No, it’s not a golf ball fished out of the lake; this is an image of Pallas, the third most massive object in the main asteroid belt after Ceres and Vesta. New 3D models made from observations taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope show details of Pallas like never before possible,…
Tag: space
Haunting Images from NASA of a Space Suit Drifting in Orbit
You might want to file this under “nightmare fuel.” Yes this is a thing that actually happened on the International Space Station in 2006. But if you’re not already familiar with what’s going on here, it’s probably not what you think…
A Dusty Twist Marks the Site of a New Planet’s Birth
All of the planets in our Solar System formed from a disk of dust and gas surrounding our home star—the Sun—about four and a half billion years ago. Many—maybe even most—of the stars we see in the sky have planets orbiting them, and they all probably formed the same way. But planetary formation is…
Ten Discoveries from SOFIA
(From NASA) Ten years ago, NASA’s telescope on an airplane, SOFIA (the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy), first peered into the cosmos. Since the night of May 26, 2010, SOFIA’s observations of infrared light, invisible to the human eye, have made many scientific discoveries about the hidden universe.
The Glowing Shroud of a Newborn Star
Here’s another of my processed Hubble data images: it’s a look into the star-forming region “S106,” made from data captured in infrared wavelengths on Feb. 13, 2011. Here, a newborn star is in the process of blasting away a clear space while still surrounded by the cloud of dust and hydrogen gas it formed within.
Are There “Aliens” in our Solar System?
No, I don’t mean little grey men in hard candy-shaped ships, I mean natural objects that have origins from outside of our own Solar System—small worlds that formed around a different star. It’s entirely possible that objects can be ejected from a star system and find their way into orbit around another, or even gravitationally…
Saturn Seen Through Titan’s Hazy Atmosphere
Here’s a view of the upper limb of Saturn seen through the atmosphere of its largest moon Titan. It’s a color-composite of images captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on March 31, 2005 as it passed just 7,500 kilometers (4,660 miles) from Titan. Saturn was 1.2 million kilometers (745,000 miles) away from Cassini at the time.
I Took a Crack at the Egg Nebula
This is an interesting object: it’s called the Egg Nebula, a protoplanetary nebula located in our galaxy 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. Here, an opaque cloud of dust and gas hides a central star that’s expelling its outer layers. Beams of the star’s light escape the cloud through holes, illuminating the layers. This…
Phobos Will Eventually Become a Ring Around Mars
Phobos, Mars’ largest moon — although at just 16 miles wide still quite small — is slowly but steadily being torn apart by the gravitational pull of Mars… and it bears the scars to prove it. Long parallel grooves seen wrapping around the surface of Phobos are most likely stress fractures, visible evidence of the tidal forces…
Why Are Pluto’s Moons So Weird?
(Updated post from 2016) Whether you call it a planet, a dwarf planet, or a Kuiper Belt or Trans-Neptunian Object—or all of the above—there’s no denying that Pluto and its family of moons are true curiosities in the Solar System. Not only does little Pluto have one moon, Charon, that’s so massive in comparison that they…
This is the First Picture Taken on the Moon
At 18:45:30 UTC on February 3, 1966 the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft made the first successful robotic soft landing on the Moon. Seven hours later it began to transmit images from the lunar surface down to Earth. The image above comprise the first two frames of the first of three panoramas captured by Luna 9’s cycloramic…
Telescopes and Spacecraft Team Up to Probe Deep into Jupiter’s Atmosphere (NASA article)
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based Gemini Observatory in Hawaii have teamed up with the Juno spacecraft to probe the mightiest storms in the solar system, taking place more than 500 million miles away on the giant planet Jupiter. “Juno’s microwave radiometer probes deep into the planet’s atmosphere by detecting high-frequency radio waves that…
Lights in the Dark 