Some cool Pulsar telescope images:
B1509-58: Chandra Examines A Quadrillion-volt Pulsar (A neutron star located about 19,000 light years away in the constellation Circinus.)
Image by Smithsonian Institution
Description: Chandra’s image of the rapidly spinning neutron star, or pulsar, B1509-58 shows a central bright source surrounded by an extremely energetic and complex nebula. The blue and purple colors in the nebula indicate X-rays emitted by high-energy particles of matter and anti-matter produced by the quadrillion volt environment around the pulsar. In the lower left of the image, a thin jet almost 20 light years in length traces a beam of particles being shot out from the pulsar’s south pole at more than 130 million miles per hour. The small arc just above the pulsar marks a shock wave produced by particles flowing away from the pulsar’s equator.
Creator/Photographer: Chandra X-ray Observatory
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Medium: Chandra telescope x-ray
Date: 2001
Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust (NASA, Chandra, Spitzer, 03/30/10)
Image by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
A new image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Spitzer Space Telescope shows the dusty remains of a collapsed star. The dust is flying past and engulfing a nearby family of stars. Scientists think the stars in the image are part of a stellar cluster in which a supernova exploded. The material ejected in the explosion is now blowing past these stars at high velocities.
The composite image of G54.1+0.3 shows X-rays from Chandra in blue, and data from Spitzer in green (shorter wavelength) and red-yellow (longer). The white source near the center of the image is a dense, rapidly rotating neutron star, or “pulsar,” left behind after a core-collapse supernova explosion. The pulsar generates a wind of high-energy particles — seen in the Chandra data — that expands into the surrounding environment, illuminating the material ejected in the supernova explosion.
The infrared shell that surrounds the pulsar wind is made up of gas and dust that condensed out of debris from the supernova. As the cold dust expands into the surroundings, it is heated and lit up by the stars in the cluster so that it is observable in the infrared. The dust closest to the stars is the hottest and is seen to glow in yellow in the image. Some of the dust is also being heated by the expanding pulsar wind as it overtakes the material in the shell.
The unique environment into which this supernova exploded makes it possible for astronomers to observe the condensed dust from the supernova that is usually too cold to emit in the infrared. Without the presence of the stellar cluster, it would not be possible to observe this dust until it becomes energized and heated by a shock wave from the supernova. However, the very action of such shock heating would destroy many of the smaller dust particles. In G54.1+0.3, astronomers are observing pristine dust before any such destruction.
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Lovell At Night
This is a panorama I stitched from 4 separate shots. Due to not lining it up very well, the very top right corner was missing so I’ve cloned a bit of sky from nearby.
It shows the Lovell Telescope observing pulsars low in the south.
