Pillars of Creation: Womb of Stars

NASA has released an image this week to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 100,000 orbit. This nebula, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope on August 10, is about 170,000 light-years away.

“The image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head ‘pillars of creation,’ and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation. The region is on the edge of a dark molecular cloud that is an incubator for the birth of new stars. The high-energy radiation blazing out from clusters of hot young stars is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away. Another young cluster may be hidden beneath a circle of brilliant blue gas. In this approximately 100-light-year-wide fantasy-like landscape, dark towers of dust rise above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the molecular cloud. The seahorse-shaped pillar at lower, right is approximately 20 light-years long, roughly four times the distance between our sun and the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. The region is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. It is a fascinating laboratory for observing star-formation regions and their evolution. Dwarf galaxies like the Large Magellanic Cloud are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies.”

You might also want to check out the The First Universe of Galaxies Map.

Wicked Coming to Big Screen

The popular and totally wicked Broadway musical Wicked is moving on to big screen, following other successful musicals such as Chicago, Hairspray and Mama Mia!

According to Paybill News, this new production will be handled by Marc Platt Productions for Universal Pictures: “Universal Pictures production president Donna Langley told the industry paper, “Our goal now is absolutely to make the Wicked film, but much like Judy Craymer wouldn’t give up screen rights to Mamma Mia! until the stage show had reached its pinnacle, Marc and Stephen Schwartz are very mindful of the right timing. But we’re dying to do it.”

Below is the clip Defying Gravity from the musical by the London cast. Just to remind you how amazing the musical is:

The New Extraterrestrial Design by Zaha Hadid

What you are looking at is the new design for the new Cultural Centre and Opera House in Dubai by Zaha Hadid.

It is said that; “The design calls for an exciting new cultural centre in the new Seven Pearls district of Dubai. This landmark development will accommodate an opera house, playhouse, arts gallery, performing arts school and themed hotel on an island in Dubai Creek just off the mainland part of the district. All of these facilities will be state of the art to host world class performances and exhibitions. The opera house will have a seating capacity of 2,500 while the playhouse will have a seating capacity of 800.”

To read more about the dune-shaped building proposed for an island off Dubai Creek, go here.

The First Universe of Galaxies Map

Remember the spacecraft GALEX (which means Galaxy Evolution Explorer) that was sent to space with the mission of observing galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history through an incorporated telescope on April 28th of 2003? It’s now officially been traveling the space and sending information back to Earth for five years.

“GALEX’s ultraviolet observations are telling the scientists how galaxies, the building block of our Universe, evolve and change. GALEX observations are providing data for NASA’s investigators to find out when and how the stars that we see today were formed and which chemical elements are the galaxies made off.”

Now GALEX has already observed more than 100 million galaxies. The first comprehensive map of the Universe of galaxies is now ready for construction, helping us understand how galaxies like our own Milky Way were formed.

“In effect, GALEX acts like a time machine through which humans see the universe as it was a few billion years after its birth because it observes places so far away that the light reaching GALEX, even traveling at 299.792.458 meters per second is still the same as billions of years before.”

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