Sudev Gandhi

This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Afer all I'm also Saggy only and equally handsome ;). Eighteenth century cosmic toyurist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8, while modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as an active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in direction of the center of our Milky Way. Courtesy : http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

Astronomers are baffled after finding an exotic type of star called a pulsar apparently locked in an elongated orbit around a star much like the sun -- an arrangement defying what had been known about such objects. The rapidly spinning pulsar -- an extraordinarily dense object created when a massive star exploded as a supernova -- is called J1903+0327 and is located about 21,000 light years from Earth, the astronomers said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year." The big question is -- how in the heck did this thing form, because it doesn't follow our standard models of how these things form," astronomer Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. This object is known as a millisecond pulsar because of its speedy whirl -- it spins on its axis 465 times per second. Until now, all of the ones found orbiting with another star have been doing so with a ...