mick laBriola

“Time is always moving on; nothing can stop it. We can’t change the past, but we can shape the future. The more compassionate you are, the more you will find inner peace. From my own limited experience I have found that the greatest degree of inner tranquility comes from the development of love and compassion.” Dali Lama

Spiral galaxy M83 lies a mere twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. About 40,000 light-years across, M83 is known as the Southern Pinwheel for its pronounced spiral arms. But the wealth of reddish star forming regions found near the edges of the arms’ thick dust lanes, also suggest another popular moniker for M83, the Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. This new deep telescopic digital image also records the bright galaxy’s faint, extended halo. Arcing toward the bottom of the cosmic frame lies a stellar tidal stream, debris drawn from massive M83 by the gravitational disruption of a smaller, merging satellite galaxy. Astronomers David Malin and Brian Hadley found the elusive star stream in the mid 1990s by enhancing photographic plates.

This Picture of the Week from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope depicts the galaxy NGC 4951, a spiral galaxythat’s located 49 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.

The data used to make this image were captured by Hubble as part of a programme to examine how matter and energy travel in nearby galaxies. Galaxies continuously undergo a cycle of star formation whereby the gas in a galaxy forms molecular clouds, which collapse to create new stars, which then disperse the clouds they formed from with powerful radiation or stellar winds in a process called feedback. The remaining gas is left to form new clouds elsewhere. This cycle of moving matter and energy determines how fast a galaxy forms stars and how quickly it burns through its supplies of gas — that is, how it evolves over the course of its life. Understanding this evolution depends on the nebulae, stars and star clusters in the galaxy: when they formed and their past behaviour. Hubble has always excelled at measuring populations of stars, and the task of tracking gas and star formation in galaxies including NGC 4951 is no exception.

NGC 4951 is also a Seyfert galaxy, a type of galaxy that has a very bright and energetic nucleus called an active galactic nucleus. This image demonstrates well how energetic the galaxy is, and some of the dynamic galactic activity which transports matter and energy throughout it: a shining core surrounded by swirling arms, glowing pink star-forming regions, and thick dust.

[Image Description: A spiral galaxy, tilted diagonally. It has thick, cloudy spiral arms wrapping around the core. They are filled with pink patches marking new star formation, young blue stars, and dark wisps of dust that block light. The galaxy glows brightly from its core. It is on a dark background, with a few distant galaxies and unrelated stars around it.]

Jaime Royal “Robbie” Robertson OC (July 5, 1943 – August 9, 2023) was a Canadian musician. He was lead guitarist for Bob Dylan in the mid-late 1960s and early-mid 1970s, guitarist and songwriter with The Band from their inception until 1978, and a solo artist.

Robertson’s work with the Band was instrumental in creating the Americana musicgenre. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as a member of the Band, and into Canada’s Walk of Fame, with the Band and on his own. He is ranked 59th in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists. He wrote “The Weight“, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down“, and “Up on Cripple Creek” with the Band and had solo hits with “Broken Arrow” and “Somewhere Down the Crazy River“, and many others. He was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Songwriters.

Robertson collaborated on film and TV soundtracks, usually with director Martin Scorsese, beginning in the rockumentary film The Last Waltz (1978) and continuing through dramatic films including Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Silence(2016), The Irishman (2019), and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), scoring the latter shortly before his death. The film was dedicated to his memory, and garnered him a posthumous nomination for Best Original Score at the Academy Awards.

The beautiful Trifid Nebula is a cosmicstudy in contrasts. Also known as M20, it lies about 5,000 light-years away toward the nebula richconstellation Sagittarius. A star forming region in the plane of our galaxy, the Trifid does illustrate three different types of astronomical nebulae; red emission nebulae dominated by light from hydrogen atoms, blue reflection nebulae produced by dust reflecting starlight, and dark nebulae where dense dust clouds appear in silhouette. But the red emission region, roughly separated into three parts by obscuring dust lanes, is what lends the Trifid its popular name. Pillars and jets sculpted by newborn stars, above and right of the emission nebula’s center, appear in famous Hubble Space Telescope close-up images of the region. The Trifid Nebula is about 40 light-years across. Too faint to be seen by the unaided eye, it almost covers the area of a full moon on planet Earth’s sky.