STEM News: Cosmic Jack-o-lantern🎃

Just in time for Halloween! Hubble has spotted something that looks like a giant jack-o-lantern - with two bright eyes and a crooked smile dotted with blue stars. But what exactly is happening here? The orange hue of this cosmic pumpkin corresponds to the glow of the ageing red stars. The blue smile is made of newborn star clusters. The eyes? They are two galaxies - NGC 2292 and NGC 2293. The two galaxies are colliding, and the entire view is 109,000 light-years across! (Approximately the diameter of the Milky Way!). The giant "pumpkin" is a spectacular display of the early stages of a collision between two stars. This pair is 120 million miles away in the Canis Major constellation. This pumpkin, NASA predicts, will form a new spiral galaxy. “Sorry Charlie Brown, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is taking a peek at what might best be described as the “Greater Pumpkin,” that looks like a Halloween decoration tucked away in a patch of sky cluttered with stars,” wrote NASA on its website. NASA also spotted a giant 'bat' in the sky. Nicknamed the "Bat Shadow" by Hubble, this bat spans approximately 200 times the length of our solar system! Hubble had captured the shadow of a young sun-like star's (HBC 672) light blocked by a disk. It is surrounded by a debris ring of dust, rock and ice.

"This is an analogue of what the solar system looked like when it was only 1 or 2 million years old," explained Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland. "For all we know, the solar system once created a shadow like this."

"These shadows are not easily seen in visible light, but the stellar disks and the shadows they project onto the surrounding nebula can be easily detected in infrared light," said Max Mutchler, a research and instrument scientist at STScI. "This infrared Bat Shadow reveals properties of both the small, dusty disk and the much larger nebula." These images were released by NASA on Halloween. Indeed a feast for our eyes!