Image (Credit): Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket lifting off on January 16, 2025. (Blue Origin)
Earlier today, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket safely made its way into the Earth’s orbit from its launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The only piece of the mission that fell short was the loss of the booster that should have landed on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
I’m incredibly proud New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt…We knew landing our booster, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, on the first try was an ambitious goal. We’ll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring. Thank you to all of Team Blue for this incredible milestone.
Even with the lost booster, the rocket launch has proven that the US space industry may soon have another reliable competitor to challenge SpaceX, which is good new for everyone.
Image (Credit): Volcanic fissure in Iceland. (NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison)
This week’s image comes from NASA’s Earth Observatory. It is an image from last November showing a volcanic fissure on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula not far from the country’s capital, Reykjavík
The image…shows lava coming from an eruptive fissure near Stóra Skógfell peak, along the Sundhnúkur crater row—a similar location to the February 2024 eruption. This natural color scene, acquired by the OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on Landsat 9 on November 24, is overlaid with an infrared signal to help distinguish the lava’s heat signature. A plume of gas, consisting primarily of sulfur dioxide, streamed from the lava, although the eruption did not affect flights to and from Iceland.
The lava flowed east and west from the fissure, rather than toward the town of Grindavík. The Icelandic National Broadcasting Service reported that the latest event forced the evacuation of some of the town’s residents and the Blue Lagoon resort, a geothermal spa. A tongue of lava flowed over the car park of the spa, enveloping a small service building located there.
The Reykjanes peninsula eruption is the seventh in a series of events that began in December 2023. As of November 26, 2024, the Blue Lagoon was closed to the public, but lava movement toward the spa had slowed.
Note: Another image from NASA’s Earth Observatory is also very relevant this week. The image below shows the Los Angeles fires that are still burning. This particular image shows the Eaton fire, which erupted on the evening of January 7 in Altadena, located north of downtown Los Angeles.
Image (Credit): The Eaton Fire on January 7, 2024. (NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025) processed by the European Space Agency)
This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the bright and colorful spiral galaxy NGC 2566, which is about 76 million light-years away.
A prominent bar of stars stretches across the center of this galaxy, and spiral arms emerge from each end of the bar. Because NGC 2566 appears tilted from our perspective, its disk takes on an almond shape, giving the galaxy the appearance of a cosmic eye.
As NGC 2566 appears to gaze at us, astronomers gaze right back, using Hubble to survey the galaxy’s star clusters and star-forming regions. The Hubble data are especially valuable for studying stars that are just a few million years old; these stars are bright at the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths to which Hubble is sensitive. Using these data, researchers can measure the ages of NGC 2566’s stars, which helps piece together the timeline of the galaxy’s star formation and the exchange of gas between star-forming clouds and the stars themselves.
Image (Credit): Star cluster NGC 602. (X-ray: NASA/CXC; Infrared: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeilder, E.Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand)
This week’s image from NASA showing a cosmic wreath is appropriate for the holiday season. It comes from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope.
The [image] depicts star cluster NGC 602 in vibrant and festive colors. The cluster includes a giant dust cloud ring, shown in greens, yellows, blues, and oranges. The green hues and feathery edges of the ring cloud create the appearance of a wreath made of evergreen boughs. Hints of red representing X-rays provide shading, highlighting layers within the wreath-like ring cloud.
The image is aglow with specks and dots of colorful, festive light, in blues, golds, whites, oranges, and reds. These lights represent stars within the cluster. Some of the lights gleam with diffraction spikes, while others emit a warm, diffuse glow. Upon closer inspection, many of the glowing specks have spiraling arms, indicating that they are, in fact, distant galaxies.
Image (Credit): Quasar known as RX J1131-1231, which is located roughly 6 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Crater. (ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Nierenberg)
This week’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope. It was highlighted inUSATodayas one of the best images from 2024. It shows the gravitational lensing of RX J1131-1231, which is a quasar about 6 billion light-years from Earth.
Here is more about the image:
It is considered one of the best lensed quasars discovered to date, as the foreground galaxy smears the image of the background quasar into a bright arc and creates four images of the object. Gravitational lensing, first predicted by Einstein, offers a rare opportunity to study regions close to the black hole in distant quasars, by acting as a natural telescope and magnifying the light from these sources. All matter in the Universe warps the space around itself, with larger masses producing a more pronounced effect. Around very massive objects, such as galaxies, light that passes close by follows this warped space, appearing to bend away from its original path by a clearly visible amount. One of the consequential effects of gravitational lensing is that it can magnify distant astronomical objects, letting astronomers study objects that would otherwise be too faint or far away.
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