Crab Nebula, Uranus & Galaxy D100

Observatory / Course Archives / ASTR 110 Fall 2019 / Alfree

The Crab Nebula

The Crab Nebula is the glowing remains of a dead star that used to be a supernova but exploded. The center of this nebula is a compressed core of the exploded supernova. With a mass similar to the sun the core is extremely dense even though it is only a few miles start to finish. Apart from the core there is hot gas that gives it this glowing sensation. This specific image was taken with a camera filter to give it a green type glow. Observations of the Crab Nebula have been traced back all the way to 1054 A.D. This Nebula is located around 6,500 light years away and is inside the constellation Taurus.

The crab nebula was first seen by the Chinese because for nearly an entire month in 1054 A.D. you could see the "guest star" during the daytime.The colors of the image are not exactly what you would see if you were viewing with your own eyes.The image taken by Hubble uses black and white exposure. The green tint comes from the representative of the filter of a camera that is using a broad color range. I chose this image because the green filter gives the picture a eerie and mysterious feeling which I feel fits the context of lurking gasses and dust. There are two beams of radiation within the neutron star that produce large amounts of lights around 30 times per second while the neutron star rotates. The Crab Nebula got its name because when viewing this nebula with a telescope, using the human eye, it slightly resembles the image of a crab.

Uranus

This image is of Uranus, Uranus rotates around the sun and is the seventh planet from the sun. Its orbit is approximately 1.784 billions miles from the earth. In fact, its orbital period around the sun takes 84 years. This orbital path has an centrality or circularity of 0.0473 making it barely more circular than Jupiter's eccentricity and ranking it the fourth most circular orbital shape of the planets. Uranus is massive enough that is has gravity to make it a round object. Uranus has a radius of around 15,759 miles. Uranus is the dominate object in its orbit and often consumes or pushes smaller objects that come into its orbital pathway.

One of the most striking part of this image is the distinct blue color of the planet. The reason this color is so prominent is because Uranus has an atmosphere made up of hydrogen, helium and methane. The methane is at the upper level of the atmosphere meaning it receives light from the sun first. Methane absorbs red light but reflects the blue light from the sun making the planet a beautiful color of blue. Another intriguing part of this image is the clear rings around the planet. The rings of Uranus are present in two different sets. The inner set of rings has dark grey colored rings that are very skinny. The second set is made of two different rings. One ring being blue like Saturn's E ring and the other is a dusty reddish color.

Galaxy D100

Galaxy D100 is a galaxy composed of a collection of dust, gas, and billions of stars held together by gravity. Galaxy D100 happens to be a spiral galaxy that is made up of mostly reddish stars.The long streak attached to the galaxy is for the most part glowing hydrogen that is getting stripped away whilst the galaxy is traveling through hot gas in a cluster of galaxies. The gas tail is about 200,000 light years long and has about 400,000 times the mass of our sun.

The dark brown center of the spiral galaxy D100 is made up of dust that is escaping from the galaxy. This dust is a part of a tail of hydrogen but the Hubble only sees the dust. The blue color portions of the galaxy are due to the loss of hydrogen gas within D100. Next to D100 is a massive cluster called the Coma cluster. This cluster is responsible not only for the large streak of dust and trail of hydrogen coming from D100, but the also the gas loss that produces the blue light. The gravity of the Coma Cluster pulls the D100 towards it and on its way there gas along with dust are pushed outside of the galaxy. Stars within this galaxy range from ages of 500 million years old to 13 billion years old.