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A selection of a new image of distant galaxies in the COSMOS field. Click to see the whole view. Image courtesy of ESO/UltraVISTA team

You aren’t looking at a picture of stars. That bright white light in the top right corner is a nearby star, but all the other points of light are incredibly distant galaxies—each roughly the size of our own Milky Way, which contains some 200 billion to 400 billion stars. The larger image from which this highlight comes contains more than 200,000 galaxies alone. And that larger image represents just a piece of a 3-degree-wide slice of the night sky. The universe, it turns out, is a really, really big place.

The photo is part of a new view of the COSMOS field, located in the Sextans constellation, released to the public last week by the European Southern Observatory. Produced by the largest survey telescope in the world, the 4.1-meter VISTA Survey Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the image looks past the stars near us in the Milky Way and out into the great beyond.

To slowly accumulate the scarce amounts of dim light reaching us from these distant galaxies, astronomers made six thousand separate exposures of the same patch of the night sky over a combined 55 hours. It is the widest deep view of the sky ever produced by infrared telescopes, and will be used by scientists around the world to study distant galaxies and what they tell us about the early universe.

A good eye will spot the black-marble jawfish next to the mimic octopus's arm (Credit: Godehard Kopp)

The mimic octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) has the uncanny ability to make itself look like more dangerous creatures, such as lionfish, sea snakes and soles. The octopus does this with its distinctive color pattern and ability to adjust its shape and behavior (see this earlier blog post on the octopus for a video in which it mimics a flatfish). But now the mimic has a mimicker of its own, scientists report in the journal Coral Reefs.

Godehard Kopp  of the University of Gottingen in Germany was filming a mimic octopus during a diving trip to Indonesia last July when he spotted a companion–a small fish that followed the octopus for several minutes, always sticking close to the octopus’s arms. Kopp has some good observational skills, because the fish’s color and banding looks incredibly similar to that of the octopus.

Kopp sent his video (see below) to two marine scientists at the California Academy of Sciences who identified the fish as a black-marble jawfish (Stalix cf. histrio). The three write:

Jawfish are poor swimmers and usually spend their entire adult lives very close to burrows in the sand, to where they quickly retreat, tail first, upon sight of any potential predator….[In Kopp's video and photos], the Black-Marble Jawfish seems to have found a safe way to move around in the open. The Mimic Octopus looks so much like its poisonous models that it is relatively safe from predation, even when swimming in the open, and by mimicking the octopus’ arms, the Jawfish seems to also gain protection.

This might at first glance appear to be a case in which the fish evolved its coloring to gain protection by associating with the octopus, but the scientists don’t think that’s likely. The jawfish can be found from Japan to Australia, but the octopus lives only in the region around Indonesia and Malaysia. They contend that this is a case of “opportunistic mimicry,” in which the fish is taking advantage of a happy coincidence.

A composite image of S106, from the Hubble Space Telescope and Japan's Subaru Telescope (Credits: NASA/ESA/the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/NAOJ)

About 2,000 light years away, in the direction of the constellation Cygnus (The Swan), in a rather isolated part of the Milky Way, lies a newly formed star known IRS 4. This star, about 15 times the mass of our Sun, is still so young that it hasn’t yet calmed down; it’s ejecting material at high speed, giving this image its wings. That hydrogen gas, colored blue here, is heated by the star to temperatures of 10,000 degrees Celsius, making them glow. The cloudy, red parts in the image are tiny particles of dust illuminated by the star.

This area of the universe is known as star-forming region S106 and it’s pretty small (well, by universe standards), at only two light years from the edge of one “wing” to the other. The nebula is also home to more than 600 known brown dwarfs, “failed” stars that, because of their size, less than a tenth the mass of our Sun, cannot undergo the nuclear fusion that powers glowing stars.

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In this image from December 15, 2011, Comet Lovejoy appeared to be headed towards sure destruction in a collision with the Sun (credit: NASA/SOHO)

Amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy of Australia discovered a comet in 2007 using nothing more than a digital camera. Comet Lovejoy was a large member of the Kreutz family of comets–fragments of a large comet that broke up hundreds of years ago but still travel in its path, grazing the surface of the Sun and sometimes colliding with it. And yesterday it looked like Comet Lovejoy would meet such a fiery end.

But that didn’t happen.

Despite scientists’ predictions that the comet would not survive its encounter with the Sun, Comet Lovejoy lives on. The Associated Press reports:

The comet came within 75,000 miles of the sun. For a small object often described as a dirty snowball, that brush with the sun should have been fatal.

Astronomers say it probably wasn’t deadly because the comet was larger than they thought.

Comet Lovejoy’s near-fatal journey was well-watched by scientists who have a fleet of satellites pointed at our Sun. You can watch the comet streak through the Sun’s atmosphere in the video below, taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or see the comet’s path around the Sun in the animated gif (below the video), created with images from the NASA satellite SOHO.

Comet Lovejoy survived its close encounter with the Sun (credit: NASA/SOHO)

A map of extreme weather events in the United States, January to October 2011 (credit: NRDC)

The United States may not have seen anything like Hurricane Katrina this year, but it’s been a bad year for extreme weather events nonetheless. High heat, drought and wildfires in Texas. Flooding in the Midwest and Northeast. Deadly tornadoes. The Natural Resources Defense Council found nearly 3,000 broken weather records throughout the United States, and that count went only through the end of October. A map compiling the locations of these events is above; an interactive version that lets you visualize the events through time can be found on the NRDC website.

Scientists are reluctant to say any specific weather event is the result of climate change (weather and climate are, after all, not interchangeable). But they do largely agree that extreme weather events, such as the ones we’ve seen this year, will become more and more common because of climate change.

And those events come with a price. NRDC provided an estimate of $53 billion associated with the events in the group’s tally–if climate change contributed even a fraction to these events, we’re looking at potentially billions of dollars lost. And a country climbing out of a recession could surely use that money elsewhere.

What will humankind do about this? Well, 15,000 delegates are currently meeting in Durban, South Africa, to discuss just that, but little is expected to come out of the meeting. Christie Aschwanden at The Last Word on Nothing thinks part of the reason for current inaction is how we look at the whole situation:

The problem can seem insurmountable, and it’s possible that it is—not because there is no solution, but because we are incapable of choosing it. There’s a one-word solution to the climate (and energy) problem staring us in the face—restraint. Simply consuming less. It’s too late to talk about carbon emissions. With a population catapulting toward nine billion or more, it’s time to focus on carbon omissions.

Restraint is not the easy, no-need-to-change-a-thing solution that people keep pretending we will find. But it’s a reality-based solution that will happen whether we want it to or not. We can plan for it and make the hard choices ourselves, or we can wait for them to be forced upon us. Using less doesn’t necessarily mean lowering our quality of life, it means redefining how we measure our wellbeing.

I’m not sure “restraint” will be any easier of a message to sell to a global population, and particularly a U.S. population, than “reducing carbon emissions,” but it’s an interesting way to look at the problem. If the old ideas aren’t working, we need new ones.

So here’s the challenge: How should we go about addressing climate change? Are global agreements worth the time, energy and carbon emissions it takes to make them? Do small changes made in your own home make any difference? If you were in charge, what would you do? I’m really hoping that one of you has a good answer (tell us in the comments below), because these extreme weather events are taking a toll and humans need to do something to prevent the worst from happening.