Hubble Captures Violent Birth Pangs of Enormous Star | Wired Science. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a young star undergoing violent birth. The star, named S106 IR, has a mass of about 15 times that of our sun and lies approximately 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Formed from a cloud of gas and dust with more than 25,000 times the sun’s mass, the star is just about to mature and settle down to what astronomers call the main sequence portion of its life, where it will glow steadily like our sun. But before it grows up, the star is releasing a fierce torrent of ultraviolet radiation, heating up the surrounding cloud to temperatures greater than 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes the hydrogen gas to glow blue.
The cooler, red dust lane in the center partially hides the star from view but it can still be seen shining near the lower part of the image. Most young stars blast tons of energy and dust, creating gigantic butterfly-wing lobes on their sides like the ones seen here. Image: NASA and ESA Video: NASA. Scientists Find a Pair of Supermassive Black Holes. They're huge. They're voracious. They're blacker than a panther on a moonless night. They're black holes, the mind-bending, space-warping cosmic objects with gravity so insanely powerful that even a beam of light that wanders too close will be sucked in, never to emerge.
Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted they might exist, but the great physicist himself doubted it would really happen. Einstein was wrong. But that's positively puny compared with the two new black holes, each about 330 million light-years away or so, just announced in the journal Nature. Loeb is referring to quasars — beacons of light so intensely bright they can be seen halfway across the universe. Back when the universe was young, there was plenty of gas floating around to feed these monsters. Such observations are technically difficult, so in one sense the latest black-hole discoveries are extraordinary. For the rest of us — well, they're just kind of awesome. Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time | Cosmic Variance. Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson at Montclair Kimberley Academy - 2010-Jan-29.
Astrobiology and Space Exploration Introduction. Neil deGrasse Tyson on life in the universe. Must Watch: An Out-of-Character Stephen Colbert Interviews Neil deGrasse Tyson.