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Celestial Fireworks: Into Star Cluster Westerlund 2

What if you could go directly to a cluster where the stars are forming? This animation was done with 3D computer modeling of the region around the star cluster Westerlund 2, based on Hubble Space Telescope images in visible and infrared light. Westerlund 2 covers about 10 light-years and is about 20 thousand light years distant towards the constellation Keel of the ship (Carina). As the illustrative animation begins, the larger Gum 29 nebula fills the screen with the young group of bright stars visible in the center. Stars pass your finger as you approach the cluster. Soon, your imaginary vessel rotates and you pass over the interstellar gas and dust pillars during the light year. Strong winds and radiations from young, massive stars destroy all but the densest clumps of dust, leaving these pillars in their shadows - many pointing back to the center of the cluster. Lastly, you move to the top of the set of stars and search hundreds of the most gigantic stars known.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, J. Anderson et al. (STScI); Acknowledgment: The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), the Westerlund 2 Science Team, and the ES

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Hubble Sees Possible Runaway Black Hole Creating a Trail of Stars

There's an invisible monster on the loose, barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy. It's likely the result of a rare, bizarre game of galactic billiards among three massive black holes.

The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy. There is a remarkably bright knot of ionized oxygen at the outermost tip of the column. Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole. "Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known," said van Dokkum.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole.

Credit: NASA

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october by OneEyedJax on Flickr.