Here are a few stories related to space and astronomy to take our minds off for a few moments from the sabotage and destruction of our government and institutions being caused by trump and his tech-bro handlers.
The Bullseye Ring Galaxy
From the venerable Hubble Space Telescope comes this stunning image of the Collisional Ring Galaxy (CGR) LEDA 1313424, nicknamed the Bullseye.
The image shows 9 distinct rings, the most ever imaged, which were formed by the smaller blue galaxy on the left, as it dove thru the center of the larger galaxy 50 million years ago, leaving rings in its gravitational wake like ripples in a pond.
LEDA 1313424 is 567 million light years away, contains 10 billion Solar mass, is about 250,000 light years across, 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way.
The image was taken on Jan 10, 2024.
CGRs form when an impactor galaxy “drops through” the center of a larger disk galaxy, producing expanding rings of gas and dust, transported from the host galaxy’s central regions.
The rings last no more than a few 100 million years before disintegrating or reforming into spiral arms.
The maximum number of rings identified before this discovery has been 3.
Hoag’s object is another distinct Ring Galaxy. In this image by Hubble from 2002, there is no sign of the second galaxy, which leads to the suspicion that the blue ring of stars may be the shredded remains of a galaxy that passed nearby.
A smaller ring galaxy is visible inside the ring at 1 O’clock!
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, will collide and merge with our neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, which is currently 2.5 million light years away from Earth.
About 4 billion years from now, the two will collide; 2 billion years later, the two galaxies will merge to form a single galaxy.
Earth will be toast long before the collision as our Sun will expand into a red giant and incinerate the inner planets.
We will probably be gone long before then 🙁
Herbig-Haro object HH 30
Next is this curious image by the Webb Space telescope of Herbig-Haro object HH 30, an edge-on protoplanetary disc surrounded by jets and a disc wind, located 477 light years away in the dark cloud LDN 1551 within the Taurus Molecular Cloud.
Herbig–Haro objects are transient bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars. They are formed when narrow jets of partially ionised gas ejected by stars collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust.
HH 30 is just 1-2 million years old.
Our solar system likely formed from a similar object.
Herbig-Haro object HH 30 was published by George Herbig in 1974 in the “Draft Catalog of Herbig–Haro Objects”.
The jets were discovered in 1983 from CCD images at Calar Alto Observatory. Webb data shows that clumps of gas within the jet are moving at 121 km/s.
The protoplanetary disk was discovered by Hubble in 1996.
The nested disk winds were first observed in 2006.
The disk wind is created by high energy photons from the central star, which ionizes and heats the gas and dust in the disk. This material is flung out of the disk plane by magneto-centrifugal processes. The disk wind often appears as a nested structure, with high-velocity narrow collimated jets surrounded by a slower and wider disk wind.
Asteroid Bennu
A recent study of samples of asteroid Bennu delivered by the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission in Sep 2023 reveals amino acids (incl. 14 of the 20 used in terrestrial biology), amines, formaldehyde, carboxylic acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and N-heterocycles (including all 5 nucleobases found in DNA and RNA), along with ~10,000 N-bearing chemical species. www.nasa.gov/…
The molecules were likely synthesized in the cold outer regions of the solar system, from where the parent body of Bennu likely originated.
It is a strongly believed that amino acids, even water, were formed not on the primitive hot earth but on asteroids in the outer solar region, where moderate radiation levels and other conditions facilitated the synthesis of such molecules.
An interesting finding in the study – many amino acids come in two mirror-image versions, aka Chirality – see graphic below. The Bennu samples contain an equal (racemic) mixture of both versions, but life on Earth almost exclusively produces the left-handed variety. This means that on early Earth, amino acids may have started out in an equal mixture, but for some reason, life “turned left” instead of right. Life, like truth, has a left-leaning bias 😉
Asteroid 2024 YR4
Most of you are well aware of 2024 YR4, the recently discovered asteroid, which now has a 2.3% chance of striking Earth on Dec 22, 2032.
The 40-90 meter approx. 0.22 billion kg asteroid is being closely monitored by ground-based telescopes. The asteroid will be visible through April, after which it will be too faint to observe until around June 2028, when it will safely swing by Earth (it has a period of 4.046 years).
NASA’s JWST will make observe and make measurements of it in March 2025.
No word yet on when the decision for a possible deflection mission will be made.
We can keep an eye on blogs.nasa.gov/… and blogs.esa.int/…for further updates.
Let’s not lose any sleep over it … yet. There are plenty of more urgent threats to our world.
Epilogue
Now back to fighting trump and musk and saving civilization.