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In this image, the magenta color indicates the mysterious glow detected by NASA's NuSTAR space telescope.Excerpt from huffingtonpost.com A mysterious glow has been observed at the center of the Milky Way, and scientists are struggling to figure o...
Excerpt from wired.com
In 2007, A Dutch schoolteacher named Hanny var Arkel discovered a weird green glob of gas in space. Sifting through pictures of galaxies online, as part of the citizen science project Galaxy Zoo, she saw a cloud, seemingly glowing, sitting next to a galaxy. Intrigued, astronomers set out to find more of these objects, dubbed Hanny’s Voorwerp (“Hanny’s object” in Dutch). Now, again with the help of citizen scientists, they’ve found 19 more of them, using the Hubble space telescope to snap the eight haunting pictures in the gallery above.
Since var Arkel found the first of these objects, hundreds more volunteers have swarmed to help identify parts of the universe in the Galaxy Zoo gallery. To find this new set, a couple hundred volunteers went through nearly 16,000 pictures online (seven people went through all of them), clicking yes/no/maybe as to whether they saw a weird green blob. Astronomers followed up on the galaxies they identified using ground-based telescopes, and confirmed 19 new galaxies surrounded by green gas.
What causes these wispy tendrils of gas to glow? Lurking at the center of each of these galaxies is a supermassive black hole, millions to billions times as massive as the sun, with gravity so strong that even light can’t escape them. As nearby gas and dust swirls into the black hole, like water circling a drain, that material heats up, producing lots of radiation—including powerful ultraviolet. Beaming out from the galaxy, that ultraviolet radiation strikes nearby clouds of gas, left over from past collisions between galaxies. And it makes the clouds glow an eerie green. “A lot of these bizarre forms we’re seeing in the images arise because these galaxies either interacted with a companion or show evidence they merged with a smaller galaxy,” says William Keel, an astronomer at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa.
The eight in this gallery, captured with Hubble, are especially weird. That’s because the quasar, the black-hole engine that’s supposed to be churning out the ultraviolet radiation, is dim—too dim, in fact, to be illuminating the green gas. Apparently, the once-bright quasar has faded. But because that UV light takes hundreds of thousands of years to travel, it can continue to illuminate the gas long after its light source has died away.
That glowing gas can tell astronomers a lot about the quasar that brought it to light. “What I’m so excited about is the fact that we can use them to do archaeology,” says Gabriela Canalizo, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, who wasn’t part of the new research. Because the streaks of gas are so vast, stretching up to tens of thousands of light years, the way they glow reveals the history of the radiation coming from the quasar. As the quasar fades, so will the gas’s glow, with the regions of gas closer to the quasar dimming first. By analyzing how the glow dwindles with distance from the quasar, astronomers can determine how fast the quasar is fading. “This was something we’ve never been able to do,” Canalizo says.
Measuring how fast the quasar fades allows astronomers to figure out exactly what’s causing it to turn off in the first place. “What makes them dim is running out of material to eat,” Canalizo says. That could happen if the quasar is generating enough radiation to blow away all the gas and dust surrounding the black hole—the same gas and dust that feeds it. Without a steady diet, the quasar is powerless to produce radiation. Only if more gas happens to make its way toward the black hole can the quasar turn on again. The glowing gas can provide details of this process, and if other mechanisms are at play.
With more powerful telescopes, astronomers will likely find many more. Hanny’s Verwoort, it turns out, may not be that weird after all.
Excerpt from educatinghumanity.com "Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it."Niels Bohr10 Ways Quantum Physics Will Change the WorldEver want to have a "life do over", teleport, time travel, have your computer wor...
Excerpt from chroniclebulletin.com University of Colorado-led Mars mission has observed two unexpected phenomena in the Martian atmosphere, unveiled Wednesday at the 46th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.NASA describes the finds by MA...
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| This infrared image shows the dust ring around the nearby star HR 4796A in the southern constellation of Centaurus. |
Excerpt from news.discovery.com
By Ian O'Neill
A new instrument attached to one of the most powerful telescopes in the world has been switched on and acquired its ‘first light’ images of alien star systems and Saturn’s moon Titan.
The Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (or SPHIRES) instrument has been recently installed at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope’s already impressive suite of sophisticated instrumentation. The VLT is located in the ultra-dry high-altitude climes of the Atacama Desert in Chile.
In the observation above, an ‘Eye of Sauron‘-like dust ring surrounding the star HR 4796A in the southern constellation of Centaurus, a testament to the sheer power of the multiple technique SPHIRES will use to acquire precision views of directly-imaged exoplanets.
The biggest problem with trying to directly image a world orbiting close to its parent star is that of glare; stars are many magnitudes brighter that the reflected light from its orbiting exoplanet, so how the heck are you supposed to gain enough contrast between the bright star and exoplanet to resolve the two? The SPHIRES instrument is using a combination of three sophisticated techniques to remove a star’s glare and zero-in on its exoplanetary targets.
The first technique, known as adaptive optics, is employed by the VLT itself. By firing a laser into the Earth’s atmosphere during the observation, a gauge on the turbulence in the upper atmospheric gases can be measured and the effects of which can be removed from the imagery. Any blurriness caused by our thick atmosphere can be adjusted for.
Next up is a precision coronograph inside the instrument that blocks the light from the target star. By doing this, any glare can be removed and any exoplanet in orbit may be bright enough to spot.
But the third technique, which really teases out any exoplanet signal, is the detection of different polarizations of light from the star system. The polarization of infrared light being generated by the star and the infrared glow from the exoplanet are very subtle. SPHIRES can differentiate between the two, thereby further boosting the observation’s contrast.
“SPHERE is a very complex instrument. Thanks to the hard work of the many people who were involved in its design, construction and installation it has already exceeded our expectations. Wonderful!” said Jean-Luc Beuzit, of the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, France and Principal Investigator of SPHERE, in an ESO press release.
The speed and sheer power of SPHIRES will be an obvious boon to astronomers zooming in on distant exoplanets, aiding our understanding of these strange new worlds.
By Ian O'Neill
A new instrument attached to one of the most powerful telescopes in the world has been switched on and acquired its ‘first light’ images of alien star systems and Saturn’s moon Titan.
The Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (or SPHIRES) instrument has been recently installed at the ESO’s Very Large Telescope’s already impressive suite of sophisticated instrumentation. The VLT is located in the ultra-dry high-altitude climes of the Atacama Desert in Chile.
In the observation above, an ‘Eye of Sauron‘-like dust ring surrounding the star HR 4796A in the southern constellation of Centaurus, a testament to the sheer power of the multiple technique SPHIRES will use to acquire precision views of directly-imaged exoplanets.
The biggest problem with trying to directly image a world orbiting close to its parent star is that of glare; stars are many magnitudes brighter that the reflected light from its orbiting exoplanet, so how the heck are you supposed to gain enough contrast between the bright star and exoplanet to resolve the two? The SPHIRES instrument is using a combination of three sophisticated techniques to remove a star’s glare and zero-in on its exoplanetary targets.
This infrared image of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, was one of the first produced by the SPHERE instrument soon after it was installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in May 2014.
ESO
Next up is a precision coronograph inside the instrument that blocks the light from the target star. By doing this, any glare can be removed and any exoplanet in orbit may be bright enough to spot.
But the third technique, which really teases out any exoplanet signal, is the detection of different polarizations of light from the star system. The polarization of infrared light being generated by the star and the infrared glow from the exoplanet are very subtle. SPHIRES can differentiate between the two, thereby further boosting the observation’s contrast.
“SPHERE is a very complex instrument. Thanks to the hard work of the many people who were involved in its design, construction and installation it has already exceeded our expectations. Wonderful!” said Jean-Luc Beuzit, of the Institut de Planétologie et d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, France and Principal Investigator of SPHERE, in an ESO press release.
The speed and sheer power of SPHIRES will be an obvious boon to astronomers zooming in on distant exoplanets, aiding our understanding of these strange new worlds.
The star HR 7581 (Iota Sgr) was observed in SPHERE survey mode (parallel observation in the near infrared with the dual imaging camera and the integral field spectrograph ). A very low mass star, more than 4000 times fainter that its parent star, was discovered orbiting Iota Sgr at a tiny separation of 0.24". This is a vital demonstration of the power of SPHERE to image faint objects very close to bright ones.
ESO
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Astronomers have discovered a dust-filled ancient galaxy from the very early universe, which debunks earlier theories that earliest galaxies had no dust but gas. Astronomers from the University of Copenhagen used the Very Large Telescope’s X-shooter instrument along with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and discovered a galaxy, named Galaxy A1689-zD1, which is an ancient galaxy and far from Earth.
The astronomers stated that the galaxy which
they were surprised to discover is far more evolved system than expected. It had a fraction of dust similar to a very mature galaxy, such as the Milky Way. Such dust is vital to life, because it helps form planets, complex molecules and normal stars.
According to the astronomers A1689-zD1 is only observable by virtue of its brightness being amplified more than nine times by a gravitational lens in the form of the spectacular galaxy cluster. Without the gravitational boost, the glow from this very faint galaxy would have been too weak to detect.
The astronomers stated that they are viewing A1689-zD1 when the Universe was only about 700 million years old, which is 5% of its present age. According to them, it is a relatively modest system — much less massive and luminous than many other objects that have been studied before at this stage in the early universe and hence a more typical example of a galaxy at that time.
A1689-zD1 is being observed as it was during the period of reionization, when the earliest stars brought with them a cosmic dawn, illuminating for the first time an immense and transparent universe and ending the extended stagnation of the Dark Ages. Expected to look like a newly formed system, the galaxy surprised the observers with its rich chemical complexity and abundance of interstellar dust.
Dust plays an extremely important role in the universe – both in the formation of planets and new stars.
Darach Watson, Associate Professor at Dark Cosmology Centre, University of Copenhagen, and the lead author of the study, said, “After confirming the galaxy’s distance using the VLT we realized it had previously been observed with ALMA. We didn’t expect to find much, but I can tell you we were all quite excited when we realized that not only had ALMA observed it, but that there was a clear detection. One of the main goals of the ALMA Observatory was to find galaxies in the early Universe from their cold gas and dust emissions — and here we had it!”
The researchers hope that future observations of a large number of distant galaxies could help unravel how frequently such evolved galaxies occur in this very early epoch of the history of the universe.
Excerpt space.com
A strange set of 48 galaxies appears to be rich in dark matter and lacking in stars, suggesting that they may be so-called "failed" galaxies, a new study reports.
The galaxies in question are part of the Coma Cluster, which lies 300 million light-years from Earth and packs several thousand galaxies into a space just 20 million light-years across. To study them, Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and his colleagues used the Dragonfly Telephoto Array in New Mexico.
The array's eight connected Canon telephoto lenses allow the researchers to search for extremely faint objects that traditional telescope surveys miss. Often, such as when the researchers used the array to search for the faint glow that dark matter might create, the hunt comes up empty.
But when van Dokkum and his colleagues looked toward the Coma Cluster, they found a pleasant surprise.
"We noticed all these faint little smudges in the images from the Dragonfly telescope," van Dokkum told Space.com.
The mysterious blobs nagged at van Dokkum, compelling him to look into the objects further. Fortuitously, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope had recently captured one of these objects with its sharp eye.
"It turned out that they're these fuzzy blobs that look somewhat like dwarf spheroidal galaxies around our own Milky Way," van Dokkum said. "So they looked familiar in some sense … except that if they are at the distance of the Coma Cluster, they must be really huge."
And with very few stars to account for the mass in these galaxies, they must contain huge amounts of dark matter, the researchers said. In fact, to stay intact, the 48 galaxies must contain 98 percent dark matter and just 2 percent "normal" matter that we can see. The fraction of dark matter in the universe as a whole is thought to be around 83 percent.
But before making this claim, the team had to verify that these blobs really are as distant as the Coma Cluster. (In fact, the team initially thought the galaxies were much closer.). But even in the Hubble image the stars were not resolved. If Hubble — one of the most powerful telescopes in existence — can't resolve the stars, those pinpricks of light must be pretty far away, study team members reasoned.
Now, van Dokkum and his colleagues have definitive evidence: They've determined the exact distance to one of the galaxies. The team used the Keck Telescope in Hawaii to look at one of the objects for two hours. This gave them a hazy spectrum, from which they were able to tease out the galaxy's recessional velocity — that is, how fast it is moving away from Earth.
That measure traces back to the Hubble Telescope's namesake. In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered one of the simplest and most surprising relationships in astronomy: The more distant a galaxy, the faster it moves away from the Milky Way.
Today, astronomers use the relationship to measure a galaxy's recessional velocity and thus calculate the galaxy's distance. In this case, the small fuzzy blob observed with Keck was moving away from Earth at 15.7 million mph (25.3 million km/h). That places it at 300 million light-years away from Earth, the distance of the Coma Cluster.
So the verdict is officially in: These galaxies must be associated with the Coma Cluster and therefore must be extremely massive.
"It looks like the universe is able to make unexpected galaxies," van Dokkum said, adding that there is an amazing diversity of massive galaxies.
But the clusters still present a mystery: The team doesn't know why they have so much dark matter and so few stars.
Though they look serene and silent from our vantage on Earth, stars are actually roiling balls of violent plasma. Test your stellar smarts with this quiz.
Normally, the galaxy has such a strong gravitational pull that most of the expelled gas falls back onto the galaxy and forms the next generations of stars. But maybe the strong gravitational pull of the other galaxies in the Coma Cluster interfered with this process, pulling the gas away.
"If that happened, they had no more fuel for star formation and they were sort of stillborn galaxies where they started to get going but then failed to really build up a lot of stars," said van Dokkum, adding that this is the most likely scenario.
Another possibility is that these galaxies are in the process of being ripped apart. But astronomers expect that if this were the case, the galaxies would be distorted and streams of stars would be flowing away from them. Because these effects don't appear, this scenario is very unlikely.
The next step is to try to measure the individual motions of stars within the galaxies. If the team knew those stars' speeds, it could calculate the galaxies' exact mass, and therefore the amount of dark matter they contain. If the stars move faster, the galaxy is more massive. And if they move slower, the galaxy is less massive.
However, this would require a better spectrum than the one the team has right now.
"But it's not outside the realm of what's possible," van Dokkum assured. "It's just very hard."
The original study has been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. You can read it for free on the preprint site arXiv.org.
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| The Sculptor Galaxy |
Excerpt from sciencerecorder.com
Starburst galaxies are named for their ability to convert gasses rapidly into new stars, at an accelerated speed that can sometimes be 1,000 times more rapid than your average spiral galaxy, such as the Milky Way. Why the disparity? In order to further investigate the reason that some galaxies seem to “burst” into being, whereas others take the better part of a few billion years, an international team of astronomers analyzed a cluster of star-forming gas clouds in the heart of NGC 253 – the Sculptor Galaxy, with the aid of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The Sculptor Galaxy is among starburst galaxies closest to the Milky Way.
“All stars form in dense clouds of dust and gas,” said Adam Leroy, in an interview with Astronomy magazine. Leroy is an astronomer at Ohio State University in Columbus. “Until now, however, scientists struggled to see exactly what was going on inside starburst galaxies that distinguished them from other star-forming regions.”
Therefore, Leroy and his colleagues turn to the ALMA which is capable of examining star changing structures even in systems as distant as Sculptor. Already, they have successfully charted distribution and movement of various molecules within several clouds located at the Sculptor Galaxy’s core.
Because NGC 253, which is disk-shaped, is in the stages of a very intense starburst and located approximately 11.5 million light-years from home, it is the perfect target for study. ALMA picks it up with remarkable precision and resolution, so much so that the team was able to isolate and identify ten different stellar ‘nurseries,’ in which stars were in the process of forming. To appreciate the magnitude of this feat, it would have been impossible with previous telescopes, which blurred the regions together into one glow.
“There is a class of galaxies and parts of galaxies, we call them starbursts, where we know that gas is just plain better at forming stars,” said Leroy. “To understand why, we took one of the nearest such regions and pulled it apart — layer by layer — to see what makes the gas in these places so much more efficient at star formation.”
More importantly, they recognized the distribution of several 40 millimeter-wavelength “signatures,” that given off by various molecules at the center of Sculptor Galaxy, signaling that a number of conditions were responsible for the development of these stars. This accounts for the diversity of the states of different stars corresponding to where they are found in star-forming clouds. One important compound, all too familiar and unwelcome on Earth, carbon monoxide (CO), correlates with massive envelopes of gases that are less dense within the stellar nurseries. Others, such as hydrogen cyanide (HCN), were present in the more dense reaches of active star formation. The rarer the molecules, for example, H13CN and H13CO+, suggest regions that are even denser.
Indeed, when the data was compared, researchers found that the gas clouds of the Sculptor Galaxy were ten times denser than those found in spiral galaxies, suggesting that because the clouds are so tightly packed, they can form star clusters much more rapidly than the Milky Way. At the same time, they give us further insight as to how stars are born, showing us the physical changes along the way, allowing astronomers a working model to compare with our own galaxy.
“These differences have wide-ranging implications for how galaxies grow and evolve,” concluded Leroy. “What we would ultimately like to know is whether a starburst like Sculptor produces not just more stars, but different types of stars than a galaxy like the Milky Way. ALMA is bringing us much closer to that goal.”
Excerpt from space.com Over the next two weeks, you have an excellent chance to spot one of the most rarely observed objects in the sky, the zodiacal light. The zodiacal light takes its name from the ancient band of 12 constellations through which the...
"The towers of fiery colors are actually dust in the galaxy and beyond that has been polarized," the JPL says of this recently released map of the universe. It shows light in the 353GHz range, wavelengths longer than our eyes can see. ...
Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) is visible to sky watchers using binoculars on clear nights in January 2015. (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)California sky watchers may be able to see two celestial bodies zooming past Earth in the next few days with just a pair...
Excerpt from earthsky.org
Admit it. You’ve probably got a pair of binoculars lying around your house somewhere. They may be perfect – that’s right, perfect – for beginning stargazing. Follow the links below to learn more about the best deal around for people who want to get acquainted with the night sky: a pair of ordinary binoculars.
1. Binoculars are a better place to start than telescopes
2. Start with a small, easy-to-use size
3. First, view the moon with binoculars.
4. Move on to viewing planets with binoculars.
5. Use your binoculars to explore inside our Milky Way.
6. Use your binoculars to peer beyond the Milky Way.
1. Binoculars are a better place to start than telescopes. The fact is that most people who think they want to buy a telescope would be better off using binoculars for a year or so instead. That’s because first-time telescope users often find themselves completely confused – and ultimately put off – by the dual tasks of learning the use a complicated piece of equipment (the ‘scope) while at the same time learning to navigate an unknown realm (the night sky).
Beginning stargazers often find that an ordinary pair of binoculars – available from any discount store – can give them the experience they’re looking for. After all, in astronomy, magnification and light-gathering power let you see more of what’s up there. Even a moderate form of power, like those provided by a pair of 7×50 binoculars, reveals 7 times as much information as the unaided eye can see.
You also need to know where to look. Many people start with a planisphere as they begin their journey making friends with the stars. You can purchase a planisphere at the EarthSky store. Also consider our Astronomy Kit, which has a booklet on what you can see with your binoculars.
2. Start with a small, easy-to-use size. Don’t buy a huge pair of binoculars to start with! Unless you mount them on a tripod, they’ll shake and make your view of the heavens shakey, too. The video above – from ExpertVillage – does a good job summing up what you want. And in case you don’t want to watch the video, the answer is that 7X50 binoculars are optimum for budding astronomers. You can see a lot, and you can hold them steadily enough that jitters don’t spoil your view of the sky. Plus they’re very useful for daylight pursuits, like birdwatching. If 7X50s are too big for you – or if you want binoculars for a child – try 7X35s.
February 24, 2014 moon with earthshine by Greg Diesel Landscape Photography.
You’ll want to start your moon-gazing when the moon is just past new – and visible as a waxing crescent in the western sky after sunset. At such times, you’ll have a beautiful view of earthshine on the moon. This eerie glow on the moon’s darkened portion is really light reflected from Earth onto the moon’s surface. Be sure to turn your binoculars on the moon at these times to enhance the view.
Each month, as the moon goes through its regular phases, you can see the line of sunrise and sunset on the moon progress across the moon’s face. That’s just the line between light and dark on the moon. This line between the day and night sides of the moon is called the terminator line. The best place to look at the moon from Earth – using your binoculars – is along the terminator line. The sun angle is very low in this twilight zone, just as the sun is low in our sky around earthly twilight. So, along the terminator on the moon, lunar features cast long shadows in sharp relief.
You can also look in on the gray blotches on the moon called maria, named when early astronomers thought these lunar features were seas. The maria are not seas, of course, and instead they’re now thought to have formed 3.5 billion years ago when asteroid-sized rocks hit the moon so hard that lava percolated up through cracks in the lunar crust and flooded the impact basins. These lava plains cooled and eventually formed the gray seas we see today.
The white highlands, nestled between the maria, are older terrain pockmarked by thousands of craters that formed over the eons. Some of the larger craters are visible in binoculars. One of them, Tycho, at the six o’clock position on the moon, emanates long swatches of white rays for hundreds of miles over the adjacent highlands. This is material kicked out during the Tycho impact 2.5 million years ago.
Photo of Jupiter’s moons by Earthsky Facebook friend Carl Galloway. Thank you Carl! The four major moons of Jupiter are called Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. This is a telescopic view, but you can glimpse one, two or more moons through your binoculars, too.
4. Move on to viewing planets with binoculars. Here’s the deal about planets. They move around, apart from the fixed stars. They are wanderers, right?
You can use our EarthSky Tonight page to locate planets visible around now. Notice if any planets are mentioned in the calendar on the Tonight page, and if so click on that day’s link. On our Tonight page, we feature planets on days when they’re easily identifiable for some reason – for example, when a planet is near the moon. So our Tonight page calendar can help you come to know the planets, and, as you’re learning to identify them, keep your binoculars very handy. Binoculars will enhance your view of a planet near the moon, for example, or two planets near each other in the twilight sky. They add a lot to the fun!
Below, you’ll find some more simple ideas on how to view planets with your binoculars.
Mercury and Venus. These are both inner planets. They orbit the sun closer than Earth’s orbit. And for that reason, both Mercury and Venus show phases as seen from Earth at certain times in their orbit – a few days before or after the planet passes between the sun and Earth. At such times, turn your binoculars on Mercury or Venus. Good optical quality helps here, but you should be able to see them in a crescent phase. Tip: Venus is so bright that its glare will overwhelm the view. Try looking in twilight instead of true darkness.
Mars. Mars – the Red Planet – really does look red, and using binoculars will intensify the color of this object (or of any colored star). Mars also moves rapidly in front of the stars, and it’s fun to aim your binoculars in its direction when it’s passing near another bright star or planet.
Jupiter. Now on to the real action! Jupiter is a great binocular target, even for beginners. If you are sure to hold your binoculars steadily as you peer at this bright planet, you should see four bright points of light near it. These are the Galilean Satellites – four moons gleaned through one of the first telescopes ever made, by the Italian astronomer Galileo. Note how their relative positions change from night to night as each moon moves around Jupiter in its own orbit.
Saturn.Although a small telescope is needed to see Saturn’s rings, you can use your binoculars to see Saturn’s beautiful golden color. Experienced observers sometimes glimpse Saturn’s largest moon Titan with binoculars. Also, good-quality high-powered binoculars – mounted on a tripod – will show you that Saturn is not round. The rings give it an elliptical shape.
Uranus and Neptune. Some planets are squarely binocular and telescope targets. If you’re armed with a finder chart, two of them, Uranus and Neptune, are easy to spot in binoculars. Uranus might even look greenish, thanks to methane in the planet’s atmosphere. Once a year, Uranus is barely bright enough to glimpse with the unaided eye . . . use binoculars to find it first. Distant Neptune will always look like a star, even though it has an atmosphere practically identical to Uranus.
There are still other denizens of the solar system you can capture through binocs. Look for the occasional comet, which appears as a fuzzy blob of light. Then there are the asteroids – fully 12 of them can be followed with binoculars when they are at their brightest. Because an asteroid looks star-like, the secret to confirming its presence is to sketch a star field through which it’s passing. Do this over subsequent nights; the star that changes position relative to the others is our solar system interloper.
Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters
5. Use your binoculars to explore inside our Milky Way. Binoculars can introduce you to many members of our home galaxy. A good place to start is with star clusters that are close to Earth. They cover a larger area of the sky than other, more distant clusters usually glimpsed through a telescope.
Beginning each autumn and into the spring, look for a tiny dipper-like cluster of stars called the Pleiades. The cluster – sometimes also called the Seven Sisters – is noticeable for being small yet distinctively dipper-like. While most people say they see only six stars here with the unaided eye, binoculars reveal many more stars, plus a dainty chain of stars extending off to one side. The Pleiades star cluster is looks big and distinctive because it’s relatively close – about 400 light years from Earth. This dipper-shaped cluster is a true cluster of stars in space. Its members were born around the same time and are still bound by gravity. These stars are very young, on the order of 20 million years old, in contrast to the roughly five billion years for our sun.
Stars in a cluster all formed from the same gas cloud. You can also see what the Pleiades might have like in a primordial state, by shifting your gaze to the prominent constellation Orion the Hunter. Look for Orion’s sword stars, just below his prominent belt stars. If the night is crisp and clear, and you’re away from urban streetlight glare, unaided eyes will show that the sword isn’t entirely composed of stars. Binoculars show a steady patch of glowing gas where, right at this moment, a star cluster is being born. It’s called the Orion Nebula. A summertime counterpart is the Lagoon Nebula, in Sagittarius the Archer.
With star factories like the Orion Nebula, we aren’t really seeing the young stars themselves. They are buried deep within the nebula, bathing the gas cloud with ultraviolet radiation and making it glow. In a few tens of thousands of years, stellar winds from these young, energetic stars will blow away their gaseous cocoons to reveal a newly minted star cluster.
Scan along the Milky Way to see still more sights that hint at our home galaxy’s complexity. First, there’s the Milky Way glow itself; just a casual glance through binoculars will reveal that it is still more stars we can’t resolve with our eyes . . . hundreds of thousands of them. Periodically, while scanning, you might sweep past what appears to be blob-like, black voids in the stellar sheen. These are dark, non-glowing pockets of gas and dust that we see silhouetted against the stellar backdrop. This is the stuff of future star and solar systems, just waiting around to coalesce into new suns.
Andromeda Galaxy from Chris Levitan Photography.
Many people use the M- or W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia to find the Andromeda Galaxy. See how the star Schedar points to the galaxy?
It’s a whole other galaxy like our own, shining across the vastness of intergalactic space. Light from the Andromeda Galaxy has traveled so far that it’s taken more than 2 million years to reach us.
Two smaller companions visible through binoculars on a dark, transparent night are the Andromeda Galaxy’s version of our Milky Way’s Magellanic Clouds. These small, orbiting, irregularly-shaped galaxies that will eventually be torn apart by their parent galaxy’s gravity.
Such sights, from lunar wastelands to the glow of a nearby island universe, are all within reach of a pair of handheld optics, really small telescopes in their own right: your binoculars.
John Shibley wrote the original draft of this article, years ago, and we’ve been expanding it and updating it ever since. Thanks, John!
Bottom line: For beginning stargazers, there’s no better tool than an ordinary pair of binoculars. This post tells you why, explains what size to get, and gives you a rundown on some of the coolest binoculars sights out there: the moon, the planets, inside the Milky Way, and beyond. Have fun!
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