Bright Planetary Nebula NGC 7027 from Hubble

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2020 June 30

Bright Planetary Nebula NGC 7027 from Hubble

Image Credit:
NASA,
ESA,
Joel Kastner
(RIT)
et al.;
Processing:
Alyssa Pagan
(STScI)

Explanation:
What created this unusual planetary nebula?

NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped
planetary nebulas known.

Given its expansion rate,
NGC 7027 first started expanding,
as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago.

For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells,
as seen in blue in the
featured image.

In modern times, though, for
reasons unknown,
it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in red) in specific directions
that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners.

These shells and patterns have been mapped in impressive detail by
recent images from the
Wide Field Camera 3 onboard the
Hubble Space Telescope.

What lies at the nebula’s center is unknown, with
one hypothesis holding it to be a
close binary star system
where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star.

NGC 7027, about 3,000
light years
away, was first discovered in 1878 and
can be seen
with a standard backyard telescope toward the
constellation of the Swan
(Cygnus).

Tomorrow’s picture: inverted Earth

Authors & editors:
Robert Nemiroff
(MTU) &
Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)
NASA Official: Phillip Newman
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& Michigan Tech. U.

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June 29, 2020

Happy birthday to Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado via /r/NationalPark

Happy birthday to Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
byu/ctgt inNationalPark

June 28, 2020

Factfulness Rules of Thumb

Source: Gapminder

This is a very interesting collection — not so much rules, but a checklist of mental models and thoughts to run though as you make major decisions:

“Factfulness is a relaxing habit for critical thinking. It helps you maintain a fact-based worldview. It teaches you how to recognise and avoid the most common ways information gets misinterpreted. . . Factfulness is the skill to recognise the common types of stories that tend to get all the attention because they trigger our dramatic instincts.”

Good advice for everyone.

The post Factfulness Rules of Thumb appeared first on The Big Picture.

via The Big Picture

June 28, 2020

Europa and Jupiter from Voyager 1

What are those spots on Jupiter?
Largest and furthest, just right of center, is the Great Red Spot — a huge storm system that has been raging on Jupiter possibly since Giovanni Cassini‘s likely notation of it 355 years ago. It is not yet known why this Great Spot is red.
The spot toward the lower left is one of Jupiter’s largest moons: Europa.
Images from Voyager in 1979 bolster the modern hypothesis that Europa has an underground ocean and is therefore a good place to look for extraterrestrial life.
But what about the dark spot on the upper right?
That is a shadow of another of Jupiter’s large moons: Io.
Voyager 1 discovered Io to be so volcanic that no impact craters could be found. Sixteen frames from Voyager 1’s flyby of Jupiter in 1979 were recently reprocessed and merged to create the featured image. About 43 years ago, Voyager 1 launched from Earth and started one of the greatest explorations of the Solar System ever.