NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S SPACE PICTURES THIS WEEK XVIII

Space Pictures This Week: Flame Nebula, Star "Bubble," More
By National Geographic News, 5 July 2012.

1. Heading Home

The Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft floats through the clouds before landing in a remote area near Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on July 1.

The three-person crew returned from more than six months aboard the International Space Station, where they served as members of the Expedition 30 and 31 crews.

(See "After Space Shuttle, Does U.S. Have a Future in Space?")

2. Star "Bubble"

A bright star "blows a bubble" of gas in an unusual image released July 2 by the Hubble Space Telescope.

As it nears the end of its life, U Camelopardalis - U Cam for short - is running low on fuel, making the star unstable.

As a result, every few thousand years, U Cam "coughs out a nearly spherical shell of gas as a layer of helium around its core begins to fuse," according to the European Space Agency.

The gas ejected in the star's latest eruption is clearly visible as a faint bubble of gas surrounding the star.

(See "Mysterious Structures Balloon From Milky Way's Core.")

3. "Magical Nights"

Photograph by Babak A. Tafreshi, TWAN

Aurora borealis light up the sky over a Sami village in northern Sweden.

The photograph, titled "Lapland Magical Nights," was recently submitted to the astronomy-education project The World at Night (TWAN).

Auroras are created when charged solar particles slam into Earth's magnetic field and get funnelled poleward. The particles collide with molecules in our atmosphere, transferring energy and making the air molecules glow.

(See "Best Night-Sky Pictures of 2012 Named.")

4. "Now You See it, Now You Don't"

Baffling astronomers, the star TYC 8241 2652 has lost its dusty disk of debris - suggesting it "abruptly shut down and by all appearances went out of business," according to the Gemini Observatory.

Only a few years ago, the star - a young analogue of our sun - seemed to be a "solar system in the making."

An illustration released July 4 (pictured) depicts how the star might appear without its surrounding dust.

"It's like the classic magician's trick: Now you see it, now you don't," Carl Melis, who led a study on the star in the July 5 issue of the journal Nature, said in a statement.

(See "Record Nine-Planet Star System Discovered?")

5. Flame Nebula

Several nebulae - including the Flame nebula, the large bright spot - shine within a star-making region of gas and dust. Released July 2, the image was taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

The Flame nebula sits on the eastern hip of Orion the Hunter, a constellation most easily visible in the Northern Hemisphere during winter evenings, according to the WISE website.

The red arc at the lower right is the star Orionis, the upper star in the sword of Orion, which sits in a blue dwarf star system about 1,070 light-years away.

(See more nebula pictures.)

6. Cosmic Skyrocket

Resembling a Fourth of July skyrocket, a geyser of hot gas from a new-born star splashes against a dense core of a molecular-hydrogen cloud in an image released July 3.

Dubbed Herbig-Haro 110, the composite image was captured by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2004 and 2005 and the Wide Field Camera 3 in April 2011.

(See "'Geyser' Moon Sprinkles Salt on Saturn's Rings.")

7. Butterfly-Shaped Impact

A butterfly-shaped ejecta blanket - an area of particles ejected during an impact - surround a large crater in the Martian region of Melas Dorsa in a picture released July 5.

"To form such an ejecta blanket, the impact must have occurred at a very shallow angle with respect to the planet's surface," according to the German Aerospace Centre.

"It is thought that subsurface ice was present, and that this liquefied or vaporised on impact."

("Huge Spirals Found on Mars—Evidence of New Lava Type?")

8. Spine of the Swan

The yellow sliver and red spot above it make up the DR21 ridge, a huge structure within the extremely active, star-forming region called Cygnus X. The region sits at a distance of about 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, or the Swan.

A combination of three maps by the European Space Agency's Herschel space observatory created the image, published in July in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Reddish colours show the finely detailed structures of the cold interstellar material, which converges as filaments toward the main ridge. The white areas show young, new stars, including several high-mass stars.

Overall, the new picture suggests the convergence of filaments is a way nature forms massive star clusters with high-mass stars.

(See another picture of the turbulent Cygnus constellation.)

Top image: U Camelopardalis

[Source: National Geographic News. Edited. Top image added.]