Dragonfish Star Cluster

The Dragonfish star cluster is a group of very massive stars that are embedded in a thin bubble of gas from which they formed. This cluster was recently discovered using the Spitzer Space Telescope, and further studied using the New Technology Telescope in Chile. It's name comes from the fact that the shell of gas (bottom middle) resembles the snarling mouth of a dragonfish. This cluster is made up of many massive stars, some of which may even be 100x the size of our sun! The region around the fishes eye (bright star in the middle) contains more gas and could still be forming stars. Stars this massive don't live very long, so it's likely that star formation in this region won't last very long, as a supernova explosion could blow away most of the material in the next few million years!

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GLIMPSE Team/Mubdi Rahman

Voyager Golden Records

Voyager Golden Record (left) and the case it's contained in (right)

In 1977, NASA launched a pair of telescopes called the Voyager Space Telescopes. They were designed to travel to the edges of our solar system and beyond, and send back as much information as possible along the way. Since astronomers knew that these telescopes would be leaving the solar system, they wanted to have something on board signifying the telescopes origins, just in case they were picked up by an alien species some day! So onboard these telescopes are two gold plated records called the Voyager Golden Records. The records contain greetings from Earth in many languages, images of various places, and different iconic sounds. Directions on how to build and use a record player are etched on the case that holds to records. The star like symbol shows some of the nearest and brightest stars to Earth. This was placed there to help any alien species pinpoint Earth's location in space. The Voyager Spacecrafts are just now leaving the solar system and have a long way to go before they reach another planetary system.  If you'd like to see some of their content, check out this website: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/voyager-to-stars/

Itty Bitty Planetary System

Astronomers are working very hard to confirm the existence of potential exoplanets identified by the Kepler space telescope. One such confirmation was made recently, and it's the "smallest" one yet!

 

KOI-961 is a red dwarf star. This means that it still has fusion in its core, but it's much smaller than the sun. In fact, it's only 13% the mass of the sun, and is slightly larger than Jupiter in size! The image above shows KOI-961 and its three planets (to scale) next to Jupiter and four of its moons for a comparison of size. KOI-961 was not originally identified by Kepler as having an exoplanetary system. Astronomers from CalTech looked at the public data released by Kepler, and saw something suspicious in the light curve. They observed this star using both the Palomar Observatory and Keck Observatory, and their results confirmed the existence of a 3 planet system! The planets masses are unknown, but their sizes are ~0.57, 0.73 and 0.78 Earth radii. This suggests that they are rocky planets similar in size to Mars. Planets 1 and 2 are too close to the star to harvest life, but planet 3 is just on the inner edge of the habitable zone! Much more work is needed before we can truly speculate the existence of life on this planet, but the more discoveries we make, the better chance we have of finding a planet just like Earth!

Image Credit: CalTech