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An orange glow radiates from the center of NGC 1792, the heart of this stellar furnace. Captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, this intimate view of NGC 1792 gives us some insight into this galactic powerhouse. The vast swathes of tell-tale blue seen throughout the galaxy indicate areas that are full of young, hot stars, and it is in the shades of orange, seen nearer the center, that the older, cooler stars reside.
Nestled in the constellation of Columba (The Dove), NGC 1792 is both a spiral galaxy and a starburst galaxy. Within starburst galaxies, stars are forming at comparatively exorbitant rates. The rate of star formation can be more than 10 times faster in a starburst galaxy than in our galaxy, the Milky Way. When galaxies have a large reservoir of gas, like NGC 1792, these short-lived starburst phases can be sparked by galactic events such as mergers and tidal interactions. One might think that these starburst galaxies would easily consume all of their gas in a large forming event. However, supernova explosions and intense stellar winds produced in these powerful starbursts can inject energy into the gas and disperse it. This halts the star formation before it can completely deplete the galaxy of all its fuel. Scientists are actively working to understand this complex interplay between the dynamics that drive and quench these fierce bursts of star formation.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee; Acknowledgement: Leo Shatz
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The brightest stars embedded in nebulae throughout our galaxy pour out a torrent of radiation that eats into vast clouds of hydrogen gas – the raw material for building new stars. This etching process sculpts a fantasy landscape where human imagination can see all kinds of shapes and figures. This nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia has flowing veils of gas and dust that have earned it the nickname "Ghost Nebula."
Officially known as IC 63, this nebula is located 550 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia the Queen.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI/Acknowledgment: H. Arab (University of Strasbourg)
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In time for Valentine’s Day, NASA’s Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer which launched Dec. 9, 2021, has delivered its first imaging data since completing its month-long commissioning phase.
All instruments are functioning well aboard the observatory, which is on a quest to study some of the most mysterious and extreme objects in the universe.
IXPE first focused its X-ray eyes on Cassiopeia A, an object consisting of the remains of a star that exploded in the 17th century. The shock waves from the explosion have swept up surrounding gas, heating it to high temperatures and accelerating cosmic ray particles to make a cloud that glows in X-ray light. Other telescopes have studied Cassiopeia A before, but IXPE will allow researchers to examine it in a new way.
In the image above, the saturation of the magenta color corresponds to the intensity of X-ray light observeded by IXPE. It overlays high energy X-ray data, shown in blue, from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Chandra and IXPE, with different kinds of detectors, capture different levels of angular resolution, or sharpness. An additional version of this image is available showing only IXPE data. These images contain IXPE data collected from Jan. 11 to 18.
Image credit: NASA
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NASA’s Juno mission captured this look at Jupiter’s tumultuous northern regions during the spacecraft’s close approach to the planet on Feb. 17, 2020.
Some notable features in this view are the long, thin bands that run through the center of the image from top to bottom. Juno has observed these long streaks since its first close pass by Jupiter in 2016. The streaks are layers of haze particles that float above the underlying cloud features. Scientists don’t yet know exactly what these hazes are made of or how they form. Two jet streams in Jupiter’s atmosphere flank either side of the region where the narrow bands of haze typically appear, and some researchers speculate those jet streams may influence the formation of the high hazes.
This JunoCam image was processed by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstädt. It was taken on Feb. 17, 2020 at 9:29 a.m. PST (12:29 p.m. EST), as the Juno spacecraft performed its 25th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 15,610 miles (25,120 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops at a latitude of about 71 degrees North.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt
A dramatic triplet of galaxies takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which captures a three-way gravitational tug-of-war between interacting galaxies. This system – known as Arp 195 – is featured in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, a list which showcases some of the weirder and more wonderful galaxies in the universe. Observing time with Hubble is extremely valuable, so astronomers don't want to waste a second. The schedule for Hubble observations is calculated using a computer algorithm which allows the spacecraft to occasionally gather bonus snapshots of data between longer observations. This image of the clashing triplet of galaxies in Arp 195 is one such snapshot. Extra observations such as these do more than provide spectacular images – they also help to identify promising targets to follow up with using telescopes such as the upcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton
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This image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft captures several storms in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere (Figure A). Some of these storms, including the Great Red Spot at upper left, have been churning in the planet’s atmosphere for many years, but when Juno obtained this view of Jupiter, the smaller, oval-shaped feature at the center of the image was brand new.
The new feature was discovered by amateur astronomer Clyde Foster of Centurion, South Africa. Early on the morning of May 31, 2020, while imaging Jupiter with his telescope, Foster noticed a new spot, which appeared bright as seen through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of light where methane gas in Jupiter's atmosphere has strong absorption. The spot was not visible in images captured just hours earlier by astronomers in Australia.
On June 2, 2020, just two days after Clyde Foster’s observations, Juno performed its 27th close flyby of Jupiter. The spacecraft can only image a relatively thin slice of Jupiter's cloud tops during each pass. Although Juno would not be travelling directly over the outbreak, the track was close enough that the mission team determined the spacecraft would obtain a detailed view of the new feature, which has been informally dubbed “Clyde’s Spot.”
Image Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Image processing by Kevin M. Gill © CC BY
A pair of quakes in 2021 sent seismic waves deep into the Red Planet’s core, giving scientists the best data yet on its size and composition.
While NASA retired its InSight Mars lander in December, the trove of data from its seismometer will be pored over for decades to come. By looking at seismic waves the instrument detected from a pair of temblors in 2021, scientists have been able to deduce that Mars’ liquid iron core is smaller and denser than previously thought.
The findings, which mark the first direct observations ever made of another planet’s core, were detailed in a paper published April 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Occurring on Aug. 25 and Sept. 18, 2021, the two temblors were the first identified by the InSight team to have originated on the opposite side of the planet from the lander – so-called farside quakes. The distance proved crucial: The farther a quake happens from InSight, the deeper into the planet its seismic waves can travel before being detected.
This is one of the last images ever taken by NASA’s InSight Mars lander. Captured on Dec. 11, 2022, the 1,436th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, it shows InSight’s seismometer on the Red Planet’s surface.
Image Credit: NASA
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NASA’s InSight mission has ended after more than four years of collecting unique science on Mars.
Mission controllers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft’s solar-powered batteries have run out of energy – a state engineers refer to as “dead bus.”
NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts. The agency will continue to listen for a signal from the lander, just in case, but hearing from it at this point is considered unlikely. The last time InSight communicated with Earth was Dec. 15.
Here is an image of the final selfie taken by NASA's InSight Mars lander on April 24, 2022, the 1,211th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The lander is covered with far more dust than it was in its first selfie, taken in December 2018, not long after landing – or in its second selfie, composed of images taken in March and April 2019.
Image Credit: NASA
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NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, exploring the universe near and far. The science instruments have returned to full operation, following recovery from a computer anomaly that suspended the telescope’s observations for more than a month.
Science observations restarted the afternoon of Saturday, July 17. The telescope’s targets this past weekend included the unusual galaxies shown in the images above.
These images, from a program led by Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington in Seattle, demonstrate Hubble's return to full science operations. [Left] ARP-MADORE2115-273 is a rarely observed example of a pair of interacting galaxies in the southern hemisphere. [Right] ARP-MADORE0002-503 is a large spiral galaxy with unusual, extended spiral arms. While most disk galaxies have an even number of spiral arms, this one has three.
Image Credit: Science: NASA, ESA, STScI, Julianne Dalcanton (UW) Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
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This jewel-bright image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 1385, a spiral galaxy 68 million light-years from Earth, which lies in the constellation Fornax. The image was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, which is often referred to as Hubble’s workhorse camera thanks to its reliability and versatility. It was installed in 2009 when astronauts last visited Hubble, and 12 years later it remains remarkably productive.
NGC 1385’s home – the Fornax constellation – is not named after an animal or an ancient god, as are many of the other constellations. Fornax is simply the Latin word for a furnace. The constellation was named Fornax by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer born in 1713. Lacaille named 14 of the 88 constellations we still recognize today. He seems to have had a penchant for naming constellations after scientific instruments, including Atlia (the air pump), Norma (the ruler, or set square), and Telescopium (the telescope).
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team
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Lying inside our home galaxy, the Milky Way, this Herbig–Haro object is a turbulent birthing ground for new stars in a region known as the Orion B molecular cloud complex, located 1,350 light-years away.
Herbig–Haro (HH) objects are bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars that form when narrow jets of partially ionized gas ejected by stars collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust. This image of Herbig-Haro Jet HH 24 was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2015.
When stars form within giant clouds of cool molecular hydrogen, some of the surrounding material collapses under gravity to form a rotating, flattened disk encircling the newborn star.
Although planets will later congeal in the disk, at this early stage the protostar is feeding on the disk with a voracious appetite. Gas from the disk rains down onto the protostar and engorges it. Superheated material spills away and is shot outward from the star in opposite directions along an uncluttered escape route – the star's rotation axis.
Shock fronts develop along the jets and heat the surrounding gas to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. The jets collide with the surrounding gas and dust and clear vast spaces, like a stream of water plowing into a hill of sand.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)/Hubble-Europe (ESA) Collaboration, D. Padgett (GSFC), T. Megeath (University of Toledo), and B. Reipurth (University of Hawaii)
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The twisting patterns created by the multiple spiral arms of NGC 2835 create the illusion of an eye. This is a fitting description, as this magnificent galaxy resides near the head of the southern constellation of Hydra, the water snake. This stunning barred spiral galaxy, with a width of just over half that of the Milky Way, is brilliantly featured in this image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Although it cannot be seen in this image, a supermassive black hole with a mass millions of times that of our Sun is known to nestle in the very center of NGC 2835.
This galaxy was imaged as part of PHANGS-HST, a large galaxy survey with Hubble that aims to study the connections between cold gas and young stars in a variety of galaxies in the local universe. Within NGC 2835, this cold, dense gas produces large numbers of young stars within large star formation regions. The bright blue areas, commonly observed in the outer spiral arms of many galaxies, show where near-ultraviolet light is being emitted more strongly, indicating recent or ongoing star formation.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee, and the PHANGS-HST Team; acknowledgment: Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla)
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Just after its close flyby of Jupiter on Nov. 3, 2019, NASA's Juno spacecraft caught this striking view of Jupiter's southern hemisphere as the spacecraft sped away from the giant planet. This image captures massive cyclones near Jupiter's south pole, as well as the chaotic clouds of the folded filamentary region — the turbulent area between the orange band and the brownish polar region.
When this image was taken, Juno was traveling at about 85,000 mph (137,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet. A little more than an hour earlier — at the point of closest approach to the cloud tops — the spacecraft reached speeds relative to Jupiter in excess of 130,000 mph (209,000 kilometers per hour).
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Thousands of sparkling young stars are nestled within the giant nebula NGC 3603, one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy.
NGC 3603, a prominent star-forming region in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way about 20,000 light-years away, reveals stages in the life cycle of stars.
Powerful ultraviolet radiation and fast winds from the bluest and hottest stars have blown a big bubble around the cluster. Moving into the surrounding nebula, this torrent of radiation sculpted the tall, dark stalks of dense gas, which are embedded in the walls of the nebula. These gaseous monoliths are a few light-years tall and point to the central cluster. The stalks may be incubators for new stars.
On a smaller scale, a cluster of dark clouds called "Bok" globules resides at the top, right corner. These clouds are composed of dense dust and gas and are about 10 to 50 times more massive than the sun. Resembling an insect's cocoon, a Bok globule may be undergoing a gravitational collapse on its way to forming new stars.
The nebula was first discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1834.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration
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The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 2276 looks a bit lopsided in this Hubble Space Telescope snapshot. A bright hub of older yellowish stars normally lies directly in the center of most spiral galaxies. But the bulge in NGC 2276 looks offset to the upper left.
What's going on? In reality, a neighboring galaxy to the right of NGC 2276 (NGC 2300, not seen here) is gravitationally tugging on its disk of blue stars, pulling the stars on one side of the galaxy outward to distort the galaxy's normal fried-egg appearance.
This sort of "tug-of-war" between galaxies that pass close enough to feel each other's gravitational pull is not uncommon in the universe. But, like snowflakes, no two close encounters look exactly alike.
In addition, newborn and short-lived massive stars form a bright, blue arm along the upper left edge of NGC 2276. They trace out a lane of intense star formation. This may have been triggered by a prior collision with a dwarf galaxy. It could also be due to NGC 2276 plowing into the superheated gas that lies among galaxies in galaxy clusters. This would compress the gas to precipitate into stars, and trigger a firestorm of starbirth.
The spiral galaxy lies 120 million light-years away, in the northern constellation Cepheus.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Paul Sell (University of Florida)
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NASA’s Juno mission captured these elaborate atmospheric jets in Jupiter's northern mid-latitude region. This detailed, color-enhanced image reveals a complex topography in Jupiter’s cloud tops. If you look closely, relatively small, bright, “pop-up” clouds — which rise above the surrounding features — stand out at the tops and edges of the swirling patterns, while the darker areas nearby reveal greater depth.
Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed this JunoCam image, which was taken on April 10, 2020, at 6:37 a.m. PDT (9:37 a.m. EDT), as the Juno spacecraft performed its 26th close flyby of the planet. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 5,375 miles (8,650 kilometers) from Jupiter’s cloud tops at a latitude of about 50 degrees North. The spacecraft was traveling about 127,000 mph (204,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet at that time.
Image Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Kevin M. Gill © CC BY
In this view of a vortex near Jupiter’s north pole, NASA’s Juno mission observed the glow from a bolt of lightning. On Earth, lightning bolts originate from water clouds, and happen most frequently near the equator, while on Jupiter lightning likely also occurs in clouds containing an ammonia-water solution, and can be seen most often near the poles.
In the coming months, Juno’s orbits will repeatedly take it close to Jupiter as the spacecraft passes over the giant planet’s night side, which will provide even more opportunities for Juno’s suite of science instruments to catch lightning in the act.
Juno captured this view as Juno completed its 31st close flyby of Jupiter on Dec. 30, 2020. In 2022, Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed the image from raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard the spacecraft. At the time the raw image was taken, Juno was about 19,900 miles (32,000 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about 78 degrees as it approached the planet.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Image processing by Kevin M. Gill © CC BY
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This composite image of BD+30-3639 shows a hot bubble of multimillion degree gas surrounding a dying, Sun-like star that is about 5,000 light years from Earth. The distance across the bubble is roughly 100 times the diameter of our solar system.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/STScI/Univ. MD/J.P.Harrington
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From 156 million light-years away the heart of active galaxy IC 5063 reveals a mixture of bright rays and dark shadows coming from the blazing core, home of a supermassive black hole.
In this Hubble Space Telescope image, astronomers suggest that a ring of dusty material surrounding the black hole may be casting its shadow into space. According to this scenario, the interplay of light and shadow may occur when light blasted by the monster black hole strikes the dust ring, which is buried deep inside the core. Light streams through gaps in the ring, creating the brilliant cone-shaped rays. However, denser patches in the disk block some of the light, casting long, dark shadows through the galaxy.
This phenomenon is similar to sunlight piercing our Earthly clouds at sunset, creating a mixture of bright rays and dark shadows formed by beams of light scattered by the atmosphere.
However, the bright rays and dark shadows appearing in IC 5063 are happening on a vastly larger scale, shooting across at least 36,000 light-years.
The observations were taken on March 7 and Nov. 25, 2019, by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI and W.P. Maksym (CfA)
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This view of Jupiter’s atmosphere from NASA’s Juno spacecraft includes something remarkable: two storms caught in the act of merging.
The two white ovals seen within the orange-colored band left of center are anticyclonic storms — that is, storms that rotate counter-clockwise. The larger of the two ovals has been tracked for many years, as it grew in size through mergers with other anticyclonic white ovals. JunoCam was fortunate to capture this new merger, which typically takes place over the course of only a few days. The event interests scientists because the ovals had approached each other months earlier, only to move apart again.
This merger may be the result of perturbations due to the proximity of Oval BA, which is the larger storm just to the north of the two merging, white ovals. Oval BA is the second largest anticyclonic vortex in Jupiter's atmosphere, second only to the famous Great Red Spot. During this pass over Jupiter, Juno gave scientists their best views of Oval BA to date.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Image processing by Tanya Oleksuik, © CC BY
On April 8, 2023, NASA’s Juno mission completed its 50th close pass by Jupiter since the spacecraft arrived at the giant planet in 2016. In celebration of 50 orbits, this graphic contains 50 images that provide just a small sampling of the data Juno has returned so far, including images from several different instruments, and spectacular views of Earth, Jupiter, and Jupiter’s large moons Ganymede, Europa, and Io.
Image credit: NASA
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Reflection nebulae reflect the light from nearby stars. The stars that illuminate them aren’t powerful enough to ionize the nebula’s gas, as with emission nebulae, but their light scatters through the gas and dust causing it to glow ? like a flashlight beam shining on mist in the dark.
Because of the way light scatters when it hits the fine dust of the interstellar medium, these reflection nebulae are often bluish in color.
A reflection nebula called NGC 1999 lies close to the famous Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years from Earth. The nebula is illuminated by a bright, recently formed star called V380 Orionis, and the gas and dust of the nebula is material left over from that star’s formation. A second well-known reflection nebula is illuminated by the Pleiades star cluster. Most nebulae around star clusters consist of material that the stars formed from. But the Pleiades shines on an independent cloud of gas and dust, drifting through the cluster at about 6.8 miles/second (11 km/s).
Image credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)
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Resting on the tail of the Great Bear in the constellation of Ursa Major lies NGC 5585, a spiral galaxy that is more than it appears.
The many stars and clouds of dust and gas that make up NGC 5585, shown here in this Hubble image, contribute only a small fraction of the total mass of the galaxy. As in many galaxies, this discrepancy can be explained by the abundant yet seemingly invisible presence of dark matter, a mysterious material that astronomers can’t directly observe.
The stellar disk of the galaxy extends over 35,000 light-years across. When compared with galaxies of a similar shape and size, NGC 5585 stands out by having a notably different composition. Contributing to the total mass of the galaxy, it contains a far higher proportion of dark matter.
Hot spots of star formation can be seen along the galaxy’s faint spiral arms. These regions shine a brilliant blue, contrasting strikingly against the ever-black background of space.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully; acknowledgment: Gagandeep Anand
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This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the constellation of Lupus (the Wolf). Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with the high resolution and clarity of Hubble, were needed to produce an image of such high level of detail and beauty.
NGC 5643 is about 60 million light-years away from Earth and has been the host of a recent supernova event (not visible in this latest image). This supernova (2017cbv) was a specific type in which a white dwarf steals so much mass from a companion star that it becomes unstable and explodes. The explosion releases significant amounts of energy and lights up that part of the galaxy.
The observation was proposed by Adam Riess, who (alongside Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt) was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for his contributions to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.; acknowledgment: Mahdi Zamani
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On Nov. 29, 2021, NASA’s Juno mission completed its 38th close flyby of Jupiter. As the spacecraft sped low over the giant planet’s cloud tops, its JunoCam instrument captured this look at two of Jupiter’s largest moons.
In the foreground, hurricane-like spiral wind patterns called vortices can be seen spinning in the planet’s north polar region. These powerful storms can be over 30 miles (50 kilometers) in height and hundreds of miles across.
Below Jupiter’s curving horizon, two Jovian moons make an appearance: Callisto (below) and Io (above).
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Image processing by Gerald Eichstädt/Thomas Thomopoulos © CC BY
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Some of the most stunning views of our sky occur at sunset, when sunlight pierces the clouds, creating a mixture of bright and dark rays formed by the clouds' shadows and the beams of light scattered by the atmosphere.
Astronomers studying nearby galaxy IC 5063 are tantalized by a similar effect in images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In this case, a collection of narrow bright rays and dark shadows is seen beaming out of the blazingly bright center of the active galaxy.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and W.P. Maksym (CfA)
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In this spectacular image captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the galaxy NGC 2799 (on the left) is seemingly being pulled into the center of the galaxy NGC 2798 (on the right).
Interacting galaxies, such as these, are so named because of the influence they have on each other, which may eventually result in a merger or a unique formation. Already, these two galaxies have seemingly formed a sideways waterspout, with stars from NGC 2799 appearing to fall into NGC 2798 almost like drops of water.
Galactic mergers can take place over several hundred million to over a billion years. While one might think the merger of two galaxies would be catastrophic for the stellar systems within, the sheer amount of space between stars means that stellar collisions are unlikely and stars typically drift past each other.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Sahai
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When a star like the Sun runs out of fuel, it expands and its outer layers puff off, and then the core of the star shrinks. This phase is known as a "planetary nebula," and astronomers expect our Sun will experience this in about 5 billion years. This Helix Nebula images contains infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (green and red), optical light from Hubble (orange and blue), ultraviolet from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (cyan), and Chandra's X-rays (appearing as white) showing the white dwarf star that formed in the center of the nebula. The image is about four light years across.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC; Ultraviolet: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSC; Optical: NASA/STScI(M. Meixner)/ESA/NRAO(T.A. Rector); Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Su
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Swirling in Jupiter's atmosphere for hundreds of years, the Great Red Spot is captured in this pair of close-up images from Juno's JunoCam camera. The giant storm churns through Jupiter's atmosphere, creating the turbulent flows to its west. On the west side of the Great Red Spot itself a sliver of red material is being pulled off the periphery. This is a recent, frequent, phenomenon first observed in ground-based data in 2017.
Two images have been mosaicked together by citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill to create this enhanced color composite. When they were taken on Feb. 12, 2019 at 10:24 a.m. PDT (1:24 p.m. EDT) and 10:29 a.m. PDT (1:29 p.m. EDT), Juno was about 43,500 miles (70,000 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops. Features as small as 31 miles (50 kilometers) can be resolved in the images, allowing us to see structure in the interior of the Great Red Spot, as well as the fine texture of the white clouds in the South Tropical Zone below.
Image Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Kevin M. Gill, © CC BY
Astronomers found something they weren't expecting at the heart of the globular cluster NGC 6397: a concentration of smaller black holes lurking there instead of one massive black hole.
Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar systems, which host stars that are closely packed together. These systems are also typically very old — the globular cluster at the focus of this study, NGC 6397, is almost as old as the universe itself. This cluster resides 7,800 light-years away, making it one of the closest globular clusters to Earth. Due to its very dense nucleus, it is known as a core-collapsed cluster.
At first, astronomers thought the globular cluster hosted an intermediate-mass black hole. These are the long-sought "missing link" between supermassive black holes (many millions of times our Sun's mass) that lie at the cores of galaxies, and stellar-mass black holes (a few times our Sun's mass) that form following the collapse of a single massive star. Their mere existence is hotly debated. Only a few candidates have been identified to date.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Stanghellini
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Saturn never shows a crescent phase -- from Earth. But when viewed from beyond, the majestic giant planet can show an unfamiliar diminutive sliver. This image of crescent Saturn in natural color was taken by the robotic Cassini spacecraft in 2007. The featured image captures Saturn's majestic rings from the side of the ring plane opposite the Sun -- the unilluminated side -- another vista not visible from Earth. Pictured are many of Saturn's photogenic wonders, including the subtle colors of cloud bands, the complex shadows of the rings on the planet, and the shadow of the planet on the rings. A careful eye will find the moons Mimas (2 o'clock) and Janus (4 o'clock), but the real challenge is to find Pandora (8 o'clock). Saturn is now nearly opposite from the Sun in the Earth's sky and so can be seen in the evening starting just after sunset for the rest of the night.
Image credit: NASA/ESA/SSI/Cassini Imaging Team
This image shows the globular cluster NGC 6380, which lies around 35,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Scorpio (the Scorpion). Globular clusters are spherical groups of stars held together by gravity; they often contain some of the oldest stars in their galaxies. The very bright star at the top of the image is HD 159073, which is only around 4,000 light-years from Earth, making it a much nearer neighbor than NGC 6380. This image was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, which, as its name suggests, has a wide field of view, meaning that it can image relatively large areas of the sky in enormous detail.
NGC 6380 is not a particularly exciting name, but it indicates that this cluster is catalogued in the New General Catalogue, which was originally compiled in 1888. This cluster has, however, been known by many other names. It was originally discovered by James Dunlop in 1826, and he rather immodestly named it Dun 538. Eight years later, in 1834, it was independently rediscovered by John Herschel and he (similarly immodestly) went on to name it H 3688. The cluster was re-rediscovered in 1959 by Paris Pismis, who catalogued it as Tonantzintla 1 – and who, to continue the pattern, also referred to it as Pismis 25. In addition to its colorful history of rediscovery, up until the 1950s NGC 6380 was thought to be an open cluster. It was A. D. Thackeray who realized that it was in fact a globular cluster. Nowadays, this cluster is reliably recognized in widely available catalogues as a globular cluster, and referred to simply as NGC 6380.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, E. Noyola
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NGC 4258 is a spiral galaxy about 25 million light years from Earth, also known as M106. The Chandra image of NGC 4258 reveals the so-called anomalous arms. These mysterious structures are due to shock waves generated by the supermassive black hole in the nucleus of the galaxy.
Image credit: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Maryland/A.S. Wilson et al.
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This stunning false-color view of Saturn's moon Hyperion reveals crisp details across the strange, tumbling moon's surface. Differences in color could represent differences in the composition of surface materials. The view was obtained during Cassini's close flyby on Sept. 26, 2005.
Hyperion has a notably reddish tint when viewed in natural color. The red color was toned down in this false-color view, and the other hues were enhanced, in order to make more subtle color variations across Hyperion's surface more apparent.
Cassini scientists think that Hyperion’s unusual appearance can be attributed to the fact that it has an unusually low density for such a large object, giving it weak surface gravity and high porosity. These characteristics help preserve the original shapes of Hyperion’s craters by limiting the amount of impact ejecta coating the moon’s surface. Impactors tend to make craters by compressing the surface material, rather than blasting it out. Further, Hyperion’s weak gravity, and correspondingly low escape velocity, means that what little ejecta is produced has a good chance of escaping the moon altogether.
Images taken using infrared, green and ultraviolet spectral filters were combined to create this view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft's narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 62,000 kilometers (38,500 miles) from Hyperion and at a Sun-Hyperion-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees. The image scale is 362 meters (1,200 feet) per pixel.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
As the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter pans over large swaths of Mars' surface, it occasionally discovers surprises like this towering dust devil, which was captured from 185 miles (297 kilometers) above the ground. The length of this whirlwind's shadow indicates that it was more than half a mile (800 meters) high – about the size of the United Arab Emirate's Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
NASA’s InSight lander recorded a magnitude 4 marsquake last Dec. 24, but scientists learned only later the cause of that quake: a meteoroid strike estimated to be one of the biggest seen on Mars since NASA began exploring the cosmos. What’s more, the meteoroid excavated boulder-size chunks of ice buried closer to the Martian equator than ever found before – a discovery with implications for NASA’s future plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet.
Scientists determined the quake resulted from a meteoroid impact when they looked at before-and-after images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and spotted a new, yawning crater. Offering a rare opportunity to see how a large impact shook the ground on Mars, the event and its effects are detailed in two papers published Thursday, Oct. 27, in the journal Science.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
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More about the InSight Mars Lander
NASA’s Juno spacecraft observed the complex colors and structure of Jupiter’s clouds as it completed its 43rd close flyby of the giant planet on July 5, 2022.
Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson created these two images using raw data from the JunoCam instrument aboard the spacecraft. At the time the raw image was taken, Juno was about 3,300 miles (5,300 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about 50 degrees. North is up. At that moment, the spacecraft was traveling at about 130,000 mph (209,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet.
The first image (left) was processed to portray the approximate colors that the human eye would see from Juno’s vantage point. The second image (right) comes from the same raw data, but in this case Jónsson digitally processed it to increase both the color saturation and contrast to sharpen small-scale features and to reduce compression artifacts and noise that typically appear in raw images. This clearly reveals some of the most intriguing aspects of Jupiter’s atmosphere, including color variation that results from differing chemical composition, the three-dimensional nature of Jupiter’s swirling vortices, and the small, bright “pop-up” clouds that form in the higher parts of the atmosphere.
Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, Image processing by Björn Jónsson © CC NC SA
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Jupiter’s volcanically active moon Io casts its shadow on the planet in this dramatic image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. As with solar eclipses on the Earth, within the dark circle racing across Jupiter’s cloud tops one would witness a full solar eclipse as Io passes in front of the Sun.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope watched a mysterious dark vortex on Neptune abruptly steer away from a likely death on the giant blue planet.
This Hubble Space Telescope snapshot of the dynamic blue-green planet Neptune reveals a monstrous dark storm (top center) and the emergence of a smaller dark spot nearby (top right). The giant vortex, which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean, was traveling south toward certain doom by atmospheric forces at the equator when it suddenly made a U-turn and began drifting back northward.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), and L.A. Sromovsky and P.M. Fry (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
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The Blue Ring Nebula, which perplexed scientists for over a decade, appears to be the youngest known example of two stars merged into one.
In 2004, scientists with NASA's space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spotted an object unlike any they'd seen before in our Milky Way galaxy: a large, faint blob of gas with a star at its center. In the GALEX images, the blob appeared blue – though it doesn't actually emit light visible to the human eye – and subsequent observations revealed a thick ring structure within it. So the team nicknamed it the Blue Ring Nebula. Over the next 16 years, they studied it with multiple Earth- and space-based telescopes, but the more they learned, the more mysterious it seemed.
A new study published online on Nov. 18 in the journal Nature may have cracked the case. By applying cutting-edge theoretical models to the slew of data that has been collected on this object, the authors posit the nebula – a cloud of gas in space – is likely composed of debris from two stars that collided and merged into a single star.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Seibert (Carnegie Institution for Science)/K. Hoadley (Caltech)/GALEX Team
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After revealing a trove of details about the moons Ganymede and Europa, the mission to Jupiter is setting its sights on sister moon Io.
NASA’s Juno mission is scheduled to obtain images of the Jovian moon Io on Dec. 15 as part of its continuing exploration of Jupiter’s inner moons. Now in the second year of its extended mission to investigate the interior of Jupiter, the solar-powered spacecraft performed a close flyby of Ganymede in 2021 and of Europa earlier this year.
In this image, the volcano-laced surface of Jupiter’s moon Io was captured in infrared by the Juno spacecraft’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) imager as it flew by at a distance of was about 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers) on July 5, 2022. Brighter spots indicate higher temperatures in this image.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
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The HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured avalanches in action. As seasonal ice vaporized in the spring, these 1,640-foot-tall (500-meter-tall) cliffs at Mars' north pole began to crumble. Such cliffs reveal the deep time scales on the planet, exposing the many layers of ice and dust that have settled during different eras. Like the rings of a tree, each layer has a story to tell scientists about how the environment was changing.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this impressive image revealing a band of swirling clouds in Jupiter's northern latitudes during Juno’s close flyby on Nov. 3, 2019. Small pop-up storms can also be seen rising above the lighter areas of the clouds, most noticeably on the right side of the image.
This view provides scientists with high-resolution details — the spacecraft skimmed approximately 3,200 miles (5,200 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops at the time it was taken.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Galaxies and dark matter go together like peanut butter and jelly. Rarely is one without the other, but a recently discovered galaxy called NGC 1052-DF2 is nearly entirely lacking in dark matter.
In November 2019, researchers were astonished when they viewed its image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Dark matter is an invisible substance that astronomers believe plays an important role in the formation of galaxies and is thought to comprise 85 percent of the universe’s mass. This discovery not only challenges the ideas of how galaxies form, but also provides evidence that dark matter is real. It shows that dark matter is not always coupled with regular matter in galaxies and that it has its own separate existence. In addition to lacking dark matter, galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 is an anomaly because you can see straight through it. This is called an ultra-diffuse galaxy because it has an extremely low density. As a result of these findings, a team of researchers are hunting for more dark-matter deficient galaxies to better understand the nature of dark matter and the formation of galaxies.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. van Dokkum (Yale University)
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Named for the Greek god of fear, Phobos is one of Mars' two moons (Deimos, named for the god of terror, is the other), and it's only about 13 miles (21 kilometers) across. Stickney Crater, the indentation on the moon's lower right, is about 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) wide in this image from the HiRISE aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Despite its small size, Phobos is of great interest to scientists: Is it a captured asteroid, or a chunk of Mars that broke off after a massive impact? A Japanese mission is scheduled to launch to Phobos in the near future, and the moon has been proposed as a staging ground for astronauts before they go to Mars.
Image credit: NASNA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
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This 2017 enhanced-color image from the fifth Juno flyby of Jupiter shows a mysterious dark spot which seems to reveal a Jovian “galaxy” of swirling storms.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko
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Images of knobbly rocks and rounded hills are delighting scientists as NASA’s Curiosity rover climbs Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8-kilometer-tall) mountain within the 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) basin of Mars’ Gale Crater. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, highlights those features in a panorama captured on July 3, 2021 (the 3,167th Martian day, or sol, of the mission).
This location is particularly exciting: Spacecraft orbiting Mars show that Curiosity is now somewhere between a region enriched with clay minerals and one dominated by salty minerals called sulfates. The mountain’s layers in this area may reveal how the ancient environment within Gale Crater dried up over time. Similar changes are seen across the planet, and studying this region up close has been a major long-term goal for the mission.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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Andromeda, a large spiral galaxy much like our Milky Way Galaxy, is relatively nearby and can be easily seen with binoculars in the autumn sky. The galaxy's central region is called the galactic bulge because the stars form a ball a few thousand light years in diameter that extends above and below the disk of the galaxy. In this Chandra/Spitzer composite, red represents Spitzer's 24 micron mid-infrared data, green represents low-energy X-rays from Chandra (0.5-2.0 keV), and blue represents high-energy X-rays from Chandra (2.0-4.0 keV).
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/UMass/Z.Li & Q.D.Wang; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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The spacecraft used its infrared instrument during recent flybys of Jupiter’s mammoth moon to create this latest map, which comes out a decade after Juno’s launch.
The science team for NASA’s Juno spacecraft has produced a new infrared map of the mammoth Jovian moon Ganymede, combining data from three flybys, including its latest approach on July 20. These observations by the spacecraft’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, which “sees” in infrared light not visible to the human eye, provide new information on Ganymede’s icy shell and the composition of the ocean of liquid water beneath.
JIRAM was designed to capture the infrared light emerging from deep inside Jupiter, probing the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below Jupiter’s cloud tops. But the instrument can also be used to study the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (known collectively as the Galilean moons in honor of their discoverer, Galileo).
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
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"A mind of limits, a camera of thoughts" is the name of this contribution from citizen scientist Prateek Sarpal. Jupiter inspires artists and scientists with its beauty. In this image, south is up, and the enhanced color evokes an exotic marble and childhood joy.
Image Credit: Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Prateek Sarpal, © CC NC SA