mick laBriola

Resting near the centre of the northerly constellation Cepheus, high in the northern sky, is the barred spiral galaxy UGC 11861, the subject of the latest Hubble Picture of the Week.

UGC 11861 is located 69 million light-years away from Earth — which may seem a vast distance, but it’s just right for Hubble to grab this majestic shot of the galaxy’s spiral arms and the short but brightly glowing bar in its centre. Among the cloudy gases and the dark wisps of dust, this galaxy is actively forming new stars, visible in the glowing blue patches in its outer arms.

This activity has resulted in three supernova explosions being spotted in and nearby UGC 11861, in 1995, 1997 and 2011. The earlier two were both Type II supernovae, a kind which results from the collapse of a massive starat the end of its life. This Hubble image was made from data collected to study Type II supernovae and their environments.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy with two broad spiral arms wrapping around a large central region, which has a glowing white bar in the very centre. Thin strands of dark dust lie over much of the galaxy. The arms have small and large patches of glowing blue light, emitted by new stars. The galaxy is on a dark background. In the foreground, bright stars with four points are dotted around.]

Peter Edward “Ginger” Baker (19 August 1939 – 6 October 2019) was an English drummer. His work in the 1960s and 1970s earned him the reputation of “rock’s first superstar drummer”, for a style that melded jazz and African rhythms and pioneered both jazz fusion and world music.

Baker gained early fame as a member of Blues Incorporated and the Graham Bond Organisation, both times alongside bassist Jack Bruce, with whom Baker would often clash. In 1966, Baker and Bruce joined guitarist Eric Clapton to form Cream, which achieved worldwide success but lasted only until 1968, in part due to Baker’s and Bruce’s volatile relationship. After working with Clapton in the short-lived band Blind Faith and leading Ginger Baker’s Air Force, Baker spent several years in the 1970s living and recording in Africa, often with Fela Kuti, in pursuit of his long-time interest in African music. Among Baker’s other collaborations are his work with Gary Moore, Masters of Reality, Public Image Ltd, Hawkwind, Atomic Rooster, Bill Laswell, jazz bassist Charlie Haden, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, and Ginger Baker’s Energy.

Baker’s drumming is regarded for its style, showmanship, and use of two bass drumsinstead of the conventional single one, after the manner of the jazz drummer Louie Bellson. In his early days, he performed lengthy drum solos, most notably in the Cream song “Toad“, one of the earliest recorded examples in rock music. Baker was an inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Cream in 1993, of the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 2008, and of the Classic Drummer Hall of Fame in 2016.^[5] Baker was noted for his eccentric, often self-destructive lifestyle, and he struggled with heroin addiction for many decades. He was married four times and fathered three children.

A single exposure made with a camera pointed almost due north on August 12 recorded this bright Perseid meteor in the night sky west of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. The meteor’s incandescent trace is fleeting. It appears to cross the stars of the Big Dipper, famous northern asterism and celestial kitchen utensil, while shimmering curtains of aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, dance in the night. Doubling the wow factor for night skywatchers near the peak of this year’s Perseid meteor shower auroral activity on planet Earth was enhanced by geomagnetic storms. The intense space weather was triggered by flares from an active Sun.

Antonio Salieri (18 August 1750 – 7 May 1825) was an Italian composer and teacher of the classical period. He was born in Legnago, south of Verona, in the Republic of Venice, and spent his adult life and career as a subject of the Habsburg monarchy.

Salieri was a pivotal figure in the development of late 18th-century opera. As a student of Florian Leopold Gassmann, and a protégé of Christoph Willibald Gluck, Salieri was a cosmopolitan composer who wrote operas in three languages. Salieri helped to develop and shape many of the features of operatic compositional vocabulary, and his music was a powerful influence on contemporary composers.

Appointed the director of the Italian opera by the Habsburg court, a post he held from 1774 until 1792, Salieri dominated Italian-language opera in Vienna. During his career, he also spent time writing works for opera houses in Paris, Rome, and Venice, and his dramatic works were widely performed throughout Europe during his lifetime. As the Austrian imperial Kapellmeisterfrom 1788 to 1824, he was responsible for music at the court chapel and attached school. Even as his works dropped from performance, and he wrote no new operas after 1804, he still remained one of the most important and sought-after teachers of his generation, and his influence was felt in every aspect of Vienna’s musical life. Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Ludwig van Beethoven, Anton Eberl, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart were among the most famous of his pupils.

Salieri’s music slowly disappeared from the repertoire between 1800 and 1868 and was rarely heard after that period until the revival of his fame in the late 20th century. This revival was due to the fictionalized depiction of Salieri in Peter Shaffer‘s play Amadeus (1979) and its 1984 film version. The death of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1791 at the age of 35 was followed by rumors that he and Salieri had been bitter rivals, and that Salieri had poisoned the younger composer; however, this has been proven untrue because the symptoms displayed by Mozart’s illness did not indicate poisoning and it is likely that they were, at least, mutually respectful peers. Despite denying the allegation, Salieri was greatly affected by the accusations and widespread public belief that he had contributed to Mozart’s death, which contributed to his nervous breakdowns in later life.

An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to discover gravitationally bound star clusters when the Universe was 460 million years old. 13bly. This is the first discovery of star clusters in an infant galaxy less than 500 million years after the Big bang. Young galaxies in the early Universe underwent significant burst phases of star formation, generating substantial amounts of ionising radiation. However, because of their cosmological distances, direct studies of their stellar content have proven challenging. Using Webb, an international team of astronomers have now detected five young massive star clusters in the Cosmic Gems arc (SPT0615-JD1), a strongly-lensed galaxy emitting light when the Universe was roughly 460 million years old, looking back across 97% of cosmic time. The Cosmic Gems arc was initially discovered in NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images obtained by the RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey) programme of the lensing galaxy cluster SPT-CL J0615−5746.  With Webb, the science team can now see where stars formed and how they are distributed, in a similar way to how the Hubble Space Telescope is used to study local galaxies. Webb’s view provides a unique opportunity to study star formation and the inner workings of infant galaxies at such an unprecedented distance.  [Image description: A field of galaxies on the black background of space. In the middle is a collection of dozens of yellowish galaxies that form a foreground galaxy cluster. Among them are distorted linear features, which mostly appear to follow invisible concentric circles curving around the centre of the image. The linear features are created when the light of a background galaxy is bent and magnified through gravitational lensing. A variety of brightly coloured, red and blue galaxies of various shapes are scattered across the image, making it feel densely populated.