![An Expanding Bubble in Space
A star 40 times more massive than our sun is blowing a giant bubble of material into space. In this colorful picture, the Hubble Telescope captured a glimpse of the expanding bubble, dubbed the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The beefy star [lower center] is embedded in the bright blue bubble. The stellar powerhouse is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space. The dense gas surrounding the star is shaping the castoff material into a bubble. The bubble’s surface is not smooth like a soap bubble’s. Its rippled appearance is due to encounters with gases of different thickness. The nebula is 6 light-years wide and is expanding at 4 million miles per hour (7 million kilometers per hour). The nebula is 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. Image Credit: NASA, Donald Walter (South Carolina State University), Paul Scowen and Brian Moore (Arizona State University)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/3f69614742022bcc50f3c6e4efc821ec/tumblr_mn7c8cCJmq1rnq3cto1_500.jpg)
An Expanding Bubble in Space
A star 40 times more massive than our sun is blowing a giant bubble of material into space. In this colorful picture, the Hubble Telescope captured a glimpse of the expanding bubble, dubbed the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635). The beefy star [lower center] is embedded in the bright blue bubble. The stellar powerhouse is so hot that it is quickly shedding material into space. The dense gas surrounding the star is shaping the castoff material into a bubble. The bubble’s surface is not smooth like a soap bubble’s. Its rippled appearance is due to encounters with gases of different thickness. The nebula is 6 light-years wide and is expanding at 4 million miles per hour (7 million kilometers per hour). The nebula is 7,100 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.
Image Credit: NASA, Donald Walter (South Carolina State University), Paul Scowen and Brian Moore (Arizona State University)
May/22/2013, 4pm
with 419 NotesReblog |
Cassini’s Private Eclipse
For this movie, Cassini pointed its cameras toward Dione to witness its distant sibling moon Rhea briefly pass behind in a series of 32 individual frames taken over 17 minutes. Four individual frames from the eclipse are shown at bottom.
Rhea (1,528 kilometers, 949 miles across) is larger than Dione (1,123 kilometers, 698 miles across), but also is farther away as seen here – thus, the two moons appear to be roughly the same angular size.
The view shows principally the anti-Saturn side of Dione, and the Saturn-facing side of far-off Rhea.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
May/20/2013, 11am
with 63 NotesReblog |
Mimas Occults Janus
Icy, impact-riddled Mimas (396 kilometers, 246 miles across) slips briefly in front of the moon Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) in this movie from Cassini.
The movie was created from 37 original images taken over the course of 20 minutes as the spacecraft’s narrow angle camera remained pointed toward Janus. Although Mimas moves a greater distance across the field of view, Janus also moved perceptibly during this time. The images were aligned to keep Janus close to the center of the scene. Additional frames were inserted between the 37 Cassini images in order to smooth the appearance of Mimas’ movement – a scheme called interpolation. Close-up images from the few minutes surrounding the occultation are arranged into a strip along the bottom of the GIF.
The terrain on Mimas seen here is about 80 degrees to the west of that visible in a previously released movie, which showed the little moon appearing to cross Saturn’s ring plane from Cassini’s vantage point. In that previous movie, the rim of the large impact crater Herschel (130 kilometers, 80 miles wide) was visible as a flattening of the moon’s eastern limb. In the new movie, Herschel is almost at dead center.
Contrast on Janus was mildly enhanced to aid the visibility of its surface. The right side of Mimas appears bright because the moon was partly overexposed in this image sequence.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
May/20/2013, 11am
with 63 NotesReblog |
Intense Color on Rhea
This intense false-color view highlights and enhances color variations across the intensely cratered and cracked surface of Rhea.
To create the false-color view, ultraviolet, green and infrared images were combined into a single black and white picture that isolates and maps regional color differences. This “color map” was then superposed over a clear-filter image. The origin of the color differences is not yet understood, but may be caused by subtle differences in the surface composition or the sizes of grains making up the icy soil.
Wispy markings were seen on the trailing hemispheres of both Rhea and Dione in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft, and were hypothesized by some researchers to be the result of material extruded onto the surface by ice volcanism. Cassini’s earlier revelation of the braided fractures on Dione led to speculation that Rhea’s wisps might also be created by fractures.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
May/20/2013, 11am
with 119 NotesReblog |
Deep Space Station 35 Being Installed
An animation, captured from a live webcam, of the Deep Space Station (DSS) 35 antenna being installed in Canberra, Australia. Located at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, the 125 tonne parabolic dish was lifted into position on top of the antenna base structure for our newest antenna, Deep Space Station 35. Several webcams caught the action.
NASA / Assembled by Bill Dunford
May/20/2013, 11am
with 35 NotesReblog |
This animated gif is only a very rough preview of a time lapse movie made from individual images taken on a tripod with a Canon 20Da camera and a 15mm lens.
The movie is available in different formats and sizes: here
Credit: Stéphane Guisard, Valère Leroy and Jean Pajus
May/19/2013, 8pm
with 123 NotesReblog |
A Burning Candle In Zero-Gravity
May/19/2013, 3pm
with 610 NotesReblog |
Barnard Stares at NGC 2170
A gaze across a cosmic skyscape, this telescopic mosaic reveals the continuous beauty of things that are. The evocative scene spans some 6 degrees or 12 Full Moons in planet Earth’s sky. Above, folds of red, glowing gas are a small part of an immense, 300 light-year wide arc. Known as Barnard’s loop, the structure is too faint to be seen with the eye, shaped by long gone supernova explosions and the winds from massive stars, and still traced by the light of hydrogen atoms. Barnard’s loop lies about 1,500 light-years away roughly centered on the Great Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery along the edge of Orion’s molecular clouds. But beyond lie other fertile star fields in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Below, the long-exposure composite finds NGC 2170, a dusty complex of nebulae near a neighboring molecular cloud some 2,400 light-years distant.
Image Credit & Copyright: John Davis
May/19/2013, 2pm
with 214 NotesReblog |
Black Hole-Powered Jets Plow Into Galaxy
This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF’s Very Large Array (pink).
This multi-wavelength view shows 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth. The radio emission comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy.
The X-ray data show a different aspect of this galaxy, tracing the location of hot gas. The bright X-rays in the center of the image mark a pool of million-degree gas around the black hole. Some of this material may eventually be consumed by the black hole, and the magnetized, whirlpool of gas near the black hole could in turn, trigger more output to the radio jet.
Most of the low-energy X-rays from the vicinity of the black hole are absorbed by dust and gas, probably in the shape of a giant doughnut around the black hole. This doughnut, or torus blocks all the optical light produced near the black hole, so astronomers refer to this type of source as a hidden or buried black hole. The optical light seen in the image is from the stars in the galaxy.
Image Credit: NASA
May/15/2013, 11pm
with 77 NotesReblog |
These images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory show four X-class flares emitted on May 12-14, 2013 – the first four X-class flares of 2013. Each panel is a blend of two images one showing light in the 171 Angstrom wavelength and the other in 131 Angstroms.
Credit: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (Little SDO)
May/15/2013, 5pm
with 54 NotesReblog |
Orion’s Hidden Fiery Ribbon
This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. The orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. It was observed by the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile.
In this image, the submillimetre-wavelength glow of the dust clouds is overlaid on a view of the region in the more familiar visible light, from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The large bright cloud in the upper right of the image is the well-known Orion Nebula, also called Messier 42.
Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2
May/15/2013, 1pm
with 304 NotesReblog |
Skylab: America’s First Home in Space Launched 40 Years Ago Today
With all the futuristic talk today about missions to Mars, lunar bases and asteroid mining, it’s easy to forget that man has already been living off of the planet on and off for decades. Forty years ago today, Skylab — America’s first outpost in space — was launched. The three-man orbiting laboratory was designed to conduct scientific experiments in space, such as studies of the effects of weightlessness on man and other living organisms, and observations of the sun.
May/14/2013, 10pm
with 122 NotesReblog |
T Tauri and Hind’s Variable Nebula
The orange star centered in this remarkable telescopic skyview is T Tauri, prototype of the class of T Tauri variable stars. Nearby it is a dusty yellow cosmic cloud historically known as Hind’s Variable Nebula (NGC 1555/1554). Over 400 light-years away, at the edge of a molecular cloud, both star and nebula are seen to vary significantly in brightness but not necessarily at the same time, adding to the mystery of the intriguing region. T Tauri stars are now generally recognized as young (less than a few million years old), sun-like stars still in the early stages of formation. To further complicate the picture, infrared observations indicate that T Tauri itself is part of a multiple system and suggest that the associated Hind’s Nebula may also contain a very young stellar object. The dramatic color image spans about 4 light-years at the estimated distance of T Tauri.
Credit & Copyright: Don Goldman
May/14/2013, 9pm
with 225 NotesReblog |
The sun erupted with an X1.7-class solar flare on May 12, 2013. The flare appears as the bright point on the left of the sun in this full disk view NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It is a blend of two images of the sun recorded at different wavelengths of light.
UPDATE: The sun has fired off a second X-class solar flare.
Credit: NASA/SDO/AIA/SPACE.com
