2023 February 22

Our Increasingly Active Sun Image Credit & Copyright: Mehmet Ergün

Explanation: Our Sun is becoming a busy place. Only two years ago, the Sun was emerging from a solar minimum so quiet that months would go by without even a single sunspot. In contrast, already this year and well ahead of schedule, our Sun is unusually active, already nearing solar activity levels seen a decade ago during the last solar maximum. Our increasingly active Sun was captured two weeks ago sporting numerous interesting features. The image was recorded in a single color of light called Hydrogen Alpha, color-inverted, and false colored. Spicules carpet much of the Sun’s face. The brightening towards the Sun’s edges is caused by increased absorption of relatively cool solar gas and called limb darkening. Just outside the Sun’s disk, several scintillating prominences protrude, while prominences on the Sun’s face are known as filaments and show as light streaks. Magnetically tangled active regions are both dark and light and contain cool sunspots. As our Sun’s magnetic field winds toward solar maximum over the next few years, whether the Sun’s high activity will continue to increase is unknown.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230222.html

Corona Australis

Nebula is mostly hydrogen gas, and a small amount of metals (elements above helium) which tend to be covered as "Dust", but it's the dust that best reflect the light of the stars, and as the largest and most energetic of them are blue, you get these areas of blue haze. Hydrogen more often glows red when bombarded by UV light, the two colours together quite magical.

The area has a number of NGC objects 6726,6727,6729 but born of the same huge molecular cloud.

Our Milky Way has many such areas full of star birth, and as blue giants are not long lived, supernova and star death too.

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The Milky Way and its red nebulae hanging over the Isaac Newton Telescope at La Palma // Jakob Sahner

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“Drifting” by | André Brandt

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NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this look of high altitude haze forming above cyclones. At the time the image was taken, Juno was about 5,095 miles above Jupiter’s cloud tops 🛰

L1527 IRS - Protostar

Stars form when bodies of dust and gas create enough mass to create a gravitational effect that's able to then pull in more gas, the process continues and the mass increases until the pressure at the centre is sufficient for fusion to begin.

There's many examples of protostars, in fact back in 2012, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope focused in on L1527 IRS, believed at the time to be the youngest forming star ever found.

Recently, the JWST re-visited this protostar, and the title image was the result.

The forming star cannot be visually spotted, but is thought to be around 20-40% the mass of our own Sun already.

If you look closely, you can see there's a dark patch in the centre, this is actually the accretion disk around the newly formed star, what is left over after the formation, may go on to form the planets, in fact, they may be actually starting to be created already, as recent evidence does point to planets being born around the same time as the star does in many cases.

The protostar is only 450 light years from Earth in the Constellation of Taurus, and is thought to be around 100,000 years old, a blink of an eye in the life of a star, particularly of this mass.

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q stars nebula JWST star formation protostars

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