Picture of the day: This wild-looking supernova remnant is nicknamed the Jellyfish Nebula. Supernovas produce some of the strangest objects in the night sky.
And I just happened to catch it from my city light-polluted backyard, using a 5cm aperture SeestarS50!
Check it out ... on the left is my image (only 25 mins of data). The cross hairs indicate a 'new star' appearing in galaxy NGC 3621. The right image is from Stellarium and I have annotated where the new star appears, and how it was not there before.
This is a type II supernova, so a massive star's core collapsed and triggered off an extremely violent explosion that we are seeing 22 million years later.
It likely formed a neutron star or pulsar!
It is incredibly bright and I encourage everyone to turn their telescopes towards it and get data / light curves!
Astrophotographers/astronomers with 'scopes capable of low-res spectrography:
Turn your telescopes to NGC 3621, a field galaxy only 7 MPC away! Supernova alert issued with progenitor data available. ⭐💥
NGC 3621 (aka the Frame Galaxy or Southern Cross Galaxy) is fairly bright and if you are around the same latitude as Sydney (many southern cities) it gets very near zenith around 9 - 10pm local time, so an easy and bright target.
The supernova, known as SN 1987A, occurred 160 000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud. #SN1987A was a type II supernova that was observed on Earth in 1987, the first supernova that was visible to the naked eye since 1604 — before the advent of telescopes.
"Tikva Forum says family informed by IDF of fate of 35-year-old father of two, who was abducted from Supernova festival on October 7; relatives remember 'happy and loved man'"
However, a secondary paper from a few days back, which also used JWST MIRI, found no evidence of the compact remnant in their data: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.14014v1
Almost 2 years ago I wrote a feature article looking at the evidence for this, so these new papers and findings are exciting!
There are better pictures of NGC4216, a Galaxy you can find in Virgo’s Constellation. My idea, however, to capture it was two-folded: to capture it “as it appears to be” from my rooftop in Mexico City, but mostly to capture and understand the supernova explosion that happened there a few weeks ago and that you can find (WOW!) in my photograph.
I was able to capture the #supernova SN 2024gy in the #galaxy NGC 4216 last night. I did not highlight it but it is the "star" in the upper right edge of the center galaxy in this photo.
This was taken with the Celestron C11 and the Nikon D750 at ISO 800, 46x120s exposures. #astrophotography#Astrodon
Watching 🇮🇹 Sanremo, saw the start of 🇫🇮 UMK, 🇱🇻 Supernova is going on right now…and 🇸🇪 Melodifestivalen has another semi-final, 🇱🇹 Eurovizija_LT has their final semi-final, and 🇩🇰 Dansk Melodi Grand Prix did their official artist introductions and BTS stuff.
Featured in Nature's selection of the best #science images of the month: a composite image of the Cassiopeia A #supernova remnant that brings together data from several #NASA telescopes: X-rays from #Chandra, infrared from #JWST & #Spitzer, optical data from #Hubble.
There is a nice bright #Supernova right now in NGC 4216 (in Virgo). Visible later in the evening, for North America. Discovered/appeared 4 January - but still pretty bright!
This is from last night. Image is noisy with artifiacts etc, due to hazy conditions, bright moonlight and short exposure time. But did not crop - wanted to show the many other galaxies in this area of the sky/universe.
Gravitational lensing has to be one of the most visually striking phenomena in astronomy
Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon where a massive object bend the light of a distant source as it approaches the observer. Most often this takes the form of enormous galaxy clusters bending the light of even more distant galaxies into warped images of their true selves. They typically follow an arc around the massive object in the foreground like ripples in a pond.
Here's a few of my favourite gravitational lensing events.
Abel 1689 – Virgo
Abel 1689 is a one of the largest galaxy clusters in the known universe. It's located about 2.459 billion light-years away in constellation Virgo. Not only is this image visually beautiful, but the sheer number of gravitationally lensed galaxies across the entire image is just mind-blowing.
In 2008, one of the lensed galaxies, A1689-zD1, became known as the most distant galaxy from Earth based on a photometric redshift. 2008 also happens to be the same year the astronomy bug really bit me and it became one of my life-long passions.
PSZ1 G311.65-18.48 is a massive galaxy cluster located 4.6 billion light-years away in the constellation Apus. What's especially remarkable about this image is that it features a bright galaxy that's been lensed 12 separate times along four arcs. Three of these arcs are visible to the upper right of the cluster, while a fainter fourth arc is partially obscured by a bright foreground star to the bottom left of the cluster. This galaxy is almost 12 billion light-years away from Earth, which given its title as the brightest gravitationally lensed galaxy is quite a remarkable feat.
I don't talk about astronomy nearly enough, so let's change that!
One of the most groundbreaking developments in astronomy has been the absolutely mind-blowing work the James Webb Space Telescope has been putting out in a fraction of the time it took the old Hubble Space Telescope to produce similar work. Here are a couple of recent images I find particularly remarkable.
S1 LMC N79 – Dorado
Honestly, this image is just beautiful to look at. It’s even more breathtaking when you consider that this is just one cloud within this star-forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which itself is an irregular galaxy located about 163,000 light-years from Earth. If you live in the Southern Hemisphere and find yourself a suitably dark place, you can gaze up and see this whole other galaxy as a milky blotch in the night sky.
A gravitationally lensed supernova in MRG-M0138 – Cetus
It's pretty wild seeing the immense force of gravity contained within these galactic clusters warp distant points of light in these visually striking ways. Each arc is a galaxy far beyond the cluster itself that allow us to peer further back in time. Sometimes these warped images mirror themselves on the complete opposite side of the cluster, like ripples on a pond. In the case of this distant supernova, the light emanating from that cataclysmic event is being reflected in such a way that it's reappearing further down the length of the arc, making it seem as though there are two supernovae happening when in fact they are the same.