This NASA montage of New Horizons images shows Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, taken during the spacecraft's Jupiter flyby in early 2007. The image shows a major eruption in progress on Io's night side, at the northern volcano Tvashtar. Incandescent lava glows red beneath a volcanic plume, whose uppermost portions are illuminated by sunlight. The plume appears blue due to scattering of light by small particles within it.
An image created by NASA shows a hemispheric view of Venus created using more than a decade of radar investigations culminating in the 1990-1994 Magellan mission, and is centered on the planet's North Pole. The Magellan spacecraft imaged more than 98 percent of the planet Venus and a mosaic of the Magellan images (most with illumination from the west) forms the image base. Gaps in the Magellan coverage were filled with images from the Earth-based Arecibo radar in a region centered roughly on 0 degree latitude and longitude, and with a neutral tone elsewhere (primarily near the south pole)
This is the most complete look at the morphology of the far side of the moon to date. The global mosaic is comprised of over 15,000 Wide Angle Camera images acquired between November 2009 and February 2011.
The hazy and aptly named Fine Ring Nebula is an unusual planetary nebula. Most are either spherical or elliptical in shape, or bipolar (featuring two symmetric lobes of material). But the Fine Ring Nebula — captured here by the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera mounted on the New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile — looks like an almost perfect circular ring. It's like an enormous smoke ring in space.
Star V838 Monocerotis's (V838 Mon) light echo, which is about six light years in diameter, is seen from the Hubble Space Telescope in this February 2004 handout photo released by NASA on December 4, 2011. Light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of Monoceros the unicorn. It became the brightest star in the Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002 when its outer surface greatly expanded suddenly.
This image shows a classic type 1a supernova remnant. Researchers Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the United States and US-Australian Brian Schmidt have won the 2011 Nobel Physics Prize for their research on supernovae, the Nobel jury said. "They have studied several dozen exploding stars, called supernovae, and discovered that the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate," it said, adding that their discovery had changed mankind's understanding of the universe.
Looking like a Mother's Day bunch of flowers, this image comes from a very deep Chandra observation of the Tycho supernova remnant in the Milky Way, produced by the explosion of a white dwarf star in our galaxy. Low-energy X-rays (red) show expanding debris from the supernova explosion and high energy X-rays (blue) show the blast wave, a shell of extremely energetic electrons. These high-energy X-rays show a pattern of X-ray "stripes" never seen in a supernova remnant. Some of the brightest stripes can be seen on the right side of the remnant pointing from the outer rim to the interior. These stripes may provide the first evidence that supernova remnants can accelerate particles to energies a hundred times higher than achieved by the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider. The results could explain how some of the extremely energetic particles bombarding the Earth, called cosmic rays, are produced. Tycho is named after a Danish astronomer who first observed it in 1572.
This picture released by the European Southern Observatory and taken from ESO's Very Large Telescope shows NGC 3521, a spiral galaxy located about 35 million light years away in the constellation of Leo. Spanning about 50,000 light-years, this galaxy has a bright and compact nucleus, surrounded by richly detailed spiral structure. The most distinctive features of the bright galaxy NGC 3521 are its long spiral arms that are dotted with star-forming regions and interspersed with veins of dust. The arms are irregular and patchy, making NGC 3521 a typical example of a flocculent spiral galaxy. These galaxies have 「fluffy」 spiral arms that contrast with the sweeping arms of grand-design spirals such as the famous Whirlpool galaxy or M 51, discovered by Charles Messier.
The Pinwheel Galaxy is pictured a few days ago as a supernova (PTF11kly) heads towards peak brightness. Astronomers have discovered the closest supernova of its kind in 25 years, the flare of a star self-destructing a mere 21 million light years from Earth and soon visible to amateur sky watchers.
Infrared images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, were combined in this image of RCW 86, the dusty remains of the oldest documented example of an exploding star, or supernova. It shows light from both the remnant itself and unrelated background light from our Milky Way galaxy. The colours in the image allow astronomers to distinguish between the remnant and galactic background, and determine exactly which structures belong to the remnant. Dust associated with the blast wave of the supernova appears red in this image, while dust in the background appears yellow and green. Stars in the field of view appear blue. By determining the temperature of the dust in the red circular shell of the supernova remnant, which marks the extent to which the blast wave from the supernova has traveled since the explosion, astronomers were able to determine the density of the material there, and conclude that RCW 86 must have exploded into a large, wind-blown cavity.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the spiral galaxy M74. Bright knots of glowing gas light up the spiral arms, indicating a rich environment of star formation. Messier 74, also called NGC 628, is an example of a grand-design spiral galaxy that is viewed by Earth observers nearly face-on. M74 is located roughly 32 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pisces. It is the dominant member of a small group of about half a dozen galaxies, the M74 galaxy group. In its entirety, it is estimated that M74 is home to about 100 billion stars, making it slightly smaller than our Milky Way.
A composite handout image from NASA shows a cluster of stars nicknamed The Pacman Nebula because of its appearance in optical images. In optical images the "mouth" of the Pacman character appears dark because it is obscured by dust and gas, but in the infrared Spitzer image the dust in this region glows brightly. This composite image of NGC 281 contains X-ray data from Chandra (purple) with infrared observations from Spitzer (red, green, blue). The high-mass stars in NGC 281 drive many aspects of their galactic environment through powerful winds flowing from their surfaces and intense radiation that heats surrounding gas, "boiling it away" into interstellar space. This process results in the formation of large columns of gas and dust, as seen on the left side of the image. These structures likely contain newly forming stars. The eventual deaths of massive stars as supernovas will also seed the galaxy with material and energy.
A Hubble Space Telescope image of an especially photogenic group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. Arp 273 lies in the constellation Andromeda and is roughly 300 million light-years away from Earth.
VV 340, also known as Arp 302, provides a textbook example of colliding galaxies seen in the early stages of their interaction. The edge-on galaxy near the top of the image is VV 340 North and the face-on galaxy at the bottom of the image is VV 340 South. Millions of years later these two spirals will merge - much like the Milky Way and Andromeda will likely do billions of years from now. Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) are shown here along with optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue). VV 340 is located about 450 million light years from Earth.
This is NGC 3132, or The Eight-Burst Nebula. NASA explain: "It's the dim star, not the bright one, near the centre of NGC 3132 that created this odd but beautiful planetary nebula. Nicknamed the Eight-Burst Nebula and the Southern Ring Nebula, the glowing gas originated in the outer layers of a star like our Sun. In this representative colour picture, the hot blue pool of light seen surrounding this binary system is energised by the hot surface of the faint star. Although photographed to explore unusual symmetries, it's the asymmetries that help make this planetary nebula so intriguing. Neither the unusual shape of the surrounding cooler shell nor the structure and placements of the cool filamentary dust lanes running across NGC 3132 are well understood."
Thousands of young stars nestle within the giant nebula NGC 3603. This stellar "jewel box" is one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. NGC 3603 is a prominent star-forming region in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, about 20,000 light-years away. This image shows a young star cluster surrounded by a vast region of dust and gas. The image reveals stages in the life cycle of stars. The nebula was first discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1834. The image spans roughly 17 light-years.
All that remains of the oldest documented example of a supernova, called RCW 86, is seen in this image, a combination of data from four different space telescopes to create a multi-wavelength view. X-ray images from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Observatory and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory are combined to form the blue and green colors in the image. The X-rays show the interstellar gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by the passage of the shock wave from the supernova. Infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are shown in yellow and red, and reveal dust radiating at a temperature of several hundred degrees below zero. This is the first time that this type of cavity has been seen around a white dwarf system prior to explosion. RCW 86 is approximately 8,000 light-years away.
This NASA image shows how using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are witnessing the unprecedented transition of a supernova to a supernova remnant, where light from an exploding star in a neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, reached Earth in February 1987. Named Supernova 1987A, it was the closest supernova explosion witnessed in almost 400 years. The supernova's close proximity to Earth allows astronomers to study it in detail as it evolves. Now, the supernova debris, which has faded over the years, is brightening. This means that a different power source has begun to light the debris. The debris of SN 1987A is beginning to impact the surrounding ring, creating powerful shock waves that generate X-rays observed with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Those X-rays are illuminating the supernova debris and shock heating is making it glow in visible light. Since its launch in 1990, the Hubble telescope has p
The bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched wings of the nebula record the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder mehim. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star. This hot gas creates the wings of our angel. A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, cinching the expanding nebula into an hourglass shape.
This NASA image shows Cygnus X as it hosts many young stellar groupings. The combined outflows and ultraviolet radiation from the region's numerous massive stars have heated and pushed gas away from the clusters, producing cavities of hot, lower-density gas. In this 8-micron infrared image, ridges of denser gas mark the boundaries of the cavities. Bright spots within these ridges show where stars are forming today.
The first image taken by Alma telescope in Chile. It shows the collision of two galaxies known as the Antennae Galaxies. The Antennae Galaxies are a pair of distorted colliding spiral galaxies about 70 million light-years away, in the constellation of Corvus (The Crow). This view combines ALMA observations, made in two different wavelength ranges during the observatorys early testing phase, with visible-light observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
This is the most detailed image ever taken of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, used radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere to produced this image. "These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Seen in radio waves, Cen A is one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. This is because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long.
This is the most detailed image ever taken of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, used radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere to produced this image. "These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Seen in radio waves, Cen A is one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. This is because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long.
At least four distinct plumes of water ice spew out from the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Light reflected off Saturn is illuminating the moon while the sun, almost directly behind Enceladus, backlights the plumes.
An image of Saturn taken on 24 December 2010 by the Cassini camera shows a storm with a latitudinal and longitudinal extent of 10,000 km and 17,000 km, respectively. The latitudinal extent of the storm's head is approximately the distance from London to Cape Town.
A quintet of Saturn's moons come together in the Cassini spacecraft's field of view. Janus (179 km, or 111 miles across) is on the far left. Pandora (81 km, or 50 miles across) orbits between the A ring and the thin F ring near the middle of the image. Brightly reflective Enceladus (504 km, or 313 miles across) appears above the centre of the image. Saturn's second largest moon, Rhea (1,528 km, or 949 miles across), is bisected by the right edge of the image. The smaller moon Mimas (396 km, or 246 miles across) can be seen beyond Rhea also on the right side of the image.
Plumes of water and ice are emitted from multiple locations along the "tiger stripes" near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus. More than 30 individual jets of different sizes can be seen in this image and more than 20 of them had not been identified before. The moon may have a salty ocean lurking beneath its iceball surface. The notion is counter-intuitive, for Saturn is so distant that the Sun is just a tiny point and the ambient temperature in space is near absolute zero (minus 273 degrees Celsius, minus 460 degrees Fahrenheit).
Enceladus shows its icy face and famous plumes in raw, unprocessed images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft during its successful flyby on November 6. The camera was pointing toward Enceladus at approximately 108,044 kilometres away. During this Enceladus encounter, the 16th of Cassini's mission, the spacecraft passed the moon at distance of about 300 miles (500 kilometres).
Photo taken by a ￡20 web cam
An amateur stargazer who surveyed the night sky every day for a year to capture the perfect shot finally struck gold after snapping this picture of a moon circling Jupiter - using a ￡20 web cam. David Billington, 56, captured the phenomenon using a 12in telescope attached to the bargain web cam which he bought down his local computer store. After 12 months patiently waiting for the perfect shot, he finally managed to capture one of Jupiter's four moons, Europa, circling the giant planet. Previous attempts at the shot were thwarted as it required the perfect conditions, which included dry weather, clear skies and the planet, moon and sun all being aligned.
The largest canyon in the Solar System cuts a wide swath across the face of Mars. Named Valles Marineris, the grand canyon extends over 3,000 kilometres long, spans as much as 600 kilometres across, and is as much as 8 kilometres deep. By comparison, Earth's Grand Canyon is 800 kilometres long, 30 kilometres across, and 1.8 kilometres deep. The origin of the Valles Marineris remains unknown, although a leading hypothesis holds that it started as a crack billions of years ago as the planet cooled. The above mosaic was created from over 100 images of Mars taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s.
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity can be seen perched on the southeast rim of the Santa Maria crater on Mars, in this photograph taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Rover tracks are visible to the west of the crater.
A section of the vast carbon-dioxide ice cap around the South Pole of Mars begins to melt towards the end of the Martian summer. Pits begin to appear and expand where the carbon dioxide dry ice sublimates directly into gas. These ice sheet pits may appear to be lined with gold, but the precise composition of the dust that highlights the pit walls actually remains unknown. The circular depressions toward the image centre measure about 60 metres across. The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars-orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the above image in late July. In the next few months, as Mars continues its journey around the Sun, colder seasons will prevail, and the thin air will turn chilly enough not only to stop the defrosting but once again freeze out more layers of solid carbon dioxide.
This image of the moon was photographed by the Expedition 28 crew aboard the International Space Station. The Earth transitions into the orange-coloured troposphere, the lowest and most dense portion of the Earth's atmosphere. The troposphere ends abruptly at the tropopause, which appears in the image as the sharp boundary between the orange and blue coloured atmosphere. The silvery-blue noctilucent clouds extend far above the Earth's troposphere.
Paolo Nespoli, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, took this spectacular photograph of the perigee moon, or "Supermoon", as the moon was at its closest point to Earth since 1993
The Comet Lovejoy is visible near Earth's horizon in this night-time image photographed by NASA astronaut Dan Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, onboard the International Space Station
Space shuttle Endeavour Commander Mark Kelly (L) and station flight engineer Ron Garan can be seen in a window of the International Space Station's cupola in this photo taken by spacewalking astronaut Mike Fincke
This unprecedented view of the space shuttle Atlantis, appearing like a bean sprout against clouds and city lights, shows the shuttle on its way home as photographed by the Expedition 28 crew of the International Space Station through a window of the station
The Southern Lights, or Aurora Australis, are photographed over the southeast Tasman Sea near southern New Zealand from the International Space Station
This image provided by NASA shows a solar flare early on Tuesday, the largest in five years. The image was was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in extreme ultraviolet light at 131 Angstroms. Scientists say the bursts of radiation hurled by the solar blast were not in the direction of Earth, so there'll be little impact to satellites and communication systems.
NASA have released this image of a huge solar flare near the edge of the Sun. It blew out a waving mass of erupting plasma that swirled and twisted over a 90-minute period on February 24. This event was captured in extreme ultraviolet light by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft . Some of the material blew out into space and other portions fell back to the surface. Because SDO images are super-HD, scientists are able to zoom in on the action and still see exquisite details. A similar flare on Valentine's Day caused concern about possible disruptions on Earth, although scientists suggest the latest eruption poses no threat.
In this photograph provided by Nick Risinger of Skysurvey.org, the entire night sky is shown in a composite photograph made from more than 37,000 exposures taken in different locations all over the world. Risinger traveled more than 60,000 miles by air and land and spent more than a year to produce the photo.
