Door to the Otherworld

Ornamental Gas While this may look like a delicate bubble floating in space, it is actually the very energetic remains of a violent supernova explosion. The pinkish outer layer is an expanding shock wave, and the soft green and blue tint within is from material heated to millions of degrees and emitting X-rays. This is the supernova remnant known as SNR 0509-67.5, located some 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. From our perspective on Earth, the stellar explosion responsible for this orb happened 400 years ago. The glowing bubble is 23 light-years across and is expanding at a rate of 5,000 kilometers per second (11.2 million miles per hour). This image is a composite based on observations from two of NASA’a Great Observatories. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the rich star filed backdrop as well as the expanding shockwave. The Chandra X-ray Observatory details the searing material inside the expanding bubble. -JF Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.Hughes et al, Optical: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Source

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The Witch’s House in Beverly Hills, built in 1921. 

Ring of Fire NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was used to capture this image of galaxy NGC 1291 in infrared light. The face-on galaxy is located about 33 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus. It is a mature galaxy, at roughly 12 billion years old. The central region of the galaxy features a long bar of stars, appearing here as an S-shaped feature within the blue circle. Barred spiral galaxies are quite common, and those bars seem to have an influence on how galaxies evolve. The Spitzer image shows shorter wavelength infrared light in blue, and longer wavelengths in red. The inner reaches of the galaxy are populated by older stars that formed long ago. With most of the raw materials used up by earlier generations of stars, there is very little star formation taking place at the galaxy’s center. Further out in the galaxy, things are very different. There is a ring of material that is teeming with new stars. All this activity heats up the surrounding dust, setting a aglow in the longer infrared wavelengths, painting a ring of red around the blue circle. The central bar had a hand in fashioning both the old and the new stars in NGC 1291. In the early years of the galaxy, it stirred the pot, forcing stars and gas out of their orbits, herding material inward and creating resonances, or high-density areas, that collapsed to form new stars. Later in the evolution of the barred spiral, new star formation shifted outwards. Density increased along the spiral arms and the resonances created by the bar once again triggered a wave of stellar births. The Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G) is a program to analyze the structures of more than 3,000 nearby galaxies, to better understand the role that central bars play in galactic evolution. -JF Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Source

julian pls

Martha Hackett as Seska in Star Trek: Voyager

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(shamelessly copied from plaidshirtjimkirk)

For @tomparisalbum. Inspired by @hesitantbabelien using this

The transmitter briefly burst to life, sparked, hissed and then fell silent for good.