Watch “Why the Universe is quite disappointing, really – Episode 4” on YouTube

Episode 4, in which I show that spiral galaxies are very grubby – they contain huge amounts of dust. And not only galaxies – astronomical dust is everywhere we look. The Universe may be big, but it sure is dirty..

Follow @telescoper

Andromeda in High Resolution

This afternoon I gave three hours of lectures on the trot, so I’m now feeling more than a little knackered. Before I head home for an early night, though, I thought I’d share this amazing video produced by the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Survey (or PHAT, for short), which is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Multi-cycle program to map roughly a third of the star-forming disk of the Andromeda Nebula (M31), using 6 filters covering from the ultraviolet through the near infrared. With HST’s resolution and sensitivity, the disk of M31 is resolved into more than 100 million stars. The combination of scale and detail is simply jaw-dropping. Hat’s off to the PHAT team!

Follow @telescoper

Herschel Views Andromeda (via The Herschel Space Observatory)

An amazing composite image of M31 in Andromeda using both infra-red and X-rays was recently obtained using Herschel and XMM space observatories. It featured in the BBC Stargazing Live programme earlier this week and I’m told that, typically for astronomy, the inspiration behind it was … beer.

We've been sitting on this image since just before Christmas so that it could be unveiled during the BBC Stargazing Live show last night, but I've been aching to get this onto the blog ever since I saw it. This is a Herschel image of our nearest neighbour galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, also known as M31, along with comparison images at other wavelengths. [/captio … Read More

via The Herschel Space Observatory