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I blogged a few months ago about an art exhibit, which I saw here in Bristol, about the Sun and magnetic fields. You can see what I thought of them here. Well (via Phil Plait) it seems they have now uploaded those films onto the web, so I urge you to pop over and have a watch of them. The two films are both innovative, interesting and most of all educating. They’re called Brilliant Noise and Magnetic Movie and they are really worth watching.

NASA have just announced that the Chandra X-ray observatory has found the youngest supernova remnant known in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The supernova, that created it, occurred about 140 years ago but wouldn’t have been observed from Earth due to it being close to the heart of the Milky Way. Here the light from the supernova would have been blocked by thick, dense clouds of gas and dust meaning that it would appear ‘about a trillion times fainter, in optical light, than an unobscured supernova.’

Astronomers have been searching for these young supernova remnants for several years as supernova formation rates suggest that there should be several around. This new discovery will help astronomers refine models for the rate of formation of supernova and also give us an insight into what happens immediately after these violent events occur. You can read the full press release on the Chandra website here.

Above: A composite image of radio and X-ray images of the newly found supernova
(Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.); Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA/Cambridge/D.Green et al.))

For a long time the beautiful colliding galaxies known as the ‘Antennae Galaxies’, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, (pictured above) have thought to have been somewhat unusual, a bit abnormal if you will. That’s because astronomers had thought they were between 65 to 100 million light years away. In order for them to be this distant, astronomers reasoned, their current appearance could only be explained by several strange intrinsic properties. To understand why they appeared this way, astronomers argued that they must be undergoing tremendous star formation, with super-massive clusters of stars and even hidden bright X-ray sources. But now new observations from Hubble seem to suggest that we don’t need all these unusual attributes to describe this intriguing merger.

Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 have found that actually the Antennae Galaxies are closer than we thought. By observing red giant stars in the tidal tails of the colliding galaxies, the astronomers found that they are in fact about 45 million light years away. The red giant stars nearing the end of their life are good for measuring distances to galaxies; as, at certain points in their life, they have a known brightness which can make them good ’standard candles’ or distance markers. So we now know that this beautiful merging swirl confirms to our models of galaxy evolution and is in fact how we expect a galaxy merger at this distance to look.

You can read the full story here.

Top image: The Antennae Galaxies by Hubble. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration. Acknowledgement: B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute) and James Long (ESA/Hubble).

Lower image: The tidal tail where the red giant stars were studied. Credit: NASA, ESA & Ivo Saviane (European Southern Observatory)

Well today is day two of the National Astronomy Meeting. I’m going to be posting any future NAM news I have on the NAMblog so be sure to check there for the latest NAM news. Today has kicked off with some great plenary session lectures on the acceleration of the Universe and the dynamic nature of the magnetic fields on the surface of the Sun. Chris and I have posted two takes on Dr Brian Schmidt’s ‘Measuring cosmic acceleration’ talk, why not take a look.