Butterfly Nebula
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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the "butterfly wing"- shaped nebula, NGC 2346. The nebula is about 2,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros. It represents the spectacular "last gasp" of a binary star system at the nebula's center. At the center of the nebula lies a pair of stars that are so close together that they orbit around each other every 16 days. This is so close that, even with Hubble, the pair of stars cannot be seen as two separate components. Astronomers believe that one of the stars, when it evolved and expanded to become a red giant, actually swallowed its companion star in an act of stellar cannibalism. The resulting interaction led to a spiraling together of the two stars, culminating in ejection of the outer layers of the red giant. Most of the outer layers were ejected into a dense disk, which can still be seen in the Hubble image, surrounding the central star.
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Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources. - Ronald Reagan (b. 1911), U.S. Republican politician, president.
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Astronaut and moon-walker James Irwin's NASA name tag, coated with lunar dust, sold at auction for $310,500. The cloth keepsake, a 6- by 12-inch rectangle, was cut from the insulated jacket worn by Irwin during the 1971 flight of Apollo 15. Lunar dust, which created a dark gray tint around the tag's edges, became embedded into the tag during three separate moonwalks Irwin took. His jacket and other equipment were left on the Moon to lighten the spacecraft's load on the return trip home, but Irwin cut out and kept his NASA tag as a memento.Word of the Day
transuranic
Pronunciation: /trans-yoo-RAN-ik/
adj : of or designating those elements having atomic numbers higher than that of uranium
"Plutonium and other transuranic elements may seal the fate of the human race."
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