Wednesday, 24 October, 2018

Minkowski 2-9

Posted on Friday, 21 November, 2014Sunday, 20 August, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

Minkowski 2-9, abbreviated M2-9, and also known as Minkowski’s Butterfly or just Butterfly Nebula, was discovered by Rudolph Minkowski in 1947. It has an apparent visual magnitude of 14.7 and is located about 2,100 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer.

M2-9 represents the spectacular “last gasp” of a binary star system at the nebula’s center. The expelled envelope of the dying star breaks out from the disk creating the bipolar appearance. The central stars are known to be a very close pair which orbit one another at perilously close distances. It is even possible that one star is being engulfed by the other. The gravity of one pulls off weakly bound gas from the surface of the other, and flings it into a thin, dense disk which surrounds both stars and extends well into space, measuring approximately 10 times the diameter of Pluto’s orbit.

Because of the nebula’s shape and the measured velocity of the gas, in excess of 200 miles per second (approx. 322 kilometres per second), astronomers believe that the description as a supersonic jet exhaust is quite apt. Ground-based studies have shown that the nebula’s size increases with time, suggesting that the stellar outburst that formed the lobes occurred just 1,200 years ago. In this image, neutral oxygen is shown in red, once-ionized nitrogen in green, and twice-ionized oxygen in blue.

Credits: Astro Washington Edu., Hubble, NASA, SOFIA, Wikipedia.

Tajik is a general designation for a wide range of native Persian-speaking people of Iranian origin, with current traditional homelands in present-day Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Not all Tajiks speak a variety of modern Persian. They may speak any one of the extant Iranian languages. For example, the Tajiks of China are actually Pamiris and speak the Eastern Iranian Pamiri languages and are distinct from more western Tajiks. They are concentrated in the Oxus Basin, the Farḡāna valley (Tajikistan and parts of Uzbekistan) and on both banks of the upper Oxus, i.e., the Pamir Mountains (Mountain Badaḵšān, in Tajikistan) and northeastern Afghanistan and western Afghanistan (Badaḵšān, Kābol, Herat, Balkh, Mazar-i-Sharif, Ghazni and other urban regions). Historically, the Tajiks were initially agriculturalists but urbanized rather early in ancient times as indicated by their role in the history of what later became Greater Khorasan. Several surviving ancient urban centres of the Tajik people include Herat, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khujand, and Kabul.

Valles Marineris: The Grand Canyon of Mars.
Credit: Viking Project, USGS, NASA. The largest canyon in the Solar System cuts a wide swath across the face of Mars. Named Valles Marineris, the grand valley extends over 3,000 kilometres long, spans as much as 600 kilometres across, and delves as much as 8 kilometres deep. By comparison, the Earth's Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA is 800 kilometres long, 30 kilometres across, and 1.8 kilometres deep. The origin of the Valles Marineris remains unknown, although a leading hypothesis holds that it started as a crack billions of years ago as the planet cooled. Several geologic processes have been identified in the canyon. The above mosaic was created from over 100 images of Mars taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s.

The current flag of Myanmar was adopted on 21 October 2010. The new flag was introduced along with implementing changes to the country's name, which were laid out in the 2008 Constitution. The design of the flag has three horizontal stripes of yellow, green and red with a five-pointed white star in the middle. The three colours of the stripes are meant to symbolise solidarity, peace and tranquility, and courage and decisiveness. The white star that symbolised the Union of Burma.

The Elgin Marbles are a collection of Classical Greek marble sculptures made under the supervision of Phidias and his assistants in c. 447 to 438 BC; originally part of the temple of the Parthenon. From 1801 to 1812, agents of Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin removed about half of the surviving sculptures and transported them to Britain. The half not removed is now displayed in the Acropolis Museum. In Britain, the acquisition of the collection was not supported by some, and the Earl's actions was likened to vandalism. Following a public debate in Parliament and its subsequent exoneration of Elgin, he sold the Marbles to the British government in 1816. They were then passed to the British Museum, where they are now on display in the purpose-built Duveen Gallery.

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