Galactic Views (28)

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SPACE WATCH

Hubble Views Grand Star-Forming Region
NASA – This massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in the Milky Way Galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.

Many of the diamond-like icy blue stars are among the most massive stars known. Several of them are 100 times more massive than our sun. These hefty stars are destined to pop off, like a string of firecrackers, as supernovas in a few million years.

The image, taken in ultraviolet, visible and red light by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, spans about 100 light-years. The nebula is close enough to Earth that Hubble can resolve individual stars, giving astronomers important information about the stars’ birth and evolution.

The brilliant stars are carving deep cavities in the surrounding material by unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light, and hurricane-force stellar winds (streams of charged particles), which are etching away the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud in which the stars were born. The image reveals a fantasy landscape of pillars, ridges, and valleys, as well as a dark region in the center that roughly looks like the outline of a holiday tree. Besides sculpting the gaseous terrain, the brilliant stars can also help create a successive generation of offspring. When the winds hit dense walls of gas, they create shocks, which may be generating a new wave of star birth.

These observations were taken Oct. 20-27, 2009. The blue color is light from the hottest, most massive stars; the green from the glow of oxygen; the red from fluorescing hydrogen.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

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We’re Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction

By Ross Andersen – We have learned to worry about asteroids and supervolcanoes, but the more-likely scenario, according to Nick Bostrom, a professor of philosophy at Oxford, is that we humans will destroy ourselves.

Bostrom, who directs Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, has argued over the course of several papers that human extinction risks are poorly understood and, worse still, severely underestimated by society.

One way of making that argument is to say that we’ve survived for over 100 thousand years, so it seems prima facie unlikely that any natural existential risks would do us in here in the short term, in the next hundred years for instance. Whereas, by contrast we are going to introduce entirely new risk factors in this century through our technological innovations and we don’t have any track record of surviving those. more> http://tinyurl.com/7rdnqt5

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Quirks in jobless data could bite Obama

By Jason Lange – Several Wall Street economists believe the government is mismeasuring seasonal shifts in the labor market, and suggest the jobless rate’s sharp winter drop was partly an illusion.

If their research is on the mark, the unemployment rate could change little in the coming months as pay back, robbing the Obama campaign of what otherwise might have been steady progress in the lead up to the election.

“We think that the improvement over the last few months dramatically overstates the underlying improvement,” said Andrew Tilton, an economist at Goldman Sachs in New York.

“You will not see that rate of improvement going forward.” more> http://tinyurl.com/7pnmxw5

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iPad

Apple – Pick up the new iPad and suddenly, it’s clear. You’re actually touching your photos, reading a book, playing the piano. Nothing comes between you and what you love. To make that hands-on experience even better, we made the fundamental elements of iPad better — the display, the camera, the wireless connection. All of which makes the new, third-generation iPad capable of so much more than you ever imagined. more> http://tinyurl.com/ydmr3cj

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Republicans fear rough primary could cost them the House and the Senate

Image @Wikipedia

By Josh Lederman and Cameron Joseph – Republicans are worried the long, drawn-out presidential primary could cost them the House and the Senate.

For months, Republicans had been bullish about their prospects for widening their margin in the House and picking off Democratic senators. But some are now questioning whether they could be done in if Mitt Romney limps out of the primary a severely weakened nominee.

“You almost have a reliving of the Civil War going on in the Republican Party right now,” said Craig Smith, a speechwriter in the Ford and first Bush administrations. more> http://tinyurl.com/89b25lq

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