This is probably the most humbling & awe-inspiring image of the #Universe I know.

It's an infrared image by the #Spitzer #Space #telescope, as wide as the full moon.

The dots aren't stars.
They're galaxies.
Each dot is 100s of Billions of stars.(1/n)

@Todd_Scheve #astronomy The image is part of the S-CANDELS programme, which observed parts of the sky very deeply (50 hours each pointing) with the Spitzer IRAC camera.

The goal was to obtain very sensitive infrared data for very distant #galaxies. See for details:

ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/link_gateway/2… (2/n)

Why do we know #Betelgeuse may go #Supernova within the next few 100000 years, but most likely not soon? And why are we sure the Sun will be a safe star for Billions of years?

A brief primer #thread to Stellar Evolution. 1/

Sun: SDO. Betelgeuse: ESO/ALMA
#astronomy #Space First thing to know is: stars are not all alike. They are big, small, bright, dim, have different colors and die different deaths. The quantity at the root of their diversity is their MASS. Stars have masses between roughly 0.1 & 100 times the Sun’s mass. Large ones are rare.2/