Pic of the Week – Page 36 – Our Awesome Universe

Pic of the Week: Stellar Tantrum

Posted on October 13, 2022February 7, 2023 by onespaceman2000

^{Image (Credit): Hubble image of an outburst from an infant star. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Nisini)}

This week’s image is from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. While it may look like an enormous interstellar stingray, it actually shows gas streaming from a newly-formed star. Here is the story from the European Space Agency (ESA):

An energetic outburst from an infant star streaks across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This stellar tantrum – produced by an extremely young star in the earliest phase of formation – consists of an incandescent jet of gas travelling at supersonic speeds. As the jet collides with material surrounding the still-forming star, the shock heats this material and causes it to glow. The result is the colorfully wispy structures, which astronomers refer to as Herbig–Haro objects, billowing across the lower right of this image.

Herbig–Haro objects are seen to evolve and change significantly over just a few years. This particular object, called HH34, was previously captured by Hubble between 1994 and 2007, and again in glorious detail in 2015. HH34 resides approximately 1,250 light-years from Earth in the Orion Nebula, a large region of star formation visible to the unaided eye. The Orion Nebula is one of the closest sites of widespread star formation to Earth, and as such has been pored over by astronomers in search of insights into how stars and planetary systems are born.

Pic of the Week: Juno and Europa

Posted on October 6, 2022 by onespaceman2000

^{Image (Credit): Jupiter’s moon Europa. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Björn Jónsson CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)}

This week’s image is from NASA’s Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter and its moons. It is a beautiful image of Europa from the spacecraft’s Junocam. Europa is one of 80 known moons orbiting its host planet.

Here is a little more from NASA about this image:

JunoCam took its closest image at an altitude of 945 miles (1,521 kilometers) over a region of the moon called Annwn Regio. In the image, terrain beside the day-night boundary is revealed to be rugged, with pits and troughs. Numerous bright and dark ridges and bands stretch across a fractured surface, revealing the tectonic stresses that the moon has endured over millennia. The circular dark feature in the lower right is Callanish Crater.

Such JunoCam images help fill in gaps in the maps from images obtained by NASA’s Voyager and Galileo missions. Citizen scientist Björn Jónsson processed the image to enhance the color and contrast. The resolution is about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) per pixel.

To learn more about JunoCam submissions go here.

Pic of the Week: The Rings of Neptune

Posted on September 29, 2022 by onespaceman2000

^{Image (Credit): JWST image of Nepture showing its rings and moons. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)}

This week’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It clearly shows the rings of Neptune as well as a number of its moons (the image below is a broader shot labeling those moons). It is an impressive shot by the JWST within our solar system, similar to the space telescope’s recent image of Jupiter.

Here is more about the image from NASA:

In this Webb image, Neptune resembles a pearl with rings that look like ethereal concentric ovals around it. There are 2 thinner, crisper rings and 2 broader, fainter rings. A few extremely bright patches on the lower half of Neptune represent methane ice clouds. Six tiny white dots, which are six of Neptune’s 14 moons, are scattered among the rings. The background of the image is black.

The Neptune image was uploaded to the NASA website on September 21, just a few days shy of the actual date in the calendar when Neptune was observed for the first time ever – September 23. The year was 1846 and the observer was German astronomer Johann Galle.

^{Image (Credit): JWST labeled image of Nepture showing its rings and moons. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)}

Pic of the Week: Interacting Galaxy Pair

Posted on September 22, 2022 by onespaceman2000

^{Image (Credit): Hubble image of colliding galaxies – NGC 169 (bottom) and IC 1559 (top). (ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL/DECam, CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS)}

This week’s image comes again from the Hubble Space Telescope, which is keeping us entertained as the James Webb Space Telescope cycles through its required observations and spins off images from time to time.

While an earlier image appeared to show colliding galaxies, though it was believed to be an optical illusion, the collision above is real. Below is more on the image from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hubble site:

Galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past one another — each of which has a significant impact on their shapes and structures. As common as these interactions are thought to be in the Universe, it is rare to capture an image of two galaxies interacting in such a visibly dynamic way. This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, feels incredibly three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery.

The subject of this image is named Arp 282, an interacting galaxy pair that is composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 (bottom) and the galaxy IC 1559 (top). If you’re interested in learning more about Seyfert galaxies, you can read about the Seyfert galaxy NGC 5728 here. Interestingly, both of the galaxies comprising Arp 282 have monumentally energetic cores, known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), although it is difficult to tell that from this image. This is actually rather fortunate, because if the full emission of two AGNs was visible in this image, then it would probably obscure the beautifully detailed tidal interactions occurring between NGC 169 and IC 1559. Tidal forces occur when an object’s gravity causes another object to distort or stretch. The direction of the tidal forces will be away from the lower-mass object and towards the higher mass object. When two galaxies interact, gas, dust and even entire solar systems will be drawn away from one galaxy towards the other by these tidal forces. This process can actually be seen in action in this image — delicate streams of matter have formed, visibly linking the two galaxies.

Pic of the Week: Martian Polygons

Posted on September 15, 2022 by onespaceman2000

^{Image (Credit): (NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)}

This week’s image is from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Observer. The Martian surface looks magical as we see the effects of water and ice. We tend to see Mars in one way – the view from a lander or rover showing a plain desert-like horizon (shown below) – but from above we can see it is so much more.

NASA has this to say:

Both water and dry ice have a major role in sculpting Mars’ surface at high latitudes. Water ice frozen in the soil splits the ground into polygons. Erosion of the channels forming the boundaries of the polygons by dry ice sublimating in the spring adds plenty of twists and turns to them.

Spring activity is visible as the layer of translucent dry ice coating the surface develops vents that allow gas to escape. The gas carries along fine particles of material from the surface further eroding the channels. The particles drop to the surface in dark fan-shaped deposits. Sometimes the dark particles sink into the dry ice, leaving bright marks where the fans were originally deposited. Often the vent closes, then opens again, so we see two or more fans originating from the same spot but oriented in different directions as the wind changes.