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Friday 8 April 2016

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S BEST SPACE PICTURES THIS WEEK CV


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Week's Best Space Pictures: Mars Rover Spots Dust Devil
By Michael Greshko,
National Geographic News, 8 April 2016.

This week, astronomers find a big black hole in a strange location, Hubble reveals a hard-to-spot galaxy, and Mars shows off scars made by an ancient river system.

1. Extraterrestrial Twister

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After trekking up a steep ridge, NASA's Opportunity rover stopped to look back at its tracks on March 31. To scientists' surprise, the rover's camera caught a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below.

2. Remnant Ripples

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NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spied deposits from at least three bygone rivers in Jezero Crater, a nearly 30-mile-wide (48-kilometre-wide) crater next to Mars' Isidis Planitia lowland.

3. Taking Cover

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Clouds hover low over the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, as captured by NASA's Aqua satellite on April 1.

4. Heavy Hitter

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The mightiest supermassive black holes are usually found in crowded galaxy clusters. But on April 6 astronomers announced a shockingly hefty black hole, weighing 17 billion suns, in a sparsely populated area of the universe.

5. Distant and Dim

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Hubble captured this image of the galaxy UGC 477, located just over 110 million light-years away. It's incredibly faint and difficult to detect, since it carries most of its mass as hydrogen gas rather than stars.

[Source: National Geographic News. Edited. Some links added.]

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