* Astronomy

360°x45° panorama with constellations

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Virtual Reality All-Sky Panorama
(requires Java)

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All-Sky Milky Way Panorama 2.0
Between October 2007 and August 2009, a new digital all-sky mosaic image was assembled from more than 3000 individual CCD frames. Using an SBIG STL-11000 camera, 70 fields (each covering 40° × 27°) were imaged from dark-sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan.

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Monster supernovae may explain galaxy's mystery haze
What is causing a mysterious "haze" of radiation at the centre of the Milky Way? It may be a load of monster supernovae kicking out radiation which is then amplified by magnetic stellar winds and turbulence near the galaxy's core.
In 2003, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe found a patch of particularly energetic microwave radiation in the centre of our galaxy - dubbed the "WMAP haze". It was proposed that this could be caused by collisions of a new type of dark-matter particle.

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Herschel views deep-space pearls on a cosmic string

Herschel has delivered spectacular vistas of cold gas clouds lying near the plane of the Milky Way, revealing intense, unexpected activity. The dark, cool region is dotted with stellar factories, like pearls on a cosmic string.
On 3 September, The Herschel Space Observatory aimed its telescope at a reservoir of cold gas in the constellation of the Southern Cross near the Galactic Plane. As the telescope scanned the sky, the spacecraft's Spectral and Photometric Imaging REceiver, SPIRE, and Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer, PACS instruments snapped the pictures. The region is located about 60° from the Galactic Centre, thousands of light-years from Earth.
The five original infrared wavelengths have been colour-coded to allow scientists to differentiate extremely cold material (red) from the surrounding, slightly warmer stuff (blue).

The images reveal structure in cold material in our Galaxy, as we have never seen it before, and even before a detailed analysis, scientists have gleaned information on the quantity of the material, its mass, temperature, composition and whether it is collapsing to form new stars. 

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Title: Tidal Imprints Of A Dark Sub-Halo On The Outskirts Of The Milky Way
Authors: Sukanya Chakrabarti, Leo Blitz
(Version v2)

We present a new analysis of the observed perturbations of the HI disk of the Milky Way to infer the existence of a dark sub-halo that tidally interacted with the Milky Way disk. We examine tidal interactions between perturbing dark sub-halos and the gas disk of the Milky Way using high resolution Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. We compare our results to the observed HI map of the Milky Way to find that the Fourier amplitudes of the planar disturbances are best-fit by a perturbing dark sub-halo with a mass that is one-hundredth of the Milky Way with a pericentric distance of 5 kpc. This best-fit to the Fourier modes occurs about a dynamical time after pericentric approach, when the perturber is 90 kpc from the galactic center. Our analysis here represents a new method to indirectly characterise dark sub-halos from the tidal gravitational imprints they leave on the gaseous disks of galaxies. We also elucidate a fundamental property of parabolic orbits. We show that under certain conditions, one can break the degeneracy between the mass of the perturber and the pericentric distance in the evaluation of the tidal force -- to directly determine the mass of the dark perturber that produced the observed disturbances.

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Kiwi Discovered in Outer Space

An astrophotographer has discovered a Kiwi in outer space from New Zealand's internationally renowned Mt John Observatory.
It may be 26,000 light years away, but a high powered astro-photograph has picked up the distinct image of New Zealand's national icon in the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy.
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'Giga Galaxy Zoom' offers tour of Milky Way
The name is already taken, but "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" might be a fitting title for a new interactive view of the Milky Way unveiled this week by the European Southern Observatory.
The 800-million-pixel panorama shows an edge-on view of the plane of our galaxy, complete with points of interests such as the 12-billion-year-old, star-packed globular cluster Omega Centauri and the beautiful, reddish Rosette Nebula.

Source

www.gigagalaxyzoom.org