January 14, 2019 - I See Dead Stars
I See Dead Stars This composite of both ground- and space-based images tells the story of the hunt for an elusive missing object hidden amid a complex tangle of gaseous filaments in the Small Magellanic Cloud, about 200,000 light-years away. Data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has revealed a remarkable ring of gas (in red) in a system called 1E 0102.2-7219, expanding slowly within the depths of numerous other fast-moving webs of gas and dust left behind after a supernova explosion. At the center of the ring is a neutron star (blue dot), the remnant of the star that formed this tenuous object in an explosion, the light from which only reached Earth some 2,000 years ago. This stellar corpse shines brightly in X-ray wavelengths. Its location within the ring of gas identifies it as the star responsible for this larger structure.
Image credit: ESO/NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/F. Vogt et al.
Weekly Calendar
January 14 - 20, 2019
Holidays - Sky Events - Space History
Monday 14
First Qtr Moon 1:46 AM ET
Uranus 5° north of Moon
1916: Royal Astronomical Society admits first women members
1975: Earth Resources Technology Satellite is renamed Landsat
2005: Huygens probe lands on Titan
2008: MESSENGER spacecraft makes its first flyby of Mercury
Tuesday 15
Venus 8° north of Antares
1973: Luna 21 lander and Lunokhod 2 rover land on Moon
1976: Helios 2 launched
2006: Stardust spacecraft returns samples of comet dust
Wednesday 16
1969: First docking of two human spacecraft (Soyuz 5 and Soyuz 4)
2003: STS-107 Columbia launched
Thursday 17
1647: Elizabeth Hevelius born
1985: 1,037th and final Aerobee sounding rocket launched
Friday 18
2002: Gemini South Observatory dedicated
Saturday 19
1747: Johann Bode born
1851: Jacobus Kapteyn born
1965: Gemini II launched
2006: New Horizons launched
Sunday 20
Total Lunar Eclipse (Middle East, Africa, Europe, Americas, E Russia)
1573: Simon Marius born
1930: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin born
1966: Apollo A-004 launched, first flight test of CSM hardware
1978: Progress 1 launched