Thursday 24 October 2013

Sagittarius A*: A glimpse of the violent past of Milky Way's giant black hole

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(Phys.org) —Researchers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence that the normally dim region very close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy flared up with at least two luminous outbursts in the past few hundred years.



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Numerical validation of quantum magnetic ordering

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A new study set out to use numerical simulations to validate previous theoretical predictions describing materials exhibiting so-called antiferromagneting characteristics. A recently discovered theory shows that the ordering temperature depends on two factors-namely the spin-wave velocity and the staggered magnetisation. The results, largely consistent with these theoretical predictions, have now been published in a paper in the European Physical Journal B by Ming-Tso Kao and Fu-Jiun Jiang from the National Taiwan Normal University, in Taipei.



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Surface plasmon resonance in interfaced heterodimers

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High-quality interfaced Au-Ag heterodimers in the quantum size regime (diameter



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Professor's quantum teleportation theory to be tested on space station

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(Phys.org) —A theory—SuperDense quantum teleportation—posed by Hampshire College physics professor Herbert Bernstein will be tested on the International Space Station.



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Astrophysics advance explanation for star formation

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A newly published paper by three UC San Diego astrophysics researchers for the first time provides an explanation for the origin of three observed correlations between various properties of molecular clouds in the Milky Way galaxy known as Larson's Laws.



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Atomically thin device shows tunable electrical behavior not previously realized in conventional electronics

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As electronics approach the atomic scale, researchers are increasingly successful at developing atomically thin, virtually two-dimensional materials that could usher in the next generation of computing. Integrating these materials to create necessary circuits, however, has remained a challenge.



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Nano-cone textures generate extremely 'robust' water-repellent surfaces

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When it comes to designing extremely water-repellent surfaces, shape and size matter. That's the finding of a group of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, who investigated the effects of differently shaped, nanoscale textures on a material's ability to force water droplets to roll off without wetting its surface. These findings and the methods used to fabricate such materials-published online October 21, 2013, in Advanced Materials-are highly relevant for a broad range of applications where water-resistance is important, including power generation and transportation.



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Scientists untangle nanotubes to release their potential in the electronics industry (w/ Video)

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(Phys.org) —Researchers have demonstrated how to produce electronic inks for the development of new applications using the 'wonder material', carbon nanotubes.



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When scaling the quantum slopes, veer for the straight path

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Like any task, there is an easy and a hard way to control atoms and molecules as quantum systems, which are driven by tailored radiation fields. More efficient methods for manipulating quantum systems could help scientists realize the next generation of technology by harnessing atoms and molecules to create small but incredibly powerful devices such as molecular electronics or quantum computers.



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Nanodiamond production in ambient conditions opens door for flexible electronics, implants and more

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Instead of having to use tons of crushing force and volcanic heat to forge diamonds, researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed a way to cheaply make nanodiamonds on a lab bench at atmospheric pressure and near room temperature.



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Celebrating the legacy of ESA's Planck mission

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From the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang to the evolution of stars and galaxies over 13.8 billion years, ESA's Planck space telescope has provided new insight into the history of our Universe. Although science observations are now complete, the legacy of the Planck mission lives on.



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New particle might make quantum condensation at room temperature possible

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Researchers from FOM Institute AMOLF, Philips Research, and the Autonomous University of Madrid have identified a new type of particle that might make quantum condensation possible at room temperature. The particles, so called PEPs, could be used for fundamental studies on quantum mechanics and applications in lasers and LEDs. The researchers published their results on 18 October in Physical Review Letters.



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Feynman wasn't joking: Modeling quantum dynamics with ground state wavefunctions

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(Phys.org) —Amongst the late Richard Feynman's many prolific and profound contributions to quantum mechanics, the eponymous Feynman clock is perhaps one of the more innovative. Conceived as a solution to the problem of quantum simulation, the Feynman clock proposes using quantum computers to simulate quantum systems – and in so doing, conjectures that if a quantum system moves stepwise forward and then backward in time in equal increments, it would necessarily return to its original state. While originally a linear concept, scientists at Harvard University and the University of Notre Dame recently generalized the proposition to construct a more flexible discrete-time variational principle that leads to a parallel-in-time algorithm. (A variational principle is a scientific principle, used within the calculus of variations, which develops general methods for finding functions which minimize or maximize the value of quantities that depend upon those functions.) The researchers then used that algorithm to describe time-based quantum system evolution as a ground state eigenvalue problem – that is, the quantum system's lowest energy state – which led them to realize that the solution of the quantum dynamics problem could also be obtained by applying the traditional ground state variational principle.



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Tiny 'Lego brick'-style studs make solar panels a quarter more efficient

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(Phys.org) —Rows of aluminum studs help solar panels extract more energy from sunlight than those with flat surfaces.



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Researchers develop method for creating much stronger nickel

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(Phys.org) —A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Nanjing University of Science and Technology has found a way to create an ultra fine grain (UFG) nickel with a nanolaminated structure. As the team describes in their paper published in the journal Science, the result is a new process that allows for the creation of a form of nickel that is both harder and stronger than the metal is in its native form.



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Ghostly shape of 'coldest place in the universe' revealed

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Astronomers have taken a new look at the Boomerang Nebula, the so-called "coldest place in the Universe" to learn more about its frigid properties and determine its true shape, which has an eerily ghost-like appearance.

via Science Daily

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ALMA reveals ghostly shape of 'coldest place in the universe'

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At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest known object in the Universe – colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, which is the natural background temperature of space.



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Gravitational waves help understand black hole weight gain

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Supermassive black holes: every large galaxy's got one. But here's a real conundrum: how did they grow so big?



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Astronomers see misaligned planets in distant system

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Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered a distant planetary system featuring multiple planets orbiting at a severe tilt to their host star.



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Persuading light to mix it up with matter

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Scientists have documented a never-before-seen coupling of photons with electrons on the surface of an exotic crystal.

via Science Daily

Physicists prove Heisenberg's intuition correct

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An international team of scientists has provided proof of a key feature of quantum physics – Heisenberg's error-disturbance relation - more than 80 years after it was first suggested.



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Most distant gravitational lens helps weigh galaxies

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An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational lens yet—a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a distant galaxy. But it also poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare. Given this and other recent finds, astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky—or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially the number of small, very young galaxies in the early Universe.



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Habitable zone super Jupiter-sized exoplanet found in Milky Way bulge

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(Phys.org) —A multinational team of astronomers has discovered the existence of a large (four times the size of Jupiter) sized exoplanet lurking in the Milky Way bulge—the first discovery of its kind. The team has reported on their findings in a paper they've uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.



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Fat black holes grown up in cities: 'Observational' result using Virtual Observatory

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Massive black holes of more than one million solar masses exist at the center of most galaxies. Some of the massive black holes are observed as active galactic nuclei (AGN) which attract surrounding gas and release huge amounts of energy.



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Quantum particles find safety in numbers

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Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich researchers have uncovered a novel effect that, in principle, offers a means of stabilizing quantum systems against decoherence. The discovery could represent a major step forward for quantum information processing.



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The infinitely small tackles counterfeiting

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The University of Montreal chemist Richard Martel explores a vast world on a tiny scale. "There are more H2O molecules in a sip of water [≈1024] than there are seconds since the Big Bang [≈1018]," he says to illustrate the scale at which he observes the Universe. In his laboratory, which is one of the most stable in Canada because of its seven-metre-deep foundations embedded directly in the Canadian Shield, he uses a low-energy electron microscope in which a vacuum has been created greater than the one surrounding the international space station. "This instrument," he says, "is like the astronomer's telescope. With it, you can look at matter at a minute scale, in the nanometre range, some 50,000 times smaller than a human hair.



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Just two weeks in orbit causes changes in eyes

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Just 13 days in space may be enough to cause profound changes in eye structure and gene expression, report researchers. This study is the first to examine eye-related gene expression and cell behavior after spaceflight.

via Science Daily

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NASA's Great Observatories Begin Deepest Ever Probe of the Universe



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NASA's Great Observatories are teaming up to look deeper into the universe than ever before. With a boost from natural "zoom lenses" found in space, they should be able to uncover galaxies that are as much as 100 times fainter than what the Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra space telescopes can typically see. This ambitious collaborative program is called The Frontier Fields. Astronomers will spend the next three years peering at six massive clusters of galaxies. Researchers are interested not only as to what's inside the clusters, but also what's behind them. The gravitational fields of the clusters brighten and magnify distant background galaxies that are so faint they would otherwise be unobservable.




via HubbleSite NewsCenter -- Latest News Releases

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2013/44/

Monogram Carina Nebula in Argo Navis space images Pendant Lamp

Here's a great lamp featuring a beautiful image from deep in outer space


tagged with: carina nebula, argos navis constellation, carina the keel, star formation, gas clouds, galaxy stars, ngc 3372, carnebngcttst, astronomy pictures, outer space

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series Hubble's view of the Carina Nebula shows star birth in a new level of detail. The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born. The immense nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel (of the old southern constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts, from Greek mythology).
The original image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of ionized hydrogen. Colour information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.

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Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope; colour data from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile

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Shedding new light on star death: A new class of super-luminous supernovae

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Astronomers at Queen's University Belfast have shed new light on the rarest and brightest exploding stars ever discovered in the universe. The research is published tomorrow in Nature. It proposes that the most luminous supernovae – exploding stars – are powered by small and incredibly dense neutron stars, with gigantic magnetic fields that spin hundreds of times a second.



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Unique chemical composition surrounding supermassive black holes

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Astronomers have captured a detailed image of high density molecular gas around an active galactic nucleus harboring a supermassive black hole. The observations at the highest ever achieved reveal a unique chemical composition characterized by enhancement of hydrogen cyanide (HCN) around the black hole. An research team thought a high temperature affected by the black hole caused this peculiar chemical properties. The team expect that this unique chemical properties can be used to find black holes hidden behind dust.

via Science Daily

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ALMA probes mysteries of jets from giant black holes

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Two international teams of astronomers have used the power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array to focus on jets from the huge black holes at the centers of galaxies and observe how they affect their surroundings. They have respectively obtained the best view yet of the molecular gas around a nearby, quiet black hole and caught an unexpected glimpse of the base of a powerful jet close to a distant black hole.



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Reexamination of Allende meteorite reveals isotopic evidence of supernova

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(Phys.org) —A combined team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Arizona State University has found isotopic evidence of a supernova inside of a meteorite that fell to Earth in 1969. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the team describes how isotopes found in the Allende meteorite differ from those found on Earth or on the moon, suggesting they came directly from a supernova rather than from a debris field that followed.



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Research maps where stars are born

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(Phys.org) —A University of Arizona-led group of astronomers has completed the largest-ever survey of dense gas clouds in the Milky Way – pockets shrouded in gas and dust where new stars are being born.



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Watery asteroid discovered in dying star points to habitable exoplanets

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Astronomers have found the shattered remains of an asteroid that contained huge amounts of water orbiting an exhausted star, or white dwarf. This suggests that the star GD 61 and its planetary system – located about 150 light years away and at the end of its life – had the potential to contain Earth-like exoplanets, they say.



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Soft shells and strange star clusters

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The beautiful, petal-like shells of galaxy PGC 6240 are captured here in intricate detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, set against a sky full of distant background galaxies. This cosmic bloom is of great interest to astronomers due to both its uneven structure, and the unusual clusters of stars that orbit around it—two strong indications of a galactic merger in the recent past.



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A strange lonely planet found without a star

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(Phys.org) —An international team of astronomers has discovered an exotic young planet that is not orbiting a star. This free-floating planet, dubbed PSO J318.5-22, is just 80 light-years away from Earth and has a mass only six times that of Jupiter. The planet formed a mere 12 million years ago—a newborn in planet lifetimes.



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Archival Hubble images reveal Neptune's 'lost' inner moon

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(Phys.org) —Neptune's tiny, innermost moon, Naiad, has now been seen for the first time since it was discovered by Voyager's cameras in 1989. Dr. Mark Showalter, a senior research scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, announced the result today in Denver, Colorado, at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. He and collaborators Dr. Jack Lissauer of the NASA Ames Research Center, Dr. Imke de Pater of UC Berkeley, and Robert French of the SETI Institute, also released a dramatic new image of Neptune's puzzling rings and ring-arcs, which were first imaged by Voyager.



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Scientists take a quieter step closer to first practical quantum computer

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(Phys.org) —Scientists working to produce the world's fastest, most powerful computers have moved a step closer to creating a practical prototype using microwaves – by shielding the atoms driving this new generation of computers from the harmful effects of noise.



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Crab Nebula Room Decals

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space

who do you know that would like one of these? A special design by galaxyofstars,
another talented creative from the Zazzle community!


tagged with: astronomy, space, space images, nebula, supernova, remnant, crab nebula, hubble telescope, hubble, telescope, exploration, constellation of taurus, constellation, taurus

The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. The nebula was observed by John Bevis in 1731; it corresponds to a bright supernova recorded by Arab, Chinese and Japanese astronomers in 1054. The Crab Nebula is one of the most intricately structured and highly dynamical objects ever observed.

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Pleiades iPad Case

Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!

look at this great design from annaleeblysse,
another talented creative from the Zazzle community!


tagged with: lovely, glowing, blue, image, space, photography, pleiades, star, cluster, nasa, hubble, starlight, starbright, amazing, constellation, myth, legend, fascinating

A lovely, glowing blue image of the Pleiades Star Cluster (NASA/Hubble). The Pleiades have held mankind's ention for millenia and this image shows us why.

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The Zazzle Promise: We promise 100% satisfaction. If you don't absolutely love it, we'll take it back!

A rare snapshot of a planetary construction site

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(Phys.org) —Planets are formed in disks of gas and dust around nascent stars. Now, combined observations with the compound telescope ALMA and the Herschel Space Observatory have produced a rare view of a planetary construction site in an intermediate state of evolution: Contrary to expectations, the disk around the star HD 21997 appears to contain both primordial gas left over from the formation of the star itself and dust that appears to have been produced in collisions between planetesimals - small rocks that are the building blocks for the much larger planets. This is the first direct observation of such a "hybrid disk", and likely to require a revision of current models of planet formation.



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Monogram Carina Nebula in Argo Navis space images Desk Lamp

Here's a great lamp featuring a beautiful image from deep in outer space


tagged with: carina nebula, argos navis constellation, carina the keel, star formation, gas clouds, galaxy stars, ngc 3372, carnebngcttst, astronomy pictures, outer space

Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series Hubble's view of the Carina Nebula shows star birth in a new level of detail. The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born. The immense nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel (of the old southern constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts, from Greek mythology).
The original image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of ionized hydrogen. Colour information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.

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more items in the Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series

image code: carnebngcttst

Image credit: Hubble Space Telescope; colour data from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile

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Click to fill in your monogram initials.
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Mars Posters

Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space

who do you know that would like one of these? A special design by Nasaworld,
another talented creative from the Zazzle community!


tagged with: astronomy, space, nasa, nebula, galaxy, best, unique, original, quality, custom, affordable, photography, gift, popular, science, planet, space exploration, solar system, outer space, deep space, space age, space design, space image, space travel, space shuttle, space telescope, space and time, space race, space center, space time, universe, mystical

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance.

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Eta Carinae Nebula Wall Skin

Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space

here's a cool design that is sure to work out for you. It was created by astronomical,
another talented creative from the Zazzle community!


tagged with: eta carinae nebula, eta carinae, carinae, nebula, carinae nebula, space, astronomy, stars, outer space, wr 22

This spectacular panoramic view combines a new image of the field around the Wolf–Rayet star WR 22 in the Carina Nebula (right) with an earlier picture of the region around the unique star Eta Carinae in the heart of the nebula (left).

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