Space at
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"I want to know why the universe exist, why there is something greater than nothing."
Steven Hawking
Scientist, Space Lover
Where is the best place on Earth to find meteorites? Although meteors fall all over the world, they usually just sink to the bottom of an ocean, are buried by shifting terrain, or are easily confused with terrestrial rocks. At the bottom of the Earth, however, in East Antarctica, huge sheets of blue ice remain pure and barren. When traversing such a sheet, a dark rock will stick out. These rocks have a high probability of being true meteorites -- likely pieces of another world. An explosion or impact might have catapulted these meteorites from the Moon, Mars, or even an asteroid, yielding valuable information about these distant worlds and our early Solar System. Small teams of snowmobiling explorers so far have found thousands. Pictured above, ice-trekkers search a field 25-kilometers in front of Otway Massif in the Transantarctic Mountain Range during the Antarctic summer of 1995-1996. The week marks the 100th anniversary of humans first reaching the Earth's South Pole. Browse or share: Lastest lunar eclipse pictures
Stars fill this infrared view, spanning 4 light-years across the center of the Lagoon Nebula. Visible light images show the glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds that dominate the scene. But this infrared image, constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data, peers closer to the heart of the active star-forming region revealing newborn stars scattered within, against a crowded field of background stars toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. This tumultuous stellar nursery's central regions are sculpted and energized by the massive, young Herschel 36, seen as the bright star near center in the field of view. Herschel 36 is actually a multiple system of massive stars. At over 30 times the mass of the Sun and less than 1 million years old, the most massive star in the system should live to a stellar old age of 5 million years. Compare that to the almost 5 billion year old Sun which will evolve into a red giant in only another 5 billion years or so. The Lagoon Nebula, also known as M8, lies about 4,000 light-years away within the boundaries of the constellation Sagittarius.
What can 100,000 galaxies tell you? Perhaps the structure and composition of the universe. Astronomers using the Two Degree Field (2dF) spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in Australia have now measured the redshifts of over 100,000 galaxies in a thin ribbon of the sky. The results show how galaxies are scattered in the universe out to 4 billion light years. Huge clusters, long filaments, and empty voids measuring over 100 million light years across are visible in the resulting 2dF map, pictured above. The map is interesting not only for what it shows but also for what it does not show. It does not show even larger structures that would be expected were the universe filled to critical density with normal matter. These results do not contradict recent evidence that most of the universe is made of some type of unusual dark energy, however.
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