Galactic & Beyond

Videos on all things galactic and beyond. Check out the News Galactic & Beyond page for the latest news.

Videos:

Carl Sagan Tribute - Milky Way Musings is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting scientific literacy, supporting funding for scientific research and providing creative and educational science programming that is accessible to everyone. Youtube videos of Carl Sagan's popular series Cosmos and other videos.

Voyage Through Space and Galaxies - Youtube video set to music of various images of space.

Planets, Stars and Galaxies - Size comparison of the planets, stars and galaxies on Youtube.

Planet OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb Discovery. Using a network of telescopes scattered across the globe, including the Danish 1.54m telescope at ESO La Silla (Chile), astronomers discovered a new extrasolar planet in 2005 significantly more Earth-like than any other planet found by that time. The planet, which is only about 5 times as massive as the Earth, circles its parent star in about 10 years. It is the least massive exoplanet around an ordinary star detected so far and also the coolest. The planet most certainly has a rocky/icy surface. Its discovery marks a groundbreaking result in the search for planets that support life.

Panning Across Omega Centauri. This video sequence shows many of the fine details in a new image of the great globular cluster Omega Centauri from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). The wide field of the telescope and its camera OmegaCAM allow the full scope of the object and its surroundings to be seen, but also imaged in exquisite quality.

Clearest View of the Orion Nebula. Hubble Minute discussing the location of the Orion Nebula, what we see within the star-formation region, and the effects of interstellar winds in shaping the nebula. The Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team captured over 3,000 stars of various ages, sizes, masses, and types.

The Hole in the Andromeda Galaxy. On August 25, 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope. Designed to peer into the infrared region of the spectrum, this instrument was designed to pierce the veil of dust and gas blocking visible light and look deeper into galaxies, where young stars are born. While imaging the Andromeda Galaxy, the Spitzer Space Telescope uncoverd a never-before-seen hole, the result of a collision with a nearby dwarf galaxy, in the Andromeda Galaxy.

NASA: Take a "Swift" Tour of the Andromeda Galaxy. NASA's Swift satellite has acquired the highest-resolution view of the neighboring spiral galaxy M31. Also known as the Andromeda Galaxy, M31 is the largest and closest such galaxy to our own. It's more than 220,000 light-years across and lies 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. Between May 25 and July 26, 2008, Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) acquired 330 images of M31 at wavelengths of 192.8, 224.6, and 260 nanometers. The images represent a total exposure time of 24 hours. Some 20,000 ultraviolet sources are visible in the image, including M32, a small galaxy in orbit around M31. Dense clusters of hot, young, blue stars sparkle in the disk beyond the galaxy's smooth, redder central bulge. Star clusters are especially plentiful along a ring about 150,000 light-years across.