Here are our picks for the most amazing space photos of the week.
1. Gault and Its Two Tails
The two long tails of material streaming from (6478) Gault, a 2.5-mile-wide (4 kilometers) rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, were visible to researchers thanks to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and a variety of ground-based instruments in Hawaii, Spain and India. Gault completes one rotation every two hours, researchers reported in a recent study. The two tails are debris streams apparently generated by two separate dust releases around Oct. 28 and Dec. 30 of last year.
2. Messier 49
The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of a galaxy called Messier 49, which contains about 200 billion stars. Messier 49 is 56 million light-years away, and boasts a supermassive black hole at its core.
3. Oldest Astrolabe Ever Found
Credit: Mearns et al., International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, 2019. DOI: 10.1111/1095-9270.12353
This copper alloy astrolabe was just inducted into the Guinness World Records for oldest mariner's astrolabe ever found. Astrolabes were circular tools used to measure the altitude of the sun and the stars so a crew could learn their latitude. The rare object - one of only 104 historical astrolabes in existence - was found in a shipwreck in Oman under the Arabian Sea.
4. Powerful Fireball Spotted From Space
Credit: NASA/GSFC
NASA's Terra satellite caught the second most powerful meteor explosion of the 21st century breaking apart above the choppy waters of the Bering Sea. The Dec. 18 impact event generated about ten times more energy than the atomic bomb the United States dropped over Hiroshima, NASA officials said.
5. Happy Equinox!
Last week, Earth celebrated its March equinox, when night and day are nearly equal in duration at all latitudes. During the equinox, the sun is directly overhead at noon if you're standing on the Equator. The equinox marks the beginning of autumn in the southern hemisphere, and the start of spring in the northern hemisphere. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES EAST satellite captured this sight on March 20 at about 8 a.m. EDT, a few hours before the exact moment of equinox.
6. 'A Million Dreams'
Rays of sunshine beam over Earth as NASA astronaut Anne McClain takes her first spacewalk outside of the International Space Station. "A million dreams is all it's gonna take," McClain tweeted after her spacewalk. She and NASA astronaut Nick Hague worked outside of the orbiting laboratory last Friday (March 22) to replace aging batteries on the station's solar arrays. McClain was scheduled to take her second spacewalk and the first all-female spacewalk in history this Friday (March 29), but NASA has reassigned her to another spacewalk due to spacesuit sizing issues. - Hanneke Weitering
7. Oil Spill Seen from Space
Credit: ESA
The European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite captured this image of an oil spill that resulted when the Italian container ship "Grande America" sank in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of France on March 12. The oil slick stretches across an area spanning about 30 miles (50 kilometers), and oil is still spilling from the ship at the ocean floor. Sentinel-1 captured this radar image on Tuesday (March 19). - Hanneke Weitering
8. A Jovian Marble
Jupiter looks like a beautifully detailed marble in this new view from NASA's Juno spacecraft. Taken from below Jupiter's southern hemisphere, this image features the planet's iconic Great Red Spot and several other storms of various sizes and shapes. Juno scientists combined three frames from the spacecraft's JunoCam imager to create this full-disk view of the giant gas planet. The images were acquired Feb. 17 when Juno was between 16,700 and 59,300 miles (26,900 to 95,400 kilometers) above the planet's cloud tops. - Hanneke Weitering
9. A Cosmic Question Mark
Colorful cosmic "fireworks" decorate the night sky over the La Silla observatory in Chile in this gorgeous image by the European Southern Observatory's resident astrophotographer Petr Horálek. Above the Milky Way and to the left are two nebulas that appear to form a question mark in the sky: an arc known as Barnard's Loop and the nearly-circular Angelfish Nebula right below it. These two nebulas are part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. - Hanneke Weitering
10. A Cosmic Butterfly
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Do you see the butterfly? This dazzling image of what looks like a red member of the lepidoptera order is actually a nebula in space about 1,400 light-years from our sun. The nebula, officially called Westerhout 40 (W40) is a vast cloud of gas where baby stars can be born. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this view with its Infrared Array Camera, using three different wavelengths that lend the image its distinct colors. Stars show up in brilliant blue light, while organic molecules are visible as reddish hues. Dusty material around stars show up as yellow and red. - Tariq Malik
Top image: X-ray and mid-infrared image of the Westerhout 40 (W40) star-forming region. Credit: NASA/CXC/Spitzer/Wikimedia Commons.
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