Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, Phil 2:5
Astronomy
the Heavens Declare His Glory
"Dedicated to Him
who sits upon the throne"
that men might see and Glorify the G-d of all creation.
For since the creation of the world
God's invisible qualities
—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen,
being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.
Romans 1:20
Below you will see
angels, the face of a child, the skull of a man, a cross, a crown of thorns,
praying hands,
an ascending dove, a hand reaching for a crown and
other works of His Hands.
My belief is the Lord has made "Monuments in the Heavens" commemorating
events on earth.
Also below, you
will see Hubble Images and read scientific data about those images.
Included are several passages from the Bible (many of which)
depict in "Astronomical Terms" not only the past but also the future.
The
Scriptures clearly state that in the last days,
there will be signs in the heavens and on the earth.
Prepare yourself to witness these events!
Blessing to you and your house
When I look in to your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and stars that you set in place-what are mere
mortals, that you concern yourself with them; humans, For He shall give His angels charge over you,
that you watch over them with such care? Ps 8:3-4
To
keep you in all your ways. Psalms 91:11
"Image on left"
(Gamma Ray Burst (GRB), considered by scientist as the most powerful force
in the universe)
http://www.universetoday.com
On March 19, 2008 at 2:13
am EDT, NASA's Swift satellite detected an
explosion from the constellation Bootes,
and sent an alert to ground-based
telescopes.
At the same moment, the Russian KONUS instrument
on NASA's Wind
satellite and a robotic wide-field optical
camera called "Pi of the Sky" in Chile captured
the first visible light from this
incredibly bright and powerful gamma ray burst.
Within the next 15 seconds, the burst brightened
enough to be visible
in a dark sky to human eyes.
For a few moments,
the GRB had a million times the
luminosity
of the entire
Milky Way
Galaxy.
It briefly crested at a magnitude of 5.3 on the astronomical brightness
scale.
Incredibly, the dying star was 7.5 billion light-years away.
Astronomers say the
reason this gamma ray burst was so bright was
that it was aimed almost directly at
Earth.
"Image on right"
(Nebulae are star nurseries)
The Eagle Nebula (catalogued as
Messier 16
or M16, and as NGC 6611) is a young
open cluster
of
stars
in the
constellation
Serpens,
discovered by
Jean-Philippe de
Cheseaux in 1745-46.
Its name derives from its shape which is reminiscent of an
eagle.
It is the subject of a famous photograph by the
Hubble Space
Telescope,
which shows pillars of
star-forming
gas and dust
within the nebula.
(The Pillars are shown 3rd image below)
"Image on left"
Close-up of M16, The Pillars"
STELLAR "EGGS" EMERGE FROM MOLECULAR CLOUD.
This column of cool molecular hydrogen
gas (two atoms of hydrogen in each molecule) and dust that is an
incubator for new stars. The stars are embedded inside finger-like protrusions
extending from the top of the nebula.
Each "fingertip" is somewhat larger than our own solar system.
The pillar is slowly eroding away by the
ultraviolet light from nearby hot stars, a process called "photo-evaporation".
As it does, small globules of especially dense gas buried within the cloud is
uncovered.
These globules have been dubbed "EGGs" -- an acronym for "Evaporating Gaseous
Globules".
The shadows of the EGGs protect gas behind them, resulting in the finger-like
structures at the top of the cloud.
Forming inside at least some of the EGGs
are embryonic stars -- stars that abruptly stop growing when the EGGs are
uncovered and they are separated from the larger reservoir of gas from which
they were drawing mass.
Eventually the stars emerge, as the EGGs themselves
succumb to photo-evaporation.
"Image on right"
Previously unseen details of a mysterious,
complex structure within the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) are revealed
by this image of the "Keyhole Nebula" . The picture is a montage assembled from
four different April 1999
telescope pointings with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which used six
different color filters.
The picture is dominated by a large,
approximately circular feature, which is part of the Keyhole Nebula,
named in
the 19th century by Sir John Herschel. This region, about 8000 light-years from
Earth, is located adjacent
to the famous explosive variable star
Eta Carinae, which lies just outside the field of view toward the upper right.
The Carina Nebula also contains several other stars that are among the hottest
and most massive known,
each about 10 times as hot, and 100 times as massive, as
our Sun.
The circular Keyhole structure contains
both bright filaments of hot, fluorescing gas, and dark silhouetted clouds of
cold molecules and dust, all of which are in rapid, chaotic motion. The high
resolution of the Hubble images
reveals the relative
three-dimensional locations of many of these features, as well as showing
numerous
small dark globules that may be in
the process of collapsing to form new stars.
The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the
You have made my days a mere
ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,
handbreadth; the span of my years is
and the man became a living being. Genesis 2:7
as a breath. Selah Psalm 39:5
"Image on Left"
"Hubble's Variable Nebula"
is named (like the Hubble telescope itself) after the American astronomer Edwin
P. Hubble, who carried out some of
the early studies of this object. It is a fan-shaped cloud of gas and dust which
is illuminated by Monocerotis, the
bright star at the bottom end of the nebula. Dense condensations of dust near
the star cast shadows out into the nebula,
and as they move the illumination changes, giving rise to the variations first
noted by Hubble.
The star itself, lying about 2,500 light-years from Earth, cannot be seen
directly, but only through
light scattered
off of dust particles in the surrounding nebula. R Mon is believed to have
a
mass of about 10 times that of the Sun,
and to have an age of only 300,000 years.
"For God so loved the
world that he gave his one and only Son, (Jesus)
that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal
life. John 3:16
In January
2002, a dull star in an obscure constellation suddenly became 600,000 times
more luminous than our Sun,
temporarily making it the brightest star in our Milky Way galaxy. The
mysterious star, called V838 Monocerotis,
has long since faded back to obscurity. But observations by NASA's Hubble
Space Telescope
of a phenomenon called a "light echo" around the star have uncovered
remarkable new features.
These details promise to provide astronomers with a CAT-scan-like probe
of the three-dimensional structure of shells of dust surrounding an aging
star
What is a light Echo?
It is light from a stellar explosion echoing off dust surrounding the star.
V838 Monocerotis produced enough energy
in a brief flash to illuminate surrounding dust, like a spelunker taking a
flash picture of the walls of an undiscovered cavern.
The star presumably ejected the illuminated dust shells in previous
outbursts.
Light from the latest outburst travels to the dust and then is reflected to
Earth. Because of this indirect path,
the light arrives at Earth months after light from the star that traveled
directly toward Earth
In the direction of the constellation Canis Major,
two spiral galaxies pass by each other
like majestic ships
in the night. The near-collision has been caught in images taken by
NASA's
Hubble Space Telescope
and its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
The larger and more massive galaxy is cataloged as
NGC 2207 (on the left in the Hubble Heritage image),
and the smaller one on the right is IC 2163. Strong tidal forces from NGC
2207 have distorted the
shape of
IC 2163, flinging out stars and gas into long streamers stretching out a
hundred thousand light-years
toward the right-hand edge of the image.
All this also comes from the
LORD Almighty,
wonderful in counsel and magnificent in
wisdom. Is 28:29
Uncovering the Veil Nebula
Hubble
photographed three magnificent sections of the Veil Nebula – the shattered
remains of a supernova that exploded
thousands of years ago. This series of
images provides beautifully detailed views of the delicate, wispy structure
resulting
from this cosmic explosion. The Veil Nebula is one of the most
spectacular supernova remnants in the sky.
The entire shell spans about 3 degrees, corresponding to about 6 full moons.
The Veil Nebula is a prototypical
middle-aged supernova remnant, and is an ideal laboratory for studying the
physics of
supernova remnants because of it's unobscured location in our galaxy,
its relative closeness, and its large size.
Also known as the Cygnus Loop, the
Veil Nebula is located in the constellation of Cygnus,
the Swan.It is about
1,500 light-years away from Earth.
Stars in our galaxy, and in other
galaxies, are constantly in the process of being born and dying. How long a star
lives
depends on how big and heavy it is. The bigger the star, the shorter its life.
When a star significantly heavier than our Sun
runs out of fuel, it collapses and blows itself apart in a catastrophic
supernova explosion. A supernova releases so much
light that it can outshine a whole galaxy of stars put together. The exploding
star sweeps out a huge bubble in its
surroundings, fringed with actual stellar debris along with material swept up by
the blast wave.
This glowing, brightly-colored shell of gas forms a nebula that astronomers call
a “supernova remnant.
For Christ
himself has brought peace to us.
"He united Jews and
Gentiles into one people"
when, in His own body on the cross, He broke down
the wall of hostility that separated us.
He did this by ending the system of law with its
commandments and regulations.
He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating
in Himself one new people from the two groups.
Together as one body, Christ reconciled both groups
to God by means of His death on the cross,
and our hostility toward each other was put to
death. Eph 2:14-16
The two
spiral galaxies
started to interact
a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the
nearest and youngest examples
of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the
Antennae image are young clusters
containing tens of thousands of stars.
The orange blobs to the left and
right of image center are the
two cores of the original galaxies and
consist mainly of old stars
criss-crossed by filaments of dust,
which appears brown in the image.
The two galaxies are dotted with brilliant
blue star-forming regions
surrounded by glowing hydrogen gas, appearing in the image in pink.
The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like “arms”
extending far out from the nuclei
of the two galaxies, best seen by ground-based telescopes. These “tidal
tails” were formed during the
initial encounter of the galaxies some 200 to 300 million years ago.
The dust and spiral arms of normal spiral galaxies,
like our own Milky Way, appear flat when viewed edge-on.
This image of ESO 510-G13 shows a galaxy that, by contrast, has an unusual
twisted disk structure, first seen in ground-based photographs obtained at
the European Southern Observatory in Chile.
ESO 510-G13 lies in the southern constellation Hydra, roughly 150 million
light-years from Earth. .
The strong warping of the disk indicates that ESO
510-G13 has recently undergone a collision with a nearby galaxy
and is in the process of swallowing it. Gravitational forces distort the
structures of the galaxies as their stars,
gas, and dust merge together in a process that takes millions of years.
Eventually the disturbances will die out, and ESO 510-G13 will become a
normal-appearing single galaxy.
"Image on right"
Galactic Silhouettes, (also Constellation
Hydra)
This new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
and its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 shows the
unique galaxy pair called NGC 3314. Through an extraordinary chance
alignment, a face-on spiral galaxy
lies precisely in front of another larger spiral. This line-up provides us
with the rare chance to visualize
dark material within the front galaxy, seen only because it is silhouetted
against the object behind it.
Dust lying in the spiral arms of the foreground
galaxy stands out where it absorbs light from the more distant galaxy.
This silhouetting shows us where the interstellar dust clouds are located,
and how much light they absorb.
The outer spiral arms of the front galaxy appear to change from bright to
dark, as they are projected first
against deep space, and then against the bright background of the other
galaxy.
NGC 3314 lies about 140 million light-years from
Earth, in the direction of the southern hemisphere
constellation Hydra. The
bright blue stars forming a pinwheel shape near the center of the front
galaxy
have formed recently from interstellar gas and dust.
The famous cluster is easily visible in the evening
sky during the winter months as a small grouping of
bright blue stars, named after the "Seven Sisters" of Greek mythology.
Resembling a small dipper,
this star cluster lies in the constellation Taurus at a distance of about
380 light-years from Earth.
The unaided eye can discern about half a dozen bright stars in the cluster,
but a small telescope will
reveal that the Pleiades contains many hundreds of fainter stars.
"Image on right"
This dramatic Hubble image of the
Orion Nebula (M42)
reveals numerous treasures that
reside within the nearby, intense star- forming region.
More than 3,000 stars of various sizes appear in this image. These stars reside
in a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape
of plateaus, mountains, and valleys. The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star
formation, from the massive,
young stars that are shaping the nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be
the homes of budding stars.
The Orion Nebula is 1,500 light-years away, the nearest
star-forming region to Earth.
Astronomers used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colors in 2004 and 2005, to
make this picture.
God said, "Let there be lights in the
dome of the sky to divide the day from the night;
let them be for signs, seasons, days and years; and let them be for lights
in the dome of the sky
to give light to the earth; and that is how it was. God made the two
great lights-
the larger light to rule the day and the smaller light to rule the night-
and the stars.
God put them in the dome of the sky to give light to darkness;
and God said that it was good. Gen 1:14-18
Astronomers observe only one out of a
million galaxies in the nearby universe in the act of colliding.
However, galaxy mergers were much more common long ago when they
were closer together,
because the expanding universe was smaller. Astronomers study
how gravity choreographs
their motions in the game of celestial bumper cars and try to
observe them in action.
For all their violence, galactic
smash-ups take place at a glacial rate by human standards -
timescales
on the order of several hundred million years. The images in the
Hubble atlas capture snapshots of the
various merging galaxies at various stages in their collision.
Pilate then took Yeshua (Jesus) and
had Him flogged.
The soldiers twisted "a crown of thorns" and placed it on His head,
John 19:1-2
The NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured
this image of NGC 7049, a mysterious looking galaxy on the border
between
spiral and elliptical galaxies. NGC 7049 is found in the constellation of
Indus, and is the brightest of a cluster of galaxies,
a so-called Brightest
Cluster Galaxy (BCG). Typical BCGs are some of the oldest and most massive
galaxies.
They provide excellent opportunities for astronomers to study the elusive
globular clusters lurking within.
The globular clusters in NGC 7049 are seen as the
sprinkling of small faint points of light in the galaxy’s halo. The halo –
the ghostly region
of diffuse light surrounding the galaxy – is composed of
myriads of individual stars and provides a luminous background to the
remarkable swirling ring of dust lanes surrounding NGC 7049's core. Globular
clusters are very dense and compact groupings of a few hundreds of thousands
of stars bound together by gravity. They contain some of the first stars to
be produced in a galaxy.
NGC 7049 has far fewer such clusters than other
similar giant galaxies in very big, rich groups.
This indicates to astronomers how the surrounding environment influenced the
formation of galaxy halos in the early Universe.
The constellation of Indus, or the Indian, is one of the least conspicuous
in the southern sky. It was named in the 16th century .
Messier
74, also called NGC 628, is a stunning example of a "grand-design" spiral
galaxy that is viewed by
Earth observers nearly face-on. Its perfectly symmetrical spiral arms
emanate from the central nucleus and are
dotted with clusters of young blue stars and glowing pink regions of ionized
hydrogen (hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons).
These regions of
star formation show an excess of light at ultraviolet wavelengths. Tracing
along the spiral
arms are winding dust lanes that also begin very near the galaxy's nucleus
and follow along the length of the spiral arms.
M74 is located roughly 32 million light-years away
in the direction of the constellation Pisces, the Fish.
It is the dominant member of a small group of about half a dozen galaxies,
the M74 galaxy group. In its entirety,
it is estimated that M74 is home to about 100 billion stars, making it
slightly smaller than our Milky Way.
"Image on
right"
"Ant Nebula, Mz3"
Why isn't this ant a big sphere?
Planetary nebula
Mz3 is being cast off by a star similar to our
Sun
that is,
surely, round.
Why then would the gas that is streaming away create an
ant-shaped nebula that is distinctly not
round?
Clues might
include the high 1000-kilometer per
second speed of the expelled gas, the
light-year
long length
of the structure, and the
magnetism
of the star
visible above
at the nebula's center.
One possible answer is that
Mz3
is hiding a second, dimmer star that
orbits close
in to the bright star.
A competing hypothesis holds that the central star's own
spin and
magnetic field
are channeling the gas.
Since the central star appears to be so similar to our
own Sun,
astronomers
hope that increased understanding
of the history of this giant space
ant
can provide useful insight into the likely future of our own Sun and Earth
He (Jesus) who descended
is the very one who ascended higher than
all the heavens,
in order to fill the whole universe,. Ephesians 4:10
Resembling a pair of owl eyes, the two nuclei of the colliding galaxies can
be seen in the process of merging at the upper left.
The bizarre blue bridge of material extending out from the northern
component looks like it connects to a third galaxy but in
reality the galaxy is in the background and not connected at all. Hubble’s
sharp view allows astronomers to try and visually
sort out what are foreground and background objects when galaxies,
superficially, appear to overlap.
For in
Him (Jesus) dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.
And you are
complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and
power:
Colossians 2:9
Two of the three galaxies
are forming new stars at a high rate. This is evident in the bright blue
knots of
star formation that are strung along the arms of the galaxy on the right and
along the small galaxy on the left.
The largest component is located in the middle of
the three. It appears as a spiral galaxy, which may be barred.
The entire system resides at about 400 million light-years away from Earth
in the constellation Virgo.
Through Him (Jesus) all things were made;
without Him nothing was made that has been made.
He counts the number of the stars,
"Image on left"
Hoag's object: A wheel within a wheel
A nearly perfect ring of hot, blue stars pinwheels about the yellow nucleus
of an unusual galaxy known as Hoag's Object.
This image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures a face-on view of the
galaxy's ring of stars, revealing more detail
than any existing photo of this object. The image may help astronomers
unravel clues on how such strange objects form.
The entire galaxy is about 120,000
light-years wide, which is slightly larger than our Milky Way Galaxy. The
blue ring,
which is dominated by clusters of young, massive stars, contrasts sharply
with the yellow nucleus of mostly older stars.
What appears to be a "gap" separating the two stellar populations may
actually contain some star clusters that are
almost too faint to see. Curiously, an object that bears an uncanny
resemblance to Hoag's Object can be seen in the
gap at the one o'clock position. The object is probably a background ring
galaxy.
"Image on right"
A sky full of
glittering jewels
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has given us a keyhole view towards the heart
of our Milky Way Galaxy,
where a dazzling array of stars reside. Most of the view of our galaxy is
obscured by dust. Hubble peered into the
Sagittarius Star Cloud, a narrow, dust-free region, providing this
spectacular glimpse of a treasure chest full of stars.
Some of these gems are among the oldest inhabitants of our galaxy. By
studying the older stars that pack our
Milky Way's hub, scientists can learn more about the evolution of our
galaxy.
Many of the brighter stars in this
image show vivid colors. A star's color reveals its temperature, one of its
most
"vital statistics." Knowing a star's temperature and the power of the star's
radiation allow scientists to make
conclusions about its age and mass. Most blue stars are young and hot, up to
ten times hotter than our Sun.
They consume their fuel much faster and live shorter lives than our Sun. Red
stars come in two flavors: small stars
and "red giants". Smaller red stars generally have a temperature about half
that of our Sun, consuming their fuel slowly
and thus, live the longest. "Red giant" stars are at the end of their lives
because they have exhausted their fuel.
Although many "red giant" stars may have been ordinary stars like our Sun,
as they die they swell up in size, become much cooler,
and are much more
luminous then they were during the majority of their stellar life.
This seemingly delicate structure also harbors a
very powerful spinning neutron star that may be the central remnant
from the initial blast. It is quite common for the core of an exploded
supernova star to become a spinning neutron star
(also called a pulsar - because of the regular pulses of energy from the
rotational spin) after the immediate shedding of the
star's outer layers. In the case of N 49, not only is the neutron star
spinning at a rate of once every 8 seconds,
it also has a super-strong magnetic field a thousand trillion times stronger
than Earth's magnetic field.
This places this star into the exclusive class of objects called
"magnetars."
"Image on right"
"Hubble takes a close-up view of a
Reflection Nebula in Orion, NGC 1999
NGC 1999 is an example of a reflection
nebula. A reflection nebula shines only because the light from an
embedded source
illuminates its dust; the nebula does not emit any visible
light of its own. NGC 1999 lies close to the famous Orion Nebula,
about 1,500 light-years from Earth, in a region of our Milky Way galaxy
where new stars are being formed actively.
The NGC 1999 nebula is illuminated by a
bright, recently formed star, visible in the Hubble photo just to the left
of center.
This star is cataloged as V380 Orionis, and its white color is due to its
high surface temperature of about 10,000 degrees Celsius
(nearly twice that
of our own Sun). Its mass is estimated to be 3.5 times that of the Sun. The
star is so young that it is still surrounded
by a cloud of material left
over from its formation, here seen as the NGC 1999 reflection nebula.
At a relatively bright magnitude of +8, M104 is
easily seen through small telescopes. The Sombrero lies at the southern
edge of the rich Virgo cluster of galaxies and is one of the most massive
objects in that group, equivalent to 800 billion suns.
The galaxy is 50,000 light-years across and is located 28 million
light-years from Earth.
In 1912, astronomer V. M. Slipher discovered that
the hat-like object appeared to be rushing away from us at
700 miles per second. This enormous velocity offered some of the earliest
clues that the Sombrero was really
another galaxy, and that the universe was expanding in all directions.
The name "planetary nebula" refers only to the
round shape that many of these objects show when examined
through a small visual telescope. In reality, these nebulae have little or
nothing to do with planets, but are instead
huge shells of gas ejected by stars as they near the ends of their
lifetimes. NGC 3132 is nearly half a light year in diameter,
and at a distance of about 2000 light years is one of the nearer known
planetary nebulae.
The gases are expanding away from the central star at a speed of 9 miles per
second.
This image, captured by NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope, clearly shows two stars near the center of the nebula,
a bright white one, and an adjacent, fainter companion to its upper right.
(A third, unrelated star lies near the edge of the nebula.)
The faint
partner is actually the star that has ejected the nebula. This star is now
smaller than our own Sun, but extremely hot.
The flood of ultraviolet radiation from its surface makes the surrounding
gases glow through fluorescence.
The brighter star is in an earlier stage of stellar evolution, but in the
future it will probably eject its own planetary nebula.
Interesting Update..
The universe may glitter with far more stars than previously imagined. A new study suggests there are a mind-blowing 300 sextillion of them, or three times as many as scientists previously calculated. That is a 3 followed by 23 zeros. Or 3 trillion times 100 billion.
Some of those galaxies the elliptical ones, which account for about a third of all galaxies have as many as 1 trillion to 10 trillion stars, not a measly 100 billion. When the numbers were crunched, they found that it tripled the estimate of stars in the universe from 100 sextillion to 300 sextillion.
Now the “coincidental” part of all of this was when they looked up how many cells are in the average human body — 50 trillion or so — and multiplied that by the 6 billion people on Earth. And he came up with about 300 sextillion.
So the number of stars in the universe "is equal to all the cells in the humans on Earth.