Wednesday, 24 October, 2018

The Prawn Nebula

Posted on Friday, 18 September, 2015Sunday, 20 August, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

Prawn Nebula or IC 4628 is an emission nebula located around 6000 light-years from Earth, south of the star Antares, in the tail of the nebula-rich constellation Scorpius (The Scorpion). The Prawn Nebula was discovered by the American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard around 1900. The nebula is also cataloged as Gum 56 for Australian astronomer Colin Stanley Gum.

IC 4628 has an apparent magnitude of 7.31, with a stellar nursery that contains a large number of very hot, luminous, young stars, formed out of the surrounding gas. These stars include two large, hot, blue-white giants belonging to the rare spectral class O. O-type stars have a relatively short life span as they tend to burn out very quickly before ending their lives in supernova explosions and collapsing into either neutron stars or black holes. The blue giants in IC 4628 will end their lives after only about a million years. The material produced by their supernova explosions will be used to form new stars in the nebula. The two luminous giants and other young stars in the nebula are responsible for illuminating the surrounding gas. The stars emit an enormous amount of ultraviolet radiation which ionises the hydrogen gas in the nebula, making it glow, dominated by the red emission of hydrogen. The region shown is about 250 light-years across, spanning an area equivalent to four full moons.

Credits: Astronomy, NASA, Space.

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.

Planetary Nebula NGC 2438.
Image Credit & Copyright: Daniel López, IAC. NGC 2438 is a planetary nebula, the gaseous shroud cast off by a dying sunlike star billions of years old whose central reservoir of hydrogen fuel has been exhausted. About 3,000 light-years distant, it lies within the boundaries of the nautical constellation Puppis. This image of NGC 2438 highlights a halo of glowing atomic gas over 4.5 light-years across, extending beyond the nebula's brighter inner ring. Similar haloes have been found in deep images of other planetary nebulae, produced during the earlier active phases of their ageing central stars.

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.

Bible verses brought to you by bVerse Convert and BibleGateway.com