In Space, Chaos Is an Understatement

The countdown to the end of one of the more chaotic weeks in recent memory has begun. The sun's starting to slide a little lower in the Friday afternoon sky. The cable news anchors are slowing their roll and even appear to be confirming details about the fugitive Boston bombing suspect, Dzokhar Tsarnaev — unlike earlier this week. The president's in the Situation Room meeting with the leaders of his national security team and probably wishing he were on a golf course. Tanks and soldiers wearing flak jackets are patrolling the streets of Boston while residents are locked in their homes under orders from the police. See? Nice and calm.

Okay, so it's a little chaotic in America right now. Look on the bright side: At least you're not in deep space. Shit's bananas out there. In deep space, you wouldn't be worried about a teenage terrorist on the loose because you'd be running away from the relentless grip of black holes and dodging stellar debris. You'd be gawking not at the suspect's crazy Chechen uncle yelling at the press in suburban Maryland but at technicolor clouds of spectacular gases that are galaxies wide.

Just to keep us all grounded (literally) I pulled together some of the most amazingly chaotic photos of deep space. Because, well — What's that cliché about the stars serving as a reminder for how small we all are? That's a good thing to keep in mind before dunking your head in a bucket of vodka and spending the weekend like a college sophomore who just finished his midterms.

No description needed, really. The crusty-looking tendrils are clouds of gas and dust that are rising three-and-a-half light years above the Carina Nebula. If you squint your eyes and titlt your head, it sort of looks like two amorphous aliens doing a chest bump.

It's tough to tell if this pair of galaxies is dancing or fighting. The two massive spiral formations in the Andromeda constellation are clearly communicating in an encounter that astronomers call Arp 273 and the gravity of the smaller galaxy has stretch the arms of the larger one into the shape of a rose. Pretty chaos is pretty.

I need point out only one fact about the Orion Nebula to encapsulate the scale of awe. Right this very moment, where the pink meets the orange meets the brown, black and yellow, there are 3,000 stars being born.

The name of this particular formation should make fairly immediate sense, but the story makes the comparison even more vivid. That bright glob of stars to the left is an entire galaxy that plunged through the middle of the Cartwheel Galaxy, literally sending it spinning. You can see the resultant ripples shooting off the center like sun rays.

This is either Sauron's pretty (but still unspeakably evil) little sister or a star exploding, sending plumes of gas as hot as 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit out into deep space at 600,000 miles per hour. Astronomers insist that it's the latter, but I'm not completely convinced.

So that picture of the iconic Horse Head Nebula is impressive enough. (So moody.) But check out this new one from the Hubble Telescope which is turning 23 next week — Happy Cake Day, Hubble! — that showcases the bright hydrogen gas that's usually hidden behind massive clouds of dust.

This looks like somebody took a Sigur Rós album and poured it out into the universe.

When stars die, they die gloriously. A couple years ago some astronomers estimated that in five billion years, when our own Sun is scheduled to meet its maker, the rest of the universe will cease to exist. That'll be a deep space chaos photo for the ages, won't it?

The name pretty much says it all. It's a hot space bubble. More like a hot mess bubble!

I'll see myself out.