This mosaic shows part of the Noctis Labyrinthus region, the ‘Labyrinth of the Night’, on Mars. It was composed by Bill Dunford using scenes available in the Mars Express image archive, HRSCview.
The object in this image is Jonckheere 900 or J 900, a planetary nebula — glowing shells of ionized gas pushed out by a dying star. Discovered in the early 1900s by astronomer Robert Jonckheere, the dusty nebula is small but fairly bright, with a relatively evenly spread central region surrounded by soft wispy edges.
Despite the clarity of this Hubble image, the two objects in the picture above can be confusing for observers. J 900’s nearby companion, a faint star in the constellation of Gemini, often causes problems for observers because it is so close to the nebula — when seeing conditions are bad, this star seems to merge into J 900, giving it an elongated appearance. Hubble’s position above the Earth’s atmosphere means that this is not an issue for the space telescope.
Astronomers have also mistakenly reported observations of a double star in place of these two objects, as the planetary nebula is quite small and compact.
J 900’s central star is only just visible in this image, and is very faint — fainter than the nebula’s neighbor. The nebula appears to display a bipolar structure, where there are two distinct lobes of material emanating from its center, enclosed by a bright oval disc.
Astronomers have discovered some of the youngest stars ever seen thanks to the Herschel space observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions. Dense envelopes of gas and dust surround the fledging stars known as protostars, making their detection difficult until now. The discovery gives scientists a window into the earliest and least understood phases of star formation.
The new results come from the Herschel Orion Protostar Survey (HOPS), led by the University of Toledo. HOPS has looked at the vast stellar nursery in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, the biggest site of star formation near our solar system, located in the constellation of Orion.
A portion of the survey is shown here in two side-by-side images of the same region around the nebula Messier 78 where several of 15 new protostars were found. Herschel detected the extremely young protostars -- indicated in the image by the four circles -- that were too cold to be picked up in previous scans of the area by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Radio wave observations from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile, a collaboration between the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden and the European Southern Observatory in Germany, further confirmed the newfound protostars' presence.
On the left, the nebula Messier 78 is shown in a three-color composite from the three telescopes just mentioned. In green is the 160-micron, far-infrared light collected by Herschel's Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS). Appearing in blue is 24-micron light from Spitzer. Finally, 870-micron radio wave light gathered by APEX glows red.
On the right the same region appears in a separate three-color composite that shows infrared observations from two instruments aboard NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Blue represents 3.6- and 4.5-micron light and green shows light of 5.8 and 8 microns, both captured by Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC). Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer's Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS).
This image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile shows NGC 1637, a spiral galaxy located about 35 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus (The River). In 1999 scientists discovered a Type II supernova in this galaxy and followed its slow fading over the following years.
MAXI J1659–152 is a rapidly spinning binary system comprising a black hole more than three times more massive than the Sun and a red dwarf companion star only 20% the mass of the Sun. The pair are separated by only 1.3 solar radii, or just under one million kilometers. Thanks to a 14.5 hour observing campaign by ESA’s XMM-Newton, scientists were able to measure a record-breaking orbital period of just 2.4 hours – the fastest spinning binary system with a black hole. The black hole orbits around the system’s common center of mass at 150,000 km/h, while the companion travels at two million kilometers per hour, making it the fastest-moving star ever seen in a binary system.
The center of mass is so close to the black hole due to its vast mass that it appears as if it is not orbiting. In this animation the focus is on the periodic absorption dips detected by XMM-Newton as the stream of material from the companion impacts on the black hole’s accretion disc.
The system was first found on 25 September 2010 by NASA’s Swift space telescope, with follow-up observations by the Japanese MAXI instrument on the International Space Station, NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, ESA’s XMM-Newton and ESO’s ground-based Very Large Telescope.
This charming and bright galaxy, known as IRAS 23436+5257, was captured by the the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It is located in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia, which is named after an arrogant, vain, and yet beautiful mythical queen.
The twisted, worm-like structure of this galaxy is most likely the result of a collision and subsequent merger of two galaxies. Such interactions are quite common in the Universe, and they can range from minor interactions involving a satellite galaxy being caught by a spiral arm, to major galactic crashes. Friction between the gas and dust during a collision can have a major effect on the galaxies involved, morphing the shape of the original galaxies and creating interesting new structures.
When you look up at the calm and quiet night sky it is not always easy to picture it as a dynamic and vibrant environment with entire galaxies in motion, spinning like children’s toys and crashing into whatever crosses their path. The motions are, of course, extremely slow, and occur over millions or even billions of years.
The aftermath of these galactic collisions helps scientists to understand how these movements occur and what may be in store for our own Milky Way, which is on a collision course with a neighboring galaxy, Messier 31.
This sequence of radar images of asteroid 2013 ET was obtained on March 10, 2013, by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, when the asteroid was about 693,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Earth. The radar imagery suggests the irregularly shaped object is at least 130 feet (40 meters) wide. The 18 radar images were taken over a span of 1.3 hours. During that interval the asteroid completed only a fraction of one rotation, suggesting that it rotates once every few hours.
NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them, and plots their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.
Kepler's Supernova Remnant: The remains of a stellar explosion that appear in Earth's sky in 1604.
Over 400 years ago, Johannes Kepler and many others witnessed the appearance of a new "star" in the sky. Today, this object is known as the Kepler supernova remnant. Previously, astronomers have deduced that the Kepler remnant comes from a so-called Type Ia supernova, which is the result of a thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf. New data from Chandra suggest that this white dwarf exploded after pulling material from a companion red giant star, and not from the merger with another white dwarf. In this image, data from Chandra are colored red, green, and blue to show low, medium, and high-energy X-rays that have been combined with an optical image of the field.
Scale: Image is 12 arcmin across (45 light years)
This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected with the greatest precision yet by the Planck mission. The ancient light, called the cosmic microwave background, was imprinted on the sky when the universe was 370,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today.
By analyzing the light patterns in this map, scientists are fine tuning what we know about the universe, including its origins, fate and basic components.
G306.3-0.9: A supernova remnant in the Milky Way at a distance of about 26,000 light years away from Earth.
The previously unknown remains of a shattered star have been found by NASA's Swift satellite. A follow-up Chandra observation helped glean more information about this object known as G306.3-0.9. This composite image merges X-rays from Chandra (blue), infrared data from Spitzer (red and cyan), and radio observations (purple) from the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Analysis of the data indicates this supernova remnant is less than 2,500 years old, making it one of the 20 youngest known in the Milky Way.
Scale: Image is 20 arcmin across (150 light years across)
"The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA's Voyager 1 has left the solar system," said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. "It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called 'the magnetic highway' where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed."
Gully landforms like those in this image are found in many craters in the mid-latitudes of Mars. Changes in gullies were first seen in images from the Mars Orbiter Camera in 2006, and studying such activity has been a high priority for HiRISE. Many examples of new deposits in gullies are now known.
This image shows a new deposit in Gasa Crater, in the southern mid-latitudes. The deposit is distinctively blue in enhanced-color images. This image was acquired in southern spring, but the flow that formed the deposit occurred in the preceding winter.
Current gully activity appears to be concentrated in winter and early spring, and may be caused by the seasonal carbon dioxide frost that is visible in gully alcoves in the winter.
This video showcases a small sampling of the thousands of images taken by the spacecraft, as well as animations illustrating how MESSENGER moves in orbit and how its orbit has changed during the mission.
The opening sequence is from the approach images from the first flyby in 2008. The first animation to follow (at 0:15) shows MESSENGER in its primary mission 12-hour orbit. The relevance of the November 9, 2011, date is that this was when the MESSENGER team was advised that NASA had approved the proposal for an extended mission, allowing the mission to continue making new observations from March 2012 to March 2013. The animation at 0:22 gives you an idea of the movement and gyrations ("dancing") that the spacecraft undergoes while it performs a schedule packed full of observations that take place over one Earth day. The animation sequence at 0:59 gives you a "top down" view over Mercury's north pole from when MESSENGER first went into orbit until several months into the extended mission. The apparent size of the orbit shrinks from the start of the animation to the end, as shortly into the extended mission, MESSENGER's orbital period was shrunk from 12-hours to 8-hours. The animation sequence at 1:44 shows MESSENGER's "dance" on the first day of the extended mission. The other images and embedded movies can be found in the Gallery section of the MESSENGER website.
Some highlight images of note include:
At 0:48 - Blue rays of Bek crater
At 0:54 - Basho crater
At 0:57 - Poe crater in Caloris basin
At 1:17 - MASCS instrument surface scans in ultraviolet and infrared
At 1:19 - A perspective view of the northern polar region, color-coded to MLA topography
At 1:27 - Rembrandt impact basin
At 1:29 - Rembrandt impact basin superimposed on the US for size comparison
At 1:34 - Rachmaninoff impact basin, 3D effect crated using the digital elevation model
At 1:34 - Debussy crater
At 1:58 - Beagle rupes
At 2:04 - Mosaic view of north pole, showing the shadowed regions
At 2:06 - As previous, with superimposed radar data indicating likely water-ice deposits
At 2:11 - A volcanic vent near the edge of Caloris basin
At 2:34 - Derain crater
At 2:36 - Disney crater and two unnamed craters that resemble Mickey Mouse
At 2:38 - Basho crater while the Sun is low in the sky
At 2:40 - Basho crater again, but now with the Sun nearly overhead
At 2:45 - Degas crater
At 2:58 - 'Weird terrain' at the Caloris antipode
At 3:03 - Waters crater with the 'blue tongue' of dark impact melt material
At 3:10 - Seuss crater
At 3:13 - Caloris basin
At 3:15 - Pit in Scarlatti crater, with prominent hollows on the pit rim
At 3:17 - Enhanced color of Caloris basin
At 3:22 - A lava channel that had flowed into the Kofi crater
At 3:29 - More detail of Caloris basin floor
At 3:30 - The young, bright-rayed Mena crater
At 3:37 - Central peaks of Eminescu crater, with hollows around the bases of the peaks
At 3:39 - Apollodorus and Pantheon fossae
At 3:41 - The hollows on the floor of Sander crater
The MESSENGER spacecraft is the first ever to orbit the planet Mercury, and the spacecraft's seven scientific instruments and radio science investigation are unraveling the history and evolution of the Solar System's innermost planet. Visit the Why Mercury? section of this website to learn more about the key science questions that the MESSENGER mission is addressing. During the one-year primary mission, MDIS acquired 88,746 images and extensive other data sets. MESSENGER is now in a year-long extended mission, during which plans call for the acquisition of more than 80,000 additional images to support MESSENGER's science goals.
The dark hot spot in this false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft is a window deep into Jupiter's atmosphere. All around it are layers of higher clouds, with colors indicating which layer of the atmosphere the clouds are in. The bluish clouds to the right are in the upper troposphere, or perhaps higher still, in the stratosphere. The reddish gyre under the hot spot to the right and the large reddish plume at its lower left are in the lower troposphere. In addition, a high, gauzy haze covers part of the frame. An annotated version of this image highlights the hot spot in the middle with an arrow and boxes around the plume and the gyre.
This image was taken on December 13, 2000, by Cassini's imaging science subsystem.
This montage combines data from ALMA with images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, for five distant galaxies. The ALMA images, represented in red, show the distant, background galaxies, being distorted by the gravitational lens effect produced by the galaxies in the foreground, depicted in the Hubble data in blue. The background galaxies appear warped into rings of light known as Einstein rings, which encircle the foreground galaxies.
This artist's impression shows the GX 339-4 binary system, which consists of a 7-solar-mass black hole that accretes mass from its companion, a low-mass star, shown on the left. The process takes place via an accretion disc and also triggers the release of powerful jets of highly-energetic particles.
Different regions in the jets and disc emit radiation at different wavelengths: the base of the jets, closer to the black hole, emit light at shorter wavelengths (infrared, shown here in yellow) than the extremity of the jets, which shine brightly in radio waves (shown here in red). Similarly, the most central part of the disc, closer to the black hole, shines brightly in X-rays (shown here in violet), whereas the outer parts shine most brightly at longer wavelengths (ultraviolet and optical, shown here in blue).
Observations performed using ESA's Herschel space observatory have provided the first view of GX 339-4 at far-infrared wavelengths, allowing astronomers to probe the jets down to their base, where the far-infrared emission originates. This is an important addition to the understanding of black-hole jets and of the physical processes that take place very close to a black hole.
NASA's STEREO-B spacecraft photographed "wild striations" in the tail of Comet Pan-STARRS as it passed by the sun.
Galaxies can take many forms — elliptical blobs, swirling spiral arms, bulges, and discs are all known components of the wide range of galaxies we have observed using telescopes like the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. However, some of the more intriguing objects in the sky around us include ring galaxies like the one pictured above — Zw II 28.
Ring galaxies are mysterious objects. They are thought to form when one galaxy slices through the disc of another, larger, one — as galaxies are mostly empty space, this collision is not as aggressive or as destructive as one might imagine. The likelihood of two stars physically colliding is minimal, and it is instead the gravitational effects of the two galaxies that causes the disruption.
This disruption upsets the material in both galaxies, causing it to redistribute to form a dense central core, encircled by bright stars. All this commotion causes clouds of gas and dust to collapse and triggers new periods of intense star formation in the outer ring, which is thus full of hot, young, blue stars and regions that are actively giving rise to new stars.
The sparkling pink and purple loop of Zw II 28 is not a typical ring galaxy due to its lack of a visible central companion. For many years it was thought to be a lone circle on the sky, but observations using Hubble have shown that there may be a possible companion lurking just inside the ring, where the loop appears to double back on itself. The galaxy has a knotty, swirling ring structure, with some areas appearing much brighter than others.
WISE J104915.57-531906 is at the center of the larger image, which was taken by the NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). This is the closest star system discovered since 1916, and the third closest to our sun. It is 6.5 light-years away.
At first, the light appeared to be from a single object, but a sharper image from Gemini Observatory in Chile revealed that it was from a pair of cool star-like bodies called brown dwarfs.
The figure above shows an oblique view of a 280 km long scarp. The color scale on this figure represents elevation in which red is high and blue is low. This scarp is interpreted to be a surface-breaking thrust fault. Thrust faults are surface manifestations of the shrinkage of the planet resulting from the cooling of its interior. Notice that the terrain on the left side of the scarp stands about 2 km higher than that of the right side of the scarp. To give you a sense of the scale of this scarp, the state of Delaware has been superposed on the figure.
Center Latitude: 58.18°
Center Longitude: 307.69° E
Scale: The crater that is being cross-cut by this scarp is about 108 km (67 mi.) in diameter.
47 Tucanae: A globular cluster located about 15,000 light years from Earth.
New results from Chandra and other X-ray telescopes have provided one of the most reliable determinations yet of the relation between the radius of a neutron star and its mass. Neutron stars, the ultra-dense cores left behind after massive stars collapse, contain the densest matter known in the Universe outside of a black hole. This image contains data from a long Chandra observation of 47Tucanae, a globular cluster where one of the eight neutron stars in the study is found. Lower-energy X-rays are red, those with intermediate energies are green, and the highest-energy X-rays are shown in blue.
Scale: Image is 2.3 arcmin across. (about 10 light years)
This image, speckled with blue, white, and yellow light, shows part of the spiral galaxy IC 5052. Surrounded by distant stars and galaxies, it emits a bright blue-white glow which highlights its narrow, intricate structure. It is viewed side-on in the constellation of Pavo (The Peacock), in the southern sky.
When spiral galaxies are viewed from this angle, it is very difficult to fully understand their properties and how they are arranged. IC 5052 is actually a barred spiral galaxy – its pinwheeling arms do not begin from the center point but are instead attached to either end of a straight "bar" of stars that cuts through the galaxy's middle. Approximately two thirds of all spirals are barred, including the Milky Way.
Bursts of pale blue light are visible across the galaxy's length, partially blocked out by weaving lanes of darker gas and dust. These are pockets of extremely hot newborn stars. The bars present in spirals like IC 5052 are thought to help these formation processes by effectively funneling material from the swirling arms inwards towards these hot stellar nurseries.
This image shows an artist's impression of a highly obscured high-mass X-ray binary, consisting of a neutron star that is accreting mass from its companion, a blue supergiant star.
Highly obscured high-mass X-ray binaries exhibit very faint emission at soft X-ray energies and as a result had eluded searches in this portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. They were discovered in 2003 via hard X-ray observations with INTEGRAL. Astronomers believe that the soft X-rays are absorbed by the wind released by the companion star, which embeds the neutron star.
Abell 68, pictured here in infrared light, is a galaxy cluster. The effect of its gravity on light means it boosts Hubble's power, extending the telescope's ability to observe distant and faint objects. The fuzzy collection of blobs in the middle and upper left of the image is a swarm of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars and vast amounts of dark matter. Distorted shapes visible throughout the field of view are distant galaxies whose light has been bent and amplified by the cluster.
Annotations:
1 and 2: This galaxy is visible twice, thanks to its light following two separate paths around an elliptical galaxy before reaching us. The image marked 2 is heavily distorted into the shape of an alien from the cult 1970s video game Space Invaders. The lensed galaxy lies at a redshift of around 1.6. The lensing galaxy significantly closer, at a redshift of around 0.26.
3: This galaxy appears to be melting, with purple liquid dripping from it. In fact, the purple droplets are clouds of gas being stripped out of the galaxy and heated up. This phenomenon, called ram pressure stripping, occurs when a galaxy passes through a denser patch of intergalactic gas, which strips out the gas from within the galaxy.
4: The series of long, light streaks here are background galaxies, the images of which have been heavily distorted by the lensing effects of the cluster in the foreground. These lie at a range of redshifts between around 2 and 6.
This photograph shows the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy to the Milky Way. The positions of eight faint and rare cool eclipsing binary stars are marked with crosses (these objects are too faint to appear directly in this picture). By studying how their light changes, and other properties of these systems, astronomers can measure the distances to eclipsing binaries very accurately. A long series of observations of these objects has now led to the most accurate determination so far of the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud — a crucial step in the determination of distances across the Universe.
This view of Jupiter's moon Europa features several regional-resolution mosaics overlaid on a lower resolution global view for context. The regional views were obtained during several different flybys of the moon by NASA's Galileo mission, and they stretch from high northern to high southern latitudes. Prominent here are the long, arcuate (or arc-shaped) and linear markings called lineae (Latin for strings or threads), which are a signature feature of Europa's surface. Color saturation has been enhanced to bring out the subtle red coloration present along many of the lineae. The color data extends into the infrared, showing bluish ice (indicating larger ice grains) in the polar regions.
The terrain in this view stretches from the side of Europa that always trails in its orbit at left (west), to the side that faces away from Jupiter at right (east). In addition to the lineae, the regional-scale images contain many interesting features, including lenticulae (small spots), chaos terrain, maculae (large spots), and the unusual bright band known as Agenor Linea in the south.
The regional-resolution mosaics enhance the amount of detail visible in a previously released view of the same region on Europa, [see PIA02590]. While the earlier image uses much of the same low-resolution data, its images are projected from a different angle and are processed with greater color saturation.
This view is an orthographic projection centered on 5.53 degrees south latitude, 214.5 degrees west longitude and has a resolution of 1600 feet (500 meters) per pixel. An orthographic view is like the view seen by a distant observer looking through a telescope.
The mosaic was constructed from individual images obtained by the Solid State Imaging (SSI) system on NASA's Galileo spacecraft during six flybys of Europa between 1996 and 1999 (flybys designated G1, E11, E14, E15, E17, and E19).
Peering over the shoulder of giant Saturn, through its rings, and across interplanetary space, NASA's Cassini spacecraft spies the bright, cloudy terrestrial planet, Venus. The vast distance from Saturn means that Venus only shows up as a white dot, just above and to the right of the image center.
Venus, along with Mercury, Earth, and Mars, is one of the rocky 'terrestrial' planets in the solar system that orbit relatively close to the sun. Though Venus has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide that reaches nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit (500 degrees Celsius) and a surface pressure 100 times that of Earth, it is considered a twin to our planet because of their similar size, mass, rocky composition and orbit. Venus is covered in thick sulfuric acid clouds, making it very bright.
This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 17 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on November 10, 2012.
This is a true-color picture of Saturn and Venus. A false-color mosaic including an image very similar to this one can be seen at PIA14934.
The bright arc is the limb of Saturn. A portion of the rings is seen in silhouette against the face of Saturn, which itself is faintly illuminated by sunlight scattered off the rings. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 498,000 miles (802,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 178 degrees. Image scale is 28 miles (44 kilometers) per pixel.
This composite image shows a view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (left) and from the NACO system on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (right) of the gas and dust around the young star HD 100546. The Hubble visible-light image shows the outer disc of gas and dust around the star. The new infrared VLT picture of a small part of the disc shows a candidate protoplanet. Both pictures were taken with a special coronagraph that suppresses the light from the brilliant star. The position of the star is marked with a red cross in both panels.
ESA's XMM-Newton and NASA's NuSTAR have detected a supermassive black hole spinning at almost the speed of light in the heart of spiral galaxy NGC 1365. The rate at which a black hole spins encodes the history of its formation. An extremely rapid rotation could result from either a steady and uniform flow of matter spiraling in via an accretion disc (as shown in this artist impression) or as a result of the merger of two galaxies and their smaller black holes.
Also depicted in this image is an outflowing jet of energetic particles, believed to be powered by the black hole's spin. The regions near black holes contain compact sources of high energy X-ray radiation thought, in some scenarios, to originate from the base of these jets. The nature of the X-ray emission enables astronomers to see how fast matter is swirling in the inner region of the disc, and ultimately to measure the black hole's spin rate.
It may look like something from The Lord of the Rings, but this fiery swirl is actually a planetary nebula known as ESO 456-67. Set against a backdrop of bright stars, the rust-colored object lies in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer), in the southern sky.
Despite the name, these ethereal objects have nothing at all to do with planets; this misnomer came about over a century ago, when the first astronomers to observe them only had small, poor-quality telescopes. Through these, the nebulae looked small, compact, and planet-like — and so were labeled as such.
When a star like the Sun approaches the end of its life, it flings material out into space. Planetary nebulae are the intricate, glowing shells of dust and gas pushed outwards from such a star. At their centers lie the remnants of the original stars themselves — small, dense white dwarf stars.
In this image of ESO 456-67, it is possible to see the various layers of material expelled by the central star. Each appears in a different hue — red, orange, yellow, and green-tinted bands of gas are visible, with clear patches of space at the heart of the nebula. It is not fully understood how planetary nebulae form such a wide variety of shapes and structures; some appear to be spherical, some elliptical, others shoot material in waves from their polar regions, some look like hourglasses or figures of eight, and others resemble large, messy stellar explosions — to name but a few.
This 73-frame movie of asteroid 2012 DA14 was generated from data obtained by NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar on the night of February 15 to 16, 2013.
This collage of 72 individual radar-generated images of asteroid 2012 DA14 was created using data from NASA's 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California. The data were collected on the night of February 15 to 16, 2013, after the asteroid had made its closest approach to Earth and was exiting the Earth-moon system. During the observations, the space rock's distance to Earth increased from 74,000 to 195,000 miles (120,000 to 314,000 kilometers).
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star like our sun, approximately 210 light-years away in the constellation Lyra.
The line up compares artist's concepts of the planets in the Kepler-37 system to the moon and planets in the solar system. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, measuring about one-third the size of Earth. Kepler-37c, the second planet, is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring almost three-quarters the size of Earth. Kepler-37d, the third planet, is twice the size of Earth.
A "year" on these planets is very short. Kepler-37b orbits its host star every 13 days at less than one-third the distance Mercury is to the sun. The other two planets, Kepler-37c and Kepler-37d, orbit their star every 21 and 40 days. All three planets have orbits lying less than the distance Mercury is to the sun, suggesting that they are very hot, inhospitable worlds.
One of the great curiosities in solar science is that our Sun's outer atmosphere – the corona – is heated to millions of degrees when its visible surface is 'only' about 6000 degrees. Even stranger is a curious temperature minimum of 4000 degrees lying between the two layers, in the chromosphere. Now, using ESA's Herschel space observatory, scientists have made the first discovery of an equivalent cool layer in the atmosphere of the Sun-like star, Alpha Centauri A.
