April 17, 2012
You are a way for the cosmos to know itself, Carl Sagan once said. On your birthday, the cosmos got to know itself a little better.
Antares and Clouds
Birthday · April 17, 2012
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APOD published April 17, 2012. Credit: Ivan Eder. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Antares is a huge star. In a class called red supergiant, Antares is about 850 times the diameter of our own Sun, 15 times more massive, and 10,000 times brighter. Antares is the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius and one of the brighter stars in all the night sky. Located about 550 light years away, Antares is seen on the left surrounded by a yellowish nebula of gas which it has itself expelled. Radiation from Antares' blue stellar companion helps cause the nebular gas to glow. Far behind Antares, to the lower right in the above image, is the globular star cloud M4, while the bright star on the far right is Al Niyat.
Image credit: Ivan Eder