Week's Best Space Pictures: A Pulsar's Technicolor Home
By Michael Greshko, National Geographic News, 11 March 2016.
By Michael Greshko, National Geographic News, 11 March 2016.
Feed your need for heavenly views of the universe with our picks of the most awe-inspiring space pictures. This week, the moon casts an ominous shadow on the Pacific Ocean, NASA's Cassini spacecraft spots two of Saturn's moons, and a dusty disk coalesces around a distant pair of aging stars.
1. Celestial Lighthouse
The new CHIMERA instrument on the Palomar Observatory’s Hale Telescope snapped this image of the Crab Pulsar, a collapsed, dead star 6,500 light-years away that spins 30 times per second and emits lighthouse-like beams of light.
2. Saturnian Siblings
NASA's Cassini spacecraft spots Rhea (left) and Tethys (right), two of Saturn's moons. The Saturnian sisters’ names couldn’t be more fitting: They’re named after two sibling Titanesses from Greek mythology.
3. Paint it Black
On March 8, 2016, NASA's Aqua satellite spotted the reddish shadow of the moon over the South Pacific Ocean during a total solar eclipse - the last one before an August 21, 2017, total solar eclipse that will be visible in much of the U.S.
4. Far-Out Focus
This Hubble image shows Abell 2744, a galaxy cluster about four billion light-years away also known as Pandora’s Box. The cluster’s mass acts like a lens to warp passing light - allowing astronomers to peer deep into the universe’s past.
5. Brilliantly Bruised
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spots the solar corona in this false-color composite. The image's three colors (red, green, and blue) correspond to different wavelengths of UV light emitted by excited iron ions.
6. Let's Have Some More
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory sharply imaged the dusty disc around IRAS 08544-4431, an aging pair of stars about 4,000 light-years away. It might provide material for a "second round" of planets.
7. Curiosity's Neighborhood
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captures the unique texture of Gale Crater's southern surface. The Curiosity rover is investigating the 96-mile-wide crater, but not the area photographed.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please adhere to proper blog etiquette when posting your comments. This blog owner will exercise his absolution discretion in allowing or rejecting any comments that are deemed seditious, defamatory, libelous, racist, vulgar, insulting, and other remarks that exhibit similar characteristics. If you insist on using anonymous comments, please write your name or other IDs at the end of your message.