This week’s image shows China’s launch of the Shenzhou 16 spacecraft earlier this week atop a Long March 2-F rocket. The launch included a three-man crew, one being the first civilian astronaut in the Chinese crew rotation, who will relieve the current crew on the Tiangong Space Station.
This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It captures the colorful, star-filled NGC 1333, which is about 960 light-years away. Quite a lot is going on in this image – both seen and unseen.
This explanations from the European Space Agency (ESA) will hopefully answer many of your questions regarding this image:
Hubble’s colourful view, showcasing its unique capability to obtain images in light from ultraviolet to near-infrared, unveils an effervescent cauldron of glowing gases and pitch-black dust stirred up and blown around by several hundred newly forming stars embedded within the dark cloud. Even then, Hubble just scratches the surface; most of the star-birthing firestorm is hidden behind clouds of fine dust — essentially soot — that are thicker toward the bottom of the image. The black areas of the image are not empty space, but are filled with obscuring dust.
To capture this image, Hubble peered through a veil of dust on the edge of a giant cloud of cold molecular hydrogen — the raw material for fabricating new stars and planets under the relentless pull of gravity. The image underscores the fact that star formation is a messy process in a rambunctious Universe.
Ferocious stellar winds, likely from the bright blue star at the top of the image, are blowing through a curtain of dust. The fine dust scatters the starlight at blue wavelengths.
Farther down, another bright super-hot star shines through filaments of obscuring dust, looking like the Sun shining through scattered clouds. A diagonal string of fainter accompanying stars looks reddish because the dust is filtering their starlight, allowing more of the red light to get through.
The bottom of the picture presents a keyhole peek deep into the dark nebula. Hubble captures the reddish glow of ionised hydrogen. It looks like the finale of a fireworks display, with several overlapping events. This is caused by pencil-thin jets shooting out from newly forming stars outside the frame of view. These stars are surrounded by circumstellar discs, which may eventually produce planetary systems, and powerful magnetic fields that direct two parallel beams of hot gas deep into space, like a double lightsaber from science fiction films. They sculpt patterns on the hydrogen cocoon, like laser lightshow tracings. The jets are a star’s birth announcement.
This view offers an example of the time when our own Sun and planets formed inside such a dusty molecular cloud, 4.6 billion years ago. Our Sun didn’t form in isolation but was instead embedded inside a mosh pit of frantic stellar birth, perhaps even more energetic and massive than NGC 1333.
This week’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It shows Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud where both stars and planets are born. Here is more about the image from NASA:
A Webb image of the central region of the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which resides 630 light-years away. This image primarily shows blue smoky wisps on a dark background. The left top side additionally features orange and white wisps. Just below them are four bright points of light. Three are orange and one is a mix of white and orange. Each of these points have Webb’s signature 8-point diffraction spikes emanating around them in long, thick orange lines, so that they look like huge snowflakes. Scattered throughout the image are distant stars or galaxies in shades of red, orange and blue, seen as tiny blobs.
This week’s image was captured in the morning sky over Alaska on April 15. It was later determined to be related to a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch the prior day in California. As The New York Times reported, the spiral was attributed to “…the reflection of the excess fuel it released into the atmosphere.”
Below is another image taken by a local resident. The Internet is full of them.
While the northern lights are impressive enough, the addition of the spiral is extra special.
This week’s image is from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). Here is the full story of the solar eclipse from the NASA site:
Along a narrow path that mostly avoided landfall, the shadow of the New Moon raced across planet Earth’s southern hemisphere on April 20 to create a rare annular-total or hybrid solar eclipse. From the Indian Ocean off the coast of western Australia, ship-borne eclipse chasers were able to witness 62 seconds of totality though while anchored near the centerline of the total eclipse track. This ship-borne image of the eclipse captures the active Sun’s magnificent outer atmosphere or solar corona streaming into space. A composite of 11 exposures ranging from 1/2000 to 1/2 second, it records an extended range of brightness to follow details of the corona not quite visible to the eye during the total eclipse phase. Of course eclipses tend to come in pairs. On May 5, the next Full Moon will just miss the dark inner part of Earth’s shadow in a penumbral lunar eclipse.
Our Awesome Universe 