ESA XMM-Newton Telescope Captures Space Bubble
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
The European Space Agency (ESA) has released an image of the cauldron bubble as seen by its XMM-Newton space telescope.
The cauldron bubble lies 5,000 light-years away from Earth, and is a bubble bursting with the fiery stellar wind of a star.
Sitting in the constellation of Canis Major, the bubble spans nearly 60 light-years across and was blown by the stellar wind of the Wolf Rayet star HD 50896.
This pink star is near the center of the image that makes up one of the object’s piercing eyes.
Wolf-Rayet bubbles are the result of a hot, massive star that expels material through a strong stellar wind. This star’s howling wind is a million-degree plasma that emits X-rays, which in the image shows up blue.
The green halo seen in the image is a result of a shock wave racing out from the star and colliding with layers of stellar material that has already been ejected into space.
An X-ray emission blow out found at the top left of the image gives the wolf an ear, and a denser region to the bottom right can be likened to a snout, according to the space agency’s description.
ESA said that eventually the bubble will burst and disperse into the surrounding environment, while the star will end its life in a dramatic supernova explosion.
The paper entitled “X-Ray Emission from the Wolf-Rayet Bubble S 308″ and written by J. Toala et al was published in the Astrophysical Journal.
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2012-10-29 14:20:56
Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112721999/space-bubble-esa-telescope-102912/
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We are about to be completely engulfed by an interstellar bubble of hot denser plasma. The stiff plasma “wind” in this new bubble will blow off the earth’s magnetosphere and upper atmosphere exposing us to a lot more radiation from interstellar space. The new, turbulent bubble has already caused extensive,visible changes in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn. This new bubble is full of much more solid debris(comets and asteroids) wildly flying willy nilly. The sun is now being pummelted by asteroids crashing into the photosphere ,kicking up CMEs and uncovering flares spewing out fast moving protons toward the earth. The sun in much more brilliant than in 1974 and a higher density of photons/sq.cm hit the earth’s surface and oceans now, thus heating the earth’s surface from beneath as well as above, thus melting the polar ice caps,giving us the Fabled Northwest Passage long sought for.The whole solar system space containing the planets is also lit up more like a big fluorescent bulb or tube, which adds to the brighter sky in this Century. Something is perturbing the earth gravitationally, thus causing more tidal friction in the earth’s mantle thus heating the ocean floors.Of course more earthquakes are now taking place as a result.