Lynd's Dark Nebula: The Native American Woman Dancer

Credit: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

Resembling a dancer twirling her skirt in the wind, this image of the Lynd's Dark Nebula (LDN 1622) glows with deep blue and maroon colors.

The picture was taken by skywatcher and photographer Adam Block from the University of Arizona's Mt. Lemmon Sky Center.

LDN 1622 is called a dark nebula because interstellar dust is so thick it obscures light from nearby stars or other nebulas.

It is located near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy close the Belt and Sword of Orion, an area that can be a favorite observing ground for avid skywatchers.

"My first impression of this nebula, especially looking at the raw grayscale images, was of a Native American woman dancer. She makes a cloud of dust as she twists in her movement. Perhaps I am influenced by where I reside, but the impressionistic form seems sinuous and kinetic," Block reported.

NASA SDO Image: Solar Moon Transit

A NASA spacecraft has captured stunning footage of Tuesday's (Feb. 21) partial solar eclipse, which left our star looking briefly like a huge celestial Pac-Man.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) was watching Tuesday morning when the new moon crossed part of the sun's face in a partial eclipse that was visible only from space. 

SDO snapped a video and photos of the solar eclipse from its lofty perch 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth.

Spinning Star's Vanishing Act Reveals Cosmic Mystery

While studying the globelike supernova remnant, astronomers discovered a new pulsar, PSR J1841-0500. 

After shining for at least a year, the pulsar, located inside the white circle, abruptly disappeared. 

The left image was provided by the Multi-Array Galactic Plane Imaging Survey, the right by CHANDRA.

CREDIT: Shami Chatterjee

Pulsars are fast-spinning stars that emit regular beams of light known for their clocklike regularity. So, when one strangely turned off for a year and a half, astronomers were surprised to find that this abnormality could help them solve the longstanding mystery of what makes these flashing stars tick.

Despite more than forty years of study, astronomers still can't nail down what causes these rapidly rotating stars to pulse but when one, called PSR J1841, turned off for 580 days, it gave astronomers a glimpse of how pulsars behave when they can't be seen.

In December 2008, Fernando Camilo, of Columbia University in New York, was using the Parkes telescope in Australia to search for a known object when he found a steadily flashing star in his field of view.

He quickly identified it as a pulsar that was spinning once every 0.9 seconds, a fairly standard rotation.

"I wasn't too excited," Camilo admitted.

Astrophysicists Discover Stellar Black Hole In Andromeda Galaxy

Astrophysicists claim to have discovered a stellar black hole in the Andromeda galaxy.

The scientists, from Clemson University and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, have discovered a stellar mass black hole in Andromeda, a spiral galaxy about 2.6 million light years from Earth.

The discovery was made with data from NASA's Chandra observatory.

The team was studying ultra-luminous X-Rays, emitted a long time ago.

The black hole was suspected when they detected an unusual X-Ray transient light source in Andromeda.

They concluded the source was emitting X-Rays because the black hole was absorbing material at very high rates.

"The brightness suggested that these X-rays belonged to the class of ultra=luminous X-ray sources, or ULXs," said Amanpreet Kaur, a graduate student in physics from the Clemson University, adding, "But ULXs are rare.

There are none at all in the Milky Way where Earth is located, and this is the first to be confirmed in Andromeda. Proving it required detailed observations." The team concluded the ULX source probably originated from a system similar to X-Ray binaries in our own galaxy.

Stellar black holes are small black holes formed by the collapse of very massive stars, each of which weighs about 10 times as much as our Sun.

"We were very lucky that we caught the ULX early enough to see most of its light curve, which showed a very similar behavior to other X-ray sources from our own galaxy," said Wolfgang Pietsch of the Max Planck Institute.

"This means that the ULX in Andromeda likely contains a normal, stellar black hole swallowing material at very high rates," he added.

Space Elevator Plans Unveiled by Japanese

Getting to space may become be as simple as pressing the "door close" button of an elevator, as imagined by Japanese construction company Obayashi Corp.

The company unveiled plans Wednesday to build a space elevator with a hopeful completion date of 2050.

According to the proposal, 30 passengers at a time would depart from the equator and travel in an enclosure guided by a 60,000 mile (96,000 km) cable that stretches a quarter of the way to the moon.

The final destination would be a spaceport that contains laboratories and living quarters 22,000 miles (35,000 km) above the Earth's surface.

Engineers expect to anchor the cable by a counterweight attached to the space end to help keep the line taut. Solar panels would provide electricity to power the station.

Don't expect a quick ride though. Even travelling at 124 mph (200 km/h) the trip would expect to take a week.

One issue that has plagued space elevator designs is finding the right material to build such a long cable. Engineers from Obayashi Corp. believe carbon nanotubes, super-light and super-strong sheets of carbon rolled into tubes, might be the answer if they can be mass produced cheap enough.

"At this moment, we cannot estimate the cost for the project," an Obayashi official reported. "However, we'll try to make steady progress so that it won't end just up as simply a dream."

Safety would play a large role in the construction of the elevator. Passengers need to be protected from the expected radiation exposure during the trip. In addition, the elevator and spaceport would not orbit around the Earth, which puts it at risk of collision with orbiting satellites.

Space elevators are not a new concept. In 1895, Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was inspired by the Eiffel Tower and conceptually designed a space elevator 22,200 miles (35,800 km) high he called a "celestial castle", according to NASA.

NASA Hubble Image: Eta Carinae Supernova

NASA's Hubble Telescope captured an image of Eta Carinae.

This image consists of ultraviolet and visible light images from the High Resolution Channel of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The field of view is approximately 30 arcseconds across.

The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star that is nearing the end of its life, and the event that the 19th century astronomers observed was a stellar near-death experience.

Scientists call these outbursts supernova impostor events, because they appear similar to supernovae but stop just short of destroying their star.

Although 19th century astronomers did not have telescopes powerful enough to see the 1843 outburst in detail, its effects can be studied today.

The huge clouds of matter thrown out a century and a half ago, known as the Homunculus Nebula, have been a regular target for Hubble since its launch in 1990.

This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys High Resolution Channel, is the most detailed yet, and shows how the material from the star was not thrown out in a uniform manner, but forms a huge dumbbell shape.

Eta Carinae is one of the closest stars to Earth that is likely to explode in a supernova in the relatively near future (though in astronomical timescales the "near future" could still be a million years away).

When it does, expect an impressive view from Earth, far brighter still than its last outburst: SN 2006gy, the brightest supernova ever observed, came from a star of the same type, though from a galaxy over 200 million light-years away.

Image Credit: ESA/NASA

Japanese Astronaut Furukawa Builds LEGO Space Station

Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa poses with the LEGO model of the International Space Station that he built on board the real space station.

CREDIT: NASA

It took more than 200 astronauts from 12 countries more than a dozen years to build the International Space Station (ISS).

Satoshi Furukawa, an astronaut from Japan, matched that feat in just about two hours and he did it all while aboard the orbiting outpost itself.

It helped that his space station was made out of LEGO.

"It was a great opportunity for me to have built the LEGO space station," Furukawa, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) flight engineer, said in an interview after he returned to Earth. "I enjoyed building it."

"The ISS was put together in space, piece by piece," said Furukawa. "It's very similar to how you put together LEGO bricks on Earth."