A morning filled with 400 billion suns...

"The sky calls to us: if we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. A still more glorious dawn awaits - not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise; a morning filled with 400 billion suns... the rising of the milky way." - Carl Sagan

The purpose of this blog is to meet the requirements of my Astronomy course at MTA... however, I can't help but feel that I'm going to enjoy this assignment more than just simply feeling compelled to blindly do work I don't like. The stars and their homes are a fascinating subject: every atom in our bodies was baked inside a star... how can that not be something worth studying and getting excited about? Astronomy and all of its coinciding fields are the next frontier: this is the science that stands the test of time. Continually, the more we learn about space, time and all of its intertwining factors... the closer we are to understanding ourselves better - aesthetically, philosophically, evolutionarily... you name it. 

As a beginning post, I'd like to start off with drawing attention to this article I read in www.sciencedaily.com, as seen [here]. The article talks about images snapped by the Hubble in 2005, and 2010. The images were meshed together to produce a composite view of the Carina Nebula. 

Stars inside and around the the nebula are shaping the huge clouds of frozen hydrogen and dust (pictured above), stretching their structures into massive columns and swathes. These pillars of dust are over a lightyear in height. As the columns are stretched and pushed into more dense portions, astronomers suspect that new stars may be beginning to form in their midst.

More universe updates soon! :)