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Category: space – Page 387

An international team of astronomers has conducted an astrometric and photometric wide-field study of the open cluster Messier 37. As a result, the researchers completed a comprehensive catalog of more than 200,000 sources in the field of Messier 37 and identified the hottest white dwarf candidate members of this cluster. The study was detailed in a paper published July 7 on arXiv.org.

Open clusters (OCs), formed from the same giant molecular cloud, are groups of stars loosely gravitationally bound to each other. So far, more than 1,000 of them have been discovered in the Milky Way, and scientists are still looking for more, hoping to find a variety of these stellar groupings. Studying OCs in detail could be crucial for improving our understanding of the formation and evolution of our galaxy.

Messier 37 (or M37, also known as NGC 2099) is the brightest and richest Galactic OC in the constellation Auriga, located at a distance of about 4,500 light years. The has a radius of at least 10 and a total mass of some 1,500 solar masses. The age of Messier 37 is estimated to be between 400 and 550 million years, while its metallicity is at a level of 0.02–0.08.

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The recent James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) guide camera’s test image looks really similar to Hubble’s deep fields, which are my favorite. I decided to take a long exposure to the same target to see what my telescope can see and compare it to JWST’s image. I found one really faint galaxy 26–32 million light-years away, and a cute planetary nebula called Abell 39, pause and see if you can find it in my image.

- Scope: Celestron RASA 8.
- Mount: Ioptron cem40.
- Camera: ZWO ASI183mm pro.
- Guide scope: ZWO mini120mm.
- Guide Camera: ZWO ASI224mc.
- Filter: Astronomik MaxFR 12nm Ha filter.

NASA article: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/countdown-to-the-webb-telescopes-first-images.

More of my astrophotography work on Instagram.

Continue reading “The true size and power of James Webb Space Telescope’s new guide camera(FGS) deep field image. [8k]” | >

Astronomers from the University of Warwick reveal a new phenomenon dubbed the “rocking shadow” effect that describes how disks in forming planetary systems are oriented, and how they move around their host star. The effect also gives clues as to how they might evolve with time. Dr. Rebecca Nealon presented the new work this week at the 2022 National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Warwick.

Stars are born when a large cloud of gas and dust collapses in on itself. The leftover material that doesn’t make it into the star ends up circling around it, not unlike how water swirls around the drain before falling in. This swirling mass of gas and dust is called a , and it’s where planets like the Earth are born.

Protoplanetary disks are often thought to be shaped like dinner plates—thin, round and flat. However, recent telescope images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) show that this is not always the case. Some of the disks seen by ALMA have shadows on them, where the part of the disk closest to the star blocks some of the stellar light and casts a shadow onto the outer part of the disk. From this shadow pattern, it can be inferred that the inner part of the disk is oriented completely differently to the outer part, in what is called a broken disk.

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