Week's Best Space Pictures: Mars Blasts Puff, Bubble Blows Rough, and Rockets Sound Off
By Jane J. Lee, National Geographic News, 30 January 2015.
By Jane J. Lee, National Geographic News, 30 January 2015.
Northern lights gleam, stellar debris blows into a bubble, and gassy explosions leave behind pits in this week's best space pictures.
1. Star Bubbles
They were the talk of the amateur space community - yellow balls (above) that kept bubbling up when citizen scientists eyed the skies for the Milky Way Project. And so researchers investigated the stellar mystery.
The suspects in the case revealed a new way of detecting the formation of massive stars.
Not actually yellow, but assigned that colour in infrared images, the balls turned out to be hidden links between nascent stars, still hidden in the dark, and more mature ones in a later stage of star formation characterized by green gas bubbles. (See "Glowing, Green Space Blob Forming New Stars, Hubble Shows.")
2. Launch Interrupted
Alas, obtaining soil observations from space must wait one more day. A rocket launch planned for January 29 ended up delayed for 24 hours due to wind shear running wild in the upper atmosphere.
The Delta II rocket - cocooned above in its protective scaffolding - is supposed to deliver NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite to measure Earth's soil moisture with never-before-seen accuracy and resolution.
The mission isn't just for kicks though. Better soil moisture readings mean more accurate weather forecasts, better flood predictions, and help in monitoring droughts.
3. Rocky Mountain High
This is what a hundred-year-old national park looks like from space. Rocky Mountain National Park turned one hundred years old on January 26. In celebration, International Space Station crewmember Terry Virts snapped a photo of the famed mountain range.
Happy birthday, Rocky Mountain National Park!
4. Glowing Globule
Sometimes called "God's Hand," CG4 looks like a comet, with a dark "head" and a faint tail. But the head of the comet stretches across 1.5 light-years, and astronomers aren't sure what it is. Some astronomers suggest the globule is a puff of gas given off by a dying red star that has been sculpted by blasts from other exploding stars.
Despite its relative proximity to Earth - it's only 1,300 light-years away - it took a while to find CG4 because it's such a faint object.
5. All "Hale" Mars
Mars isn't the most pristine place in the solar system, as the pits (above) surrounding Hale Crater demonstrate.
When meteorites crash into the red planet, they throw up debris, called ejecta, from the resultant craters. That ejecta can explode and produce pits and shower dust more widely.
6. Sounding Off
What happens when you mix scientists, the northern lights, and sounding rockets? Four launches straight into the heart of the ethereal skies.
The rockets measure the solar radiation that produces auroras in Earth's upper atmosphere.
7. Let There Be Lights
A bubble of stellar debris, dubbed SNR 0519-69.0, is all that remains of a massive star that exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The superheated gas throws off x-rays (blue), while the leading edge of the explosion (red) and the surrounding stars gleam in visible light.
Photo gallery by Nicole Werbeck.
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.