Wednesday, 24 October, 2018

The Spire Of The Eagle Nebula

Posted on Friday, 25 September, 2015Sunday, 20 August, 2017 by Zheluo Cai

Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, the billowing tower of gas and dust that rises from the stellar nursery known as the Spire in the Eagle Nebula or M16, is 57 trillion miles long (9.5 light-years or 91.7 trillion km), which is about twice the diameter of our solar system. The Nebula is in the Constellation Serpens (The Serpent), about 6,500 light-years from Earth.

Stars in the Eagle Nebula are born in clouds of cold hydrogen gas that reside in chaotic neighbourhoods, where energy from young stars sculpts fantasy-like landscapes in the gas. The Spire may be a giant incubator for those newborn stars. A torrent of ultraviolet light from a band of massive, hot, young stars off the top of the image is eroding the pillar. The starlight also is responsible for illuminating the tower’s rough surface. Ghostly streamers of gas can be seen boiling off this surface, creating the haze around the structure and highlighting its three-dimensional shape. The column is silhouetted against the background glow of more distant gas. Thick clouds of hydrogen gas and dust have survived longer than their surroundings in the face of a blast of ultraviolet light from the hot, young stars. Inside the gaseous tower, stars may be forming. The bumps and fingers of material in the centre of the tower are examples of these stellar birthing areas. These regions may look small but they are roughly the size of our solar system. The dominant colours in the image were produced by gas energized by the star cluster’s powerful ultraviolet light. The blue colour at the top is from glowing oxygen. The red colon in the lower region is from glowing hydrogen.

Credits: Hubble, 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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