Aug 16
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Jul 09
We may think our Sun is impressive, but it pales in significance when compared to the red supergiant Antares which burns more than 600 light years away.
In this stunning image Antares glows orange and is surrounded by reflected bright yellow gas and dust. It is considered a bruiser in the Milky Way, with a diameter 800 times that of our Sun and a luminosity which is 10,000 times brighter.
Antarres is the crowning star in the Rho Ophiuchus Nebulae Complex, considered by many astro-photographers to be the most beautiful area of the night sky.
The complex features stunning nebulae, which are huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust. A yellow reflection nebula surrounds Antares and the red areas of this image are created by hydrogen gas in red nebulae emitting light.
To the left of the picture a sensational blue reflection nebula surrounds the Rho Ophiuchi triple star and is a result of interstellar dust that is illuminated by nearby stars.
It also contains dark nebulae in strange murky shapes such as the ‘pipe nebula,’ which appears upside down to the left of Antares, and the ‘Dark River’ that flows down towards the bottom of the picture. Made up of hydrogen gas and thick dust clouds they hide background stars from view.
Jun 12
- 15 January 2009 by Marcus Chown
- Magazine issue 2691. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn’t look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres.
For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.
For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.
