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Behold!, the Orion Nebula. If you haven’t clicked for the larger version, go, do it! The definition is ridiculous, no? This picture is staggering. As usual, Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy breaks down exactly what we’re looking at:

The nebula is a vast cloud of gas, both atomic and molecular, and dust located about 1350 light years away. It’s one of the largest star forming factories in the Milky Way, and what you see here is well over 20 light years across.

For years I figured it was just a diffuse glowing thing in space, but it turns out to be more complicated than that.  In reality, a lot of the nebula is actually a dark, dense molecular cloud – literally, composed of molecules like H₂ (molecular hydrogen) and CO (carbon monoxide). This cloud is actually far, far larger than what you see in this image, perhaps 20 times the width! But it’s dark, so we don’t see it in visible light… and what we’re seeing in this picture is not really a free-floating gas cloud, but a cavity in the wall of the denser dark cloud.

Stars are being born inside that cloud. Some of them are very massive, hot, and bright. They blast out a fierce stellar wind, like the solar wind but far more powerful. They also emit a fierce flood of ultraviolet photons. Together, these two forces erode away at the material of the cloud, breaking apart the molecules into their constituent atoms, ionizing them, and causing them to glow. It so happens that some of these stars were born near the side of this cloud, so when they ate away the insides of the cloud it caused a blister in the side which burst open.

You can actually see that in this image! The bulk of the colorful nebula, from the upper left on down, is actually gas inside this cavity set aglow. The far wall is opaque and dark, so you don’t see it here. But you can get a sense of the bubble-like nature of the nebula.

Outstanding. There’s your existential nausea for the day.

Behold the inner sanctum of Hell! You probably thought that the Devil lived in some dingy-ass cave, right? Shitty halls and screams? Naw, he lives here. Where is here? The Whirlpool Galaxy, but you can call it M51. We have one picture of it on the left, looking all safe and shit. On the right, however, we have its true form exposed. The sanctum of El Diablo.

The Hubble’s site explains the two different views:

The image at left, 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 at right, 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.

Outstanding.

Hit the jump for a high-res version of the Devil’s Regions revealed.

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Today, NASA announced the finding of Kepler 10-b, and it’s the first “confirmed discovery of a rocky planet around another star.” Righteous! It’s also the most Earth-like of all the exoplanets that have been found, clocking in at 1.4 times the size of our lovely Blue Marble.

Don’t pack your fucking bags yet though, cautions io9:

Unfortunately, Kepler-10b doesn’t fit any of the other criteria for a potentially habitable planet. It’s 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to ours, placing it far from the habitable zone that would allow life to survive there. Indeed, Kepler-10b races around its star, completing an orbit every 0.84 days. And, though it’s only 1.4 times the size of Earth, Kepler-10b is a dense world, with a mass 4.6 times that of Earth and an average density similar to an iron dumbbell.

Totally depressed now? Yeah, me too. Frak. Scientist Douglas Hudgins drops some encouraging words:

The discovery of Kepler 10-b is a significant milestone in the search for planets similar to our own. Although this planet is not in the habitable zone, the exciting find showcases the kinds of discoveries made possible by the mission and the promise of many more to come.

Well then! Party on.

Hinode, NASA’s solar observatory caught the solar eclipse. Oh goodness, it’s a stunning sight. Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait puts it into perspective,  saying the “cool thing is the size difference between the Sun and the Moon. The Sun is roughly 400x bigger than the Moon and 400x farther away, so they look about the same size in the sky. But the Moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse, and can change its distance to us by quite a bit, well over 10% – that means its apparent diameter as seen on Earth can change by 10% too.”

Hit the jump for the video. It’s sexy.

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Watch the fuck out! That’s the Mars Opportunity rover rolling up on a crater. Don’t do it! Life’s worth living! This picture is pretty awesome. It’s of a piece of technology we placed down to explore an alien world being seen by another piece of technology we jettisoned into space and traveled 35-million miles.

Righteous.

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Meet UGC 12158. Or as he calls himself in bars to pick up chicks, Biggie Spiral. You’ll notice a resemblance between Biggie and our favorite galaxy: Sir Milky Way. Namely, that they’re both gorgeous spiral galaxies. Phil Plait, who has worked with Hubble images for years, decided to crunch the numbers on this gorgeous galaxy:

So I went to the release page for it, and when I saw the distance, I was shocked: that galaxy’s not big, it’s freaking  huge.  I figured it was part of the Virgo cluster, maybe, 60 million light years away or so. Nope: it’s a whopping  400 million light years distant, which is a long, long haul. That was stunning to me; if it’s that far away the galaxy really has to be a bruiser. So I grabbed a raw image from the Hubble archive and measured its size in pixels, which I could then convert to a spatial size given its distance.

And I can still hardly accept this, but UGC 12158 is  140,000 light years across. I measured it twice, two different ways, to be sure. That’s the biggest spiral I’ve ever heard of! Mind you, the Milky Way is in the top tier of galaxies in the entire Universe when it comes to size, but UGC 12158 whips us by a clean 40%!.

Good lord. I had no idea that the Milky Way Galaxy was an impressively sized galaxy until Phil Plait dropped that knowledge bomb on me. But still!, this galaxy is 40% bigger? Brain. Doesn’t compute. Wants to, but cannot.

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The Andromeda Galaxy is our boy. It’s the nearest spiral galaxy to us, and someday we’re going to collide with it. The good news is that we have some time to prepare for it, since it isn’t going to happen for another three to five billion years. Calm down. Sit down. We got time. Over at io9, they break down a gallery recently done by the European Space Agency. The ESA created the gallery by using “three different kinds of light: visible, infrared, and x-ray. These three very different views are then combined together to create one amazingly beautiful composite image.”

Want to see the images? Hit the jump.

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Today, Bad Astronomy linked to this picture by Thierry Legault. Not only is it gorgeous, but it’s a bit special. Why? It’s a friggin’ double eclipse! Wait, wut you ask? Phil Plait over at the aforementioned site breaks it down in ways that I can only fathom.

Can you see why he traveled so far to get this shot? The silhouette of the Moon taking a dark bite out of the Sun is obvious enough, as are some interesting sunspots on the Sun’s face… but wait a sec… that one spot isn’t a spot at all, it’s the International Space Station! This was a  double eclipse!

That’s why Thierry sojourned to Oman; due to the geometry of the ISS orbit, it was from there that he had the best chance of getting a picture of the station as it passed in front of the Sun during the relatively brief duration of the actual solar eclipse. But talk about brief; the ISS was in front of the Sun for less than second, so not only did he have one chance at getting this spectacular once-in-a-lifetime shot, but he had only a fraction of a second to snap it!

To give you an overall idea of what you’re seeing here: the Sun is 147 million kilometers away (less than usual because this eclipse happened, coincidentally,  very close to perihelion, when Earth was closest to the Sun). The Moon is 390,000 kilometers away. The Sun is about 400 times bigger than the Moon, but also about 400 times farther away, making them look about the same size in the sky. If you’re still having a hard time picturing the scale, take a look at the dark sunspot in the lower right of the big picture:  it’s about twice the size of the Earth!

Like I said, Plait is amazing. This image is already incredible, but then he goes and gives it even more scope. The dark sunspot is twice the size of Earth? Incredible. In the truest sense of the word.

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Since I’m a life long geek, everything is filtered through Star Wars and video game metaphors. So when I saw this picture of a solar eclipse taken by the Mir space station in 1999, all I could think was the daunting shadow of the most famous planet obliterator. Earth about to go Alderaan!

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Everyone knows about Jupiter’s Red Spot. And for good reason, ’cause it’s goddamn impressive. But did you know that Saturn has its own friggin’ insane spot? Not to be outdone by its solar system brethren, Saturn has a Great White Spot that is a thousand-mile storm.

The Great White Spot is the lesser known, Saturnian equivalent of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. It’s the name given to periodic storms that flare up about every 28.5 years, previously showing up in 1876, 1903, 1933, 1960, and 1990. As such, we shouldn’t be expecting another appearance until around 2018, although huge, Spot-like storms do occasionally show up at times that don’t fit the cycle, including 1994 and 2006.

G’damn! Thanks to a   new image by the Cassini probe taken on Christmas Eve, we may have an insane image of another occurrence:

torms like these are thought to be created by thermal instability, which throws up tons of material from the planet’s lower atmosphere up into the higher regions. When these storms overlap with the turning of Saturn’s seasonal cycle every 28 or so years, the storm becomes so massive that it can encircle the entire planet, creating the Great White Spot.

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Technically speaking, we don’t know yet whether this particular storm will develop into a full-fledged Great White Spot. Of course, even if it doesn’t technically qualify for “great” status, we’re still talking about a storm system that you could fit this week’s northeastern blizzard into a dozen times over.

If that shit isn’t mindblowing enough, Bad Astronomy puts it into even crazier perspective:

This image, taken with a blue filter, shows the storm clearly. The main spot is huge, about 6,000 km (3600 miles) across – half the size of Earth! Including the tail streaming off to the right, the whole system is over 60,000 km (36,000 miles) long.

Whether this is a new iteration of the son of a bitch Great White Spot, or just an enormous storm enough to send me into a full-blown existential crisis, it’s goddamn gorgeous.