Tag Archives: cosmic dust

In this illustration, several dust rings circle the Sun. These rings form when planets’ gravities tug dust grains into orbit around the Sun. Recently, scientists have detected a dust ring at Mercury’s orbit. Others hypothesize the source of Venus’ dust ...

Credits: Illustration: Springel et al. (2005); Spectrum: NASA/CXC/CfA/Kovács et al. Where is the Universe Hiding its Missing Mass? Astronomers have spent decades looking for something that sounds like it would be hard to miss: about a third of the “normal” ...

Artist’s concept illustrating Supernova 1987A as the powerful blast wave passes through its outer ring and destroys most of its dust, before the dust re-forms or grows rapidly. SOFIA observations reveal that dust — a building block of stars and ...

This image of supernova remnant G54.1+0.3 includes radio, infrared and X-ray light. NASA/JPL-Caltech/CXC/ESA/NRAO/J. Rho (SETI Institute)   Exploding Stars Make Key Ingredient in Sand, Glass We are all, quite literally, made of star dust. Many of the chemicals that compose ...

Cosmic dust particle collected from an urban gutter (Imperial College London) Click for a full size image   Scientists Discover Cosmic Dust in the Grime of City Gutters Usually only found in remote locations, a dedicated amateur scientist combed through ...

This richly detailed view of the star formation region Messier 78, in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter), was taken with the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. As well as the blue regions of reflected ...

A small glimpse of one region, a tenth of the full area of the Herschel ATLAS images. Everything in this image, apart from the picture of the moon, which has just been placed there to show the area of sky ...

Hubble Reveals Incredible Last Moments Of A Dying Star by Robin Andrews Photo credit: NASA Death is a topic that inspires dread and fear in most people. When it comes to stars, however, we positively marvel at it. The colors, ...

Herschel Completes Largest Ever Dust Census in Local Universe Astronomers using data from ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory have completed the largest-ever survey of cosmic dust, spanning 323 nearby galaxies located 50-80 million light-years away. Collage of galaxies in the Herschel ...

The LBN 777 is rarely imaged, also known as Vulture Head Nebula. This nebula is part of the Taurus Molecular Cloud. These giant molecular clouds consist of cosmic dust and molecular gas, with an average density of 100-1000 particles per ...