers have discovered and measured the most distant supermassive black hole to date.  This newly-discovered black holes sit in the centre of an ultrabirght quasar that was emitted just 690 million years after the Big Bang. The remarkable thing is that this light has taken almost 13 billion years to reach us - almost the same age as the Universe.  The discovery, which was made possible through data collected by the DECam Legaxy Survey (DECaLS) at the CTIO Blanco telescope, has shown that the black hole has a mass of approximately 800 million solar masses - humongous for today’s standards. This has lead to some astronomers theorizing that the very early Universe might have had ripe conditions allowing the creation of very large black holes, such as those with masses reaching 100,000 times the mass of the Sun.  “Gathering all this mass in fewer than 690 million years is an enormous challenge for theories of supermassive black hole growth,” said team leader Dr. Eduardo Bañados, from Carnegie Observatories.

Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/most-distant-supermassive-black-hole-05509.html

Image: Artist’s conception of the most-distance supermassive black hole every discovered via Robin Dienel / Carnegie Institution for Science