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Subscribe to RSSToday at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Seattle, one team of researchers presented a wonderful view of two "partner galaxies," M81 and M82, captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Another team showed off two radically different Hubble Space Telescope views of the Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51. For more about the first image, from WISE, click here. For a more detailed look at the second two images, from Hubble, click here.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
This image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, features two stunning galaxies engaged in an intergalactic dance. The galaxies, Messier 81 and Messier 82, swept by each other a few hundred million years ago, and will likely continue to twirl around each other multiple times before eventually merging into a single galaxy. The relatively recent encounter triggered a spectacular burst of star formation visible in both galaxies.
These images by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show off two dramatically different face-on views of the spiral galaxy M51, dubbed the Whirlpool Galaxy.
The image at top, taken in visible light, highlights the attributes of a typical spiral galaxy, including graceful, curving arms, pink star-forming regions, and brilliant blue strands of star clusters. In the image below, most of the starlight has been removed, revealing the Whirlpool's skeletal dust structure, as seen in near-infrared light. This new image is the sharpest view of the dense dust in M51. The narrow lanes of dust revealed by Hubble reflect the galaxy's moniker, the Whirlpool Galaxy, as if they were swirling toward the galaxy's core.
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M51--the second image looks like a black hole....
nkim- but only if you have never seen one
Actually, no one has seen a black hole. You can't. All you can see is what the black hole does to the space around it. lol. :P
nice pics, can't wait to import them into gimp and start playing around with the gamma and contrast et all controls...sometimes you have to wonder if you can see wisps of the dark matter in filaments amongst the regular matter...whatever dark matter is.....maybe it is just nuetrons that ran out of momentum....hehe...
Pictures like these really help the space exploration program to move forward !
The imagination of Man is no match for the wonders of the universe.
Absolutely spectacular photos!
I wish someone could create a game like Spore that used realistic images like these. Such a cool game, I just wish it was a little (a lot) less cartoony.
Yea I like Spore too, giving the galaxy a spin with a click and drag....eh One good make a spiralling animation by rotating the image every few degrees creating an overlay of several images. It would be one huge animated GIF image, but Shockwave Flash might be more efficient and the image could be coded to transition. But you still need to give it the 3rd dimension for depth, rather than just 2D or a horizontal plane, possibly some vertical tilt. Interesting that just a little vertical tilt on a horizontal plane can give you the impression of depth in 2D.
Beautiful
All these photos are like way cool, I just admire them.
Yes everyone thinks they're mezmerizing. I for one would think that of how they form. Go and see the truth and more behind these transfixing photos of the universe around us.
Where would I find out more about them, at the NASA website? I love space stuff, cause I do believe that it where we all come from and were we all will end up going and then back here again. Maybe as an animal or as a human, or even a plant. :)
I feel that looking at these picture its hard not to believe in God
I sometimes wonder if you took all of the mass of a galaxy and compressed it together, how large of a planet would you have.