Astronomical

HD189733b is a "hot Jupiter"-type extrasolar planet. It is 20% more massive than Jupiter, but orbits 10 times closer to its star than Mercury orbits the Sun. Mercury's orbit around the Sun is shown for comparison. Credit: S. Redfield/T. Jones/McDonald Obs.

The dotted line shows the planet's orbit around the star HD189733. The planet orbits the star once every 2.2 Earth days, crossing the face of the star well below its equator. The small circles indicate the planet's location during each of Seth Redfield's more than 200 HET observations over the course of one Earth year. The red circles indicate observations during transit; the rest of the circles denote out-of-transit observations. Credit: S. Redfield/T. Jones/McDonald Obs.

Seth Redfield used HET's High Resolution Spectrograph to detect the well-known signature of sodium, a pair of absorption lines known as a "doublet," at specific wavelengths (indicated here in angstroms) in the atmosphere of the extra-solar planet HD189733b. Credit: S. Redfield/T. Jones/McDonald Obs.

HIP 56948 is more like the Sun than any known star. Located 200 light-years away in Draco, the dragon, the star is too dim to see with the unaided eye. Credit: Tim Jones/McDonald Obs./UT-Austin

Left: Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) image of the field where supernova 2005ap was found, showing four nearby galaxies in December 2004. Right: Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) image of the same field about 2.5 months later. Supernova 2005ap appears at right center. The supernova's host galaxy is too distant to appear in either image. Credit: SDSS, R. Quimby/McDonald Obs./UT-Austin

Left: Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) image of the field where supernova 2005ap was found, showing four nearby galaxies (A, B, C, and D) in December 2004. Right: Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) image of the same field about 2.5 months later, showing supernova 2005ap. The supernova's host galaxy is too distant to appear in either image. Credit: SDSS, R. Quimby/McDonald Obs./UT-Austin

This chart shows the light given off by superheated material spiraling into a black hole at the heart of a galaxy 12.7 billion light-years away. This active galaxy, called a "quasar," is known as CFHQS 1641+3755. Because its light has traveled so far to us, it has lost energy, causing wavelengths to stretch. The light from neutral hydrogen gas, indicated by the label "Ly alpha" here, has stretched from a wavelength of 1216 Angstroms all the way to 8500 Angstroms.

This supermassive black hole has been ejected from the center of its host galaxy. The black hole drags part of its surrounding accretion disk along for the ride. Some of the material lags behind, then catches up, crashing into the moving disk and producing a powerful burst of X-rays. Credit: Tim Jones/McDonald Observatory.

Supernova 2006bp was discovered by the Texas Supernova Search within two days of its explosion. Credit: Robert Quimby, UT-Austin McDonald Observatory.

More than a billion stars form the whirling spiral galaxy Messsier 33 (M33) in the constellation Triangulum. Its spiral arms glow blue with the light of hot, new stars. Older, yellow stars populate the nucleus. At a distance of only 3.5 million light-years, M33 is one of the nearest spiral galaxies. This image was made with the 0.8-meter Telescope at McDonald Observatory, with the Prime Focus Corrector instrument. Credit: Tom Montemayor/McDonald Observatory.