mick laBriola

The striking spiral galaxy featured in this week’s Hubble Picture of the Week is Messier 90 (M90, also NGC 4569), located in the constellation Virgo. In 2019, an image of M90 was released using data from the older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 — data taken in 1994 soon after the camera’s installation. That image has a distinctive stair-step pattern due to the layout of WFPC2’s sensors. WFPC2 was replaced in 2010 by the Wide Field Camera 3, and Hubble used WFC3 when it turned its aperture to Messier 90 again in 2019 and 2023. The resulting data was processed to create this stunning new image, providing a much fuller view of the galaxy’s dusty disc, its gaseous halo and its bright core.

The inner regions of M90’s disc are sites of star formation, which is highlighted here by red H-alpha light from nebulae, but this is absent in the rest of the galaxy. M90 sits among the galaxies of the relatively nearby Virgo Cluster, and the course of its orbit took it on a path near the cluster’s centre about three hundred million years ago. The density of gas in the inner cluster weighed on M90 like a strong headwind, stripping enormous quantities of gas from the galaxy and creating the diffuse halo that can be seen around it here. This gas is no longer available for M90 to form new stars with, and it will eventually fade as a spiral galaxy as a result.

M90 is located 55 million light-years from Earth, but it’s one of the very few galaxies getting closer to us. Its orbit through the Virgo cluster has accelerated it so much that it’s in the process of escaping the cluster entirely, and by happenstance it’s moving in our direction — other galaxies in the Virgo cluster have been measured at similar speeds, but in the opposite direction. Over the coming billions of years, we will be treated to a yet better view of M90 while it evolves into a lenticular galaxy.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy. It has a bright core with light spilling out, and its disc is filled with thick clumps of dark reddish dust, which swirls around the galaxy following its rotation. Parts of the disc are speckled with blue, showing brighter and hotter stars. A halo of faintly-lit gas wraps around the galaxy, extending beyond the edges of the image.]

MacHouston “Mickey” Baker (October 15, 1925 – November 27, 2012) was an American musician, best known for his work as a studio musician and as part of the recording duo Mickey & Sylvia.

Baker was born in Louisville, Kentucky. His mother was black, and his father, whom he never met, was believed to be white.

By 1949, Baker had his own combo, and a few paying jobs. He decided to move west, but found that audiences there were not receptive to progressive jazz music. Baker was stranded without work in California when he saw a show by blues guitarist Pee Wee Crayton. Baker said of the encounter:

“I asked Pee Wee, ‘You mean you can make money playing that stuff on guitar?’ Here he was driving a big white Eldorado and had a huge bus for his band. So I started bending strings. I was starving to death, and the blues was just a financial thing for me then.”

He found a few jobs in Richmond, California, and made enough money to return to New York.

After returning east, Baker began recording for Savoy, King and Atlantic Records. He did sessions with Doc Pomus, The Drifters, Ray Charles, Ivory Joe Hunter, Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner, Louis Jordan, Coleman Hawkins, Dion and numerous other artists.

Inspired by the success of Les Paul & Mary Ford, he formed the pop duo Mickey & Sylvia (with Sylvia Robinson, one of his guitar students) in the mid-1950s. Together, they had a hit single with “Love Is Strange” in 1956. After the duo split up in the late 1958, Baker recorded with Kitty Noble as Mickey & Kitty. They released three records on Atlantic Records in 1959. In late 1959, Baker released his debut solo album, The Wildest Guitar, on Atlantic. Mickey & Sylvia reunited in 1960 and sporadically worked together on additional tracks until the mid-1960s.

Christopher Columbus wasn’t Italian or even originally Catholic but instead a Sephardic Jew likely from Spain who hid his heritage to avoid persecution, a new genetic study suggests.

A decades-long investigation into the famous controversial explorer’s background and conducted by Spanish scientists was meant to shed light on the lengthy debate over where the 15th-century globetrotter was actually born, according to the BBC.

Traditional theories held that Columbus — who was sailing on behalf of Spain when he trekked across the Atlantic in 1492, sparking European interest in the Americas — was born in 1451 in Genoa, an independent republic on Italy’s northwest coast. But many historians questioned that. And new DNA evidence pulled from some of the bones of Columbus’ corpse in Spain’s Seville Cathedral seems to prove them right. “We have DNA from Christopher Columbus, very partial but sufficient,” forensic expert and investigation leader Miguel Lorente said in a documentary called “Columbus DNA: The true origin,” which aired in Spain on Saturday. “We have DNA from Hernando Colón, his son. And both in the Y [male] chromosome and in the mitochondrial DNA [from the mother] of Hernando there are traits compatible with Jewish origin,” Lorente said. Although researchers weren’t positive where Columbus was actually born, they believe it was likely Western Europe, possibly the Spanish city of Valencia.

They believe that Columbus either concealed his Jewish identity or converted to Catholicism to avoid religious persecution.

The findings are based on nearly 22 years’ worth of research that began in 2003, when Lorente, a professor of forensic medicine at Granada University, and historian Marcial Castro exhumed Columbus’ partial remains from the cathedral.

For centuries, countries had argued over his origin, with dozens of conflicting theories that claimed he was born in Poland, Great Britain, Greece, Portugal, Hungary or even Scandinavia. But those ideas — including the novel thought of a Viking Columbus — appear to have been incorrect. The DNA-driven results are “almost absolutely reliable,” Lorente said. The results are consistent with historical records of the era, too, which showed that about 300,000 Jews lived in Spain before Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand ordered Jews and Muslims to either convert to Catholicism or leave.

Even though it looks stunning by itself, this Picture of the Week is actually only a tiny part of a 1.5-billion-pixel image of the Running Chicken Nebula. It forms the comb on the running chicken’s head — at least according to some people, because everyone seems to see a different chicken! The data for this gigantic image was captured by the VLT Survey Telescope(VST), a facility of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics hosted and operated by ESO.

But for now, let’s zoom back in on GUM 39, as this nebula is officially called. In the sky, you will find it in the Centaurus constellation, about 6500 light-years from Earth. All around the nebula, orange, white and blue stars are dotting the sky like fireworks. The pink glow that you see are fumes of hydrogen gas, illuminated by the intense radiation from newborn stars. The nebula is also crossed by dark lanes of cosmic dust that block the light behind them.

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