NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Oct 30 2022

Night on a Spooky Planet

What spooky planet is this? Planet Earth of course, on a dark and stormy night in 2013 at Hverir, a geothermally active area along the volcanic landscape in northeastern Iceland. Triggered by solar activity, geomagnetic storms produced the auroral display in the starry night sky. The ghostly towers of steam and gas are venting from fumaroles and danced against the eerie greenish light. For now, auroral apparitions are increasing as our Sun approaches a maximum in its 11 year solar activity cycle. And pretty soon, ghostly shapes may dance in your neighborhood too.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

See NASA destroy its vintage Marshall Space Flight Center headquarters

NASA destroyed one of its own vintage buildings early Saturday (Oct. 29), sending the vintage structure off with a literal bang.

The space agency intentionally demolished its historic Building 4200, which served as the administrative headquarters of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama from 1963 to 2020. The building is being removed to "make way for a series of new, state-of-the-art facilities tailored to help NASA map out the next century's worth of discoveries in space," agency officials said in a statement this month(opens in new tab).

NASA destroyed Building 4200 at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT) Saturday morning with a controlled implosion that brought the office building, now merely a shell of its former self, down in just a few seconds. NASA webcast the weekend destruction live on YouTube(opens in new tab). You can see a replay of the event below at about the 30-minute mark.

Building 4200 had originally been slated for an update in 2030. But engineers found structural problems in its exterior wall panels in 2020, and NASA decided that it made more sense to demolish Building 4200 than to repair and maintain it.

"That decision tugs a lot of heartstrings here," agency officials wrote in the same statement. "The building was home to thousands of Marshall team members over much of six decades. That number includes 14 directors, from Dr. Wernher von Braun — who led rocket development in the 1960s and 1970s — to [current director Jody] Singer, the first woman to serve in the capacity."

The historical preservation team at Marshall, NASA's lead center for rocketry and propulsion research, is working with the agency's History Office and the Alabama State Historic Preservation Office to safeguard Building 4200's history and legacy.

"Thousands of photos, videos and other documents have been archived and made available for public use by the Library of Congress' Historical American Building Survey and Historical American Engineering Record," NASA officials wrote.

https://www.space.com/nasa-demolish-building-marshall-space-flight-center-webcast

https://youtu.be/dRtLqKa_5bY

Haunting Portrait: NASA’s Webb Reveals Dust, Structure in Pillars of Creation

This is not an ethereal landscape of time-forgotten tombs. Nor are these soot-tinged fingers reaching out. These pillars, flush with gas and dust, enshroud stars that are slowly forming over many millennia. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has snapped this eerie, extremely dusty view of the Pillars of Creation in mid-infrared light – showing us a new view of a familiar landscape.

Why does mid-infrared light set such a somber, chilling mood in Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) image? Interstellar dust cloaks the scene. And while mid-infrared light specializes in detailing where dust is, the stars aren’t bright enough at these wavelengths to appear. Instead, these looming, leaden-hued pillars of gas and dust gleam at their edges, hinting at the activity within.

Thousands and thousands of stars have formed in this region. This is made plain when examining Webb’s recent Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) image. In MIRI’s view, the majority of the stars appear missing. Why? Many newly formed stars are no longer surrounded by enough dust to be detected in mid-infrared light. Instead, MIRI observes young stars that have not yet cast off their dusty “cloaks.” These are the crimson orbs toward the fringes of the pillars. In contrast, the blue stars that dot the scene are aging, which means they have shed most of their layers of gas and dust.

Mid-infrared light excels at observing gas and dust in extreme detail. This is also unmistakable throughout the background. The densest areas of dust are the darkest shades of gray. The red region toward the top, which forms an uncanny V, like an owl with outstretched wings, is where the dust is diffuse and cooler. Notice that no background galaxies make an appearance – the interstellar medium in the densest part of the Milky Way’s disk is too swollen with gas and dust to allow their distant light to penetrate.

How vast is this landscape? Trace the topmost pillar, landing on the bright red star jutting out of its lower edge like a broomstick. This star and its dusty shroud are larger than the size of our entire solar system.

This scene was first captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 and revisited in 2014, but many other observatories, like NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, have also gazed deeply at the Pillars of Creation. With every observation, astronomers gain new information, and through their ongoing research build a deeper understanding of this star-forming region. Each wavelength of light and advanced instrument delivers far more precise counts of the gas, dust, and stars, which inform researchers’ models of how stars form. As a result of the new MIRI image, astronomers now have higher resolution data in mid-infrared light than ever before, and will analyze its far more precise dust measurements to create a more complete three-dimensional landscape of this distant region.

The Pillars of Creation is set within the vast Eagle Nebula, which lies 6,500 light-years away.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/haunting-portrait-nasa-s-webb-reveals-dust-structure-in-pillars-of-creation