WIRED Space Photo of the Day for February 2014
- 6:30 am |
A collage of radar images of near-Earth asteroid 2006 DP14 was generated by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., on the night of Feb. 11, 2014.
Delay-Doppler radar imaging revealed that the asteroid is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) long, 660 feet (200 meters) wide, and shaped somewhat like a big peanut. The asteroid's period of rotation is about six hours. The asteroid is of a type known as a "contact binary" because it has two large lobes on either end that appear to be in contact. Previous radar data from Goldstone and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has shown that at least 10 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than about 650 feet (200 meters) have contact binary shapes like that of 2006 DP14. The data were obtained over an interval of 2.5 hours as the asteroid completed about half a revolution. The resolution is about 60 feet (19 meters) per pixel.
The data were obtained on Feb. 11 between 9:03 a.m. and 11:27 p.m. PST (12:03 a.m. to 2:27 a.m. EST on Feb. 12). At the time of the observations, the asteroid's distance was about 2.6 million miles (4.2 million kilometers) from Earth. That is about 11 times the average distance between Earth and its moon. The asteroid's closest approach to Earth occurred on Feb. 10, at a distance of about 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers).
Radar is a powerful technique for studying an asteroid's size, shape, rotation state, surface features and surface roughness, and for improving the calculation of asteroid orbits. While this asteroid would appear as no more than a point of light to optical telescopes, using planetary radar scientists are able to discern the physical characteristics of the asteroid and measure its exact distance from Earth. But, in order to point the enormous 230-foot (70-meter) dish antenna in the precise direction of the asteroid, numerous professional and amateur astronomers assisted in the days leading up to Feb. 11 by supplying observational data to help pinpoint the location. Radar measurements of asteroid distances and velocities often enable computation of asteroid orbits much further into the future than if radar observations weren't available.
This wide-angle image shows the south polar region of Saturn's moon Enceladus and outlines the area covered by the high-resolution mosaic combining data from the imaging science subsystem and composite infrared spectrometer aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The outlined area focuses on Baghdad Sulcus, a fracture in the south polar region.
Cassini captured the data for this wide-angle image during the spacecraft's close flyby of the moon Nov. 21, 2009. This image and others from that flyby are among the best visible light images Cassini will capture of the region around the "tiger stripes," -- the fissures that spray icy particles, water vapor and organic compounds -- compounds, before the moon's south polar region enters winter darkness for the coming years.
This wide-angle view shows not only Baghdad Sulcus, but also other nearby fractures. Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere and Saturn-facing side of Enceladus (504 kilometers, 313 miles across). The south pole lies in shadow near the bottom middle of the image. The wide-angle view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) from Enceladus and at a sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 114 degrees. Scale in the wide-angle view is 116 meters (381 feet) per pixel.
Caption: Cassini Solstice Team
The closest supernova of its kind to be observed in the last few decades has sparked a global observing campaign involving legions of instruments on the ground and in space, including NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. This image shows Spitzer's view of the supernova's host galaxy, M82 or the "Cigar galaxy," on three separate dates: May 9, 2005; February 7, 2014; and February 12, 2014. The observations from February 7 reveal the presence of a bright spot -- the supernova -- not present in the prior observations. By February 12, the supernova has started to dim somewhat from its peak brightness in the first week of February. The supernova, dubbed SN 2014J, was first spotted by human observers on January 21, 2014.
SN 2014J is glowing very brightly in the infrared light that Spitzer sees. The telescope was able to observe the supernova before and after it reached its peak brightness. Such early observations with an infrared telescope have only been obtained for a few Type Ia supernovas in the past. Dust in the M82 galaxy partially obscures observations in optical and high-energy forms of light. The infrared light that Spitzer sees in, however, can pass through this dust, allowing astronomers to peer directly into the heart of the aftermath of the stellar explosion.
This new image from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, shows the bright star cluster Messier 7, also known as NGC 6475. Easily spotted by the naked eye in the direction of the tail of the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion), this cluster is one of the most prominent open clusters of stars in the sky and an important research target.
ESA’s Sun-watching Proba-2 minisatellite shows the aftermath of 18 February’s ‘coronal mass ejection’. Acquired at 0445 GMT, a little more than three hours after the initial eruption, the image demonstrates the Sun’s magnetic field reconnecting in the form of loops. Look down and left of the centre of the solar disc to clearly see this distinctive belt of loops.
Coronal mass ejections are powered by energy stored in the magnetic field of the Sun’s corona. This energy that can be released by the process of reconnection, in which oppositely oriented field lines are reconfigured to a more relaxed state and stored magnetic energy is converted into the heat and kinetic energy needed to drive huge outward eruptions.
Fields that have recently reconnected are heated to many millions of degrees, then cooling to the one million degree temperatures that are visible to Proba-2’s SWAP imager. A second Proba-2 sensor, LYRA, measures the Sun’s energy intensity at the same time. Both instruments are operated for ESA by the Royal Observatory of Belgium. To see a movie of the 18 February CME and its aftermath, click here.
NGC 2276 and NGC 2300 are "boundary" targets in that they are the northernmost objects in the New General Catalog of space stuff. Being this close to the north celestial pole (and Polaris) makes them challenging targets for equatorial telescopes.
NGC 2276 is a beautiful spiral galaxy that is punctuated by pink star forming regions. In fact it has one of the highest rates of star formation that has been measured. Its neighbor, NGC 2300, appears as a regular elliptical galaxy that shows some evidence of shells (and perhaps former structure). Together these make a wonderful contrast at the boundaries of space and time. From my southern-mid-latitude the celestial pole is a mere 32 degrees above the horizon. Which means that although this field is always available- it is never high in the sky the challenges the telescope to point at it.
Finally the field also contains some of the foreground galactic cirrus (IFN) that pervade these high declinations. Perhaps you can see hints of it at the bottom left.
P.S. As far as I know, my statement is correct concerning NGC 2276 being the northernmost NGC object. The more famous cluster of NGC 188 is just a bit farther south. Let me know if I am mistaken.
Caption: Adam Block
This look back at a dune that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover drove across was taken by the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam) during the 538th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars (Feb. 9, 2004). The rover had driven over the dune three days earlier. For scale, the distance between the parallel wheel tracks is about 9 feet (2.7 meters). The dune is about 3 feet (1 meter) tall in the middle of its span across an opening called "Dingo Gap." This view is looking eastward.
The image has been white balanced to show what the Martian surface materials would look like if under the light of Earth's sky. A version with raw color, as recorded by the camera under Martian lighting conditions, is available as Figure 1.
Roguish runaway stars can have a big impact on their surroundings as they plunge through the Milky Way galaxy. Their high-speed encounters shock the galaxy, creating arcs, as seen in this newly released image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
In this case, the speedster star is known as Kappa Cassiopeiae, or HD 2905 to astronomers. It is a massive, hot supergiant moving at around 2.5 million mph relative to its neighbors (1,100 kilometers per second). But what really makes the star stand out in this image is the surrounding, streaky red glow of material in its path. Such structures are called bow shocks, and they can often be seen in front of the fastest, most massive stars in the galaxy.
Bow shocks form where the magnetic fields and wind of particles flowing off a star collide with the diffuse, and usually invisible, gas and dust that fill the space between stars. How these shocks light up tells astronomers about the conditions around the star and in space. Slow-moving stars like our sun have bow shocks that are nearly invisible at all wavelengths of light, but fast stars like Kappa Cassiopeiae create shocks that can be seen by Spitzer’s infrared detectors.
Although the crack-like features seen here on Dione's surface appear wispy and faded, they are in reality a series of geologically fresh fractures!
Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Dione. North on Dione (698 miles, or 1,123 kilometers across) is up and rotated 29 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 10, 2013. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 554,000 miles (892,000 kilometers) from Dione. Image scale is three miles (five kilometers) per pixel.
Caption: Cassini Solstice Team
The mystery of how Cassiopeia A exploded is unraveling thanks to new data from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. In this image, NuSTAR data, which show high-energy X-rays from radioactive material, are colored blue. Lower-energy X-rays from non-radioactive material, imaged previously with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, are shown in red, yellow and green.
The new view shows a more complete picture of Cassiopeia A, the remains of a star that blew up in a supernova event whose light reached Earth about 350 years ago, when it could have appeared to observers as a star that suddenly brightened. The remnant is located 11,000 light-years away from Earth.
NuSTAR is the first telescope capable of taking detailed pictures of the radioactive material in the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant. While other telescopes have detected radioactivity in these objects before, NuSTAR is the first capable of pinpointing the location of the radioactivity, creating maps. When massive star explode, they create many elements: non-radioactive ones like iron and calcium found in your blood and bones; and radioactive elements like titanium-44, the decay of which sends out high-energy X-ray light that NuSTAR can see.
By mapping titanium-44 in Cassiopeia A, astronomers get a direct look at what happened in the core of the star when it was blasted to smithereens. These NuSTAR data complement previous observations made by Chandra, which show elements, such as iron, that were heated by shock waves farther out from the remnant's center. In this image, the red, yellow and green data were collected by Chandra at energies ranging from 1 to 7 kiloelectron volts (keV). The red color shows heated iron, and green represents heated silicon and magnesium. The yellow is what astronomers call continuum emission, and represents a range of X-ray energies. The titanium-44, shown in blue, was detected by NuSTAR at energies ranging between 68 and 78 keV.
The NuSTAR observations point to a possible solution to the puzzle of how stars detonate. The fact that the titanium -- which is a direct tracer of the supernova blast -- is concentrated in clumps at the core supports a theory referred to as "mild asymmetries." In this scenario, material sloshes about at the heart of the supernova, reinvigorating a shock wave and allowing it to blow out the star's outer layers.
An extraordinary jet trailing behind a runaway pulsar is seen in this composite image that contains X-ray data from Chandra (purple), radio data from the ACTA (green), and optical data from the 2MASS survey (red, green, and blue). The pulsar - a spinning neutron star - and its tail are found in the lower right of this image. The tail stretches for 37 light years, making it the longest X-ray jet ever seen from an object in the Milky Way galaxy. The pulsar is moving away from the center of the supernova remnant (seen in the upper left of the image) where it was born at a speed between 2.5 million and 5 million miles per hour. This supersonic pace makes IGR J1104-6103 one of the fastest moving pulsars ever observed.
Caption: Chandra Telescope Team
Large and small, hundreds of thousands of craters scar the surface of Mars, hollowed out by a multitude of asteroids and comets that impacted the Red Planet throughout its history. This image shows a region of the planet’s northern hemisphere known as Hephaestus Fossae – after the Greek god of fire – that was imaged by the high-resolution stereo camera on ESA’s Mars Express orbiter on 28 December 2007. The image has been coloured to indicate the elevation of the terrain: green and yellow shades represent shallow ground, while blue and purple stand for deep depressions, down to about 4 km.
Scattered across the scene are a few dozen impact craters that cover a wide range of sizes, with the largest boasting a diameter of around 20 km. The long and intricate canyon-like features that resemble riverbeds are the phenomenal aftermath of the same fierce impacts that created the largest craters. When a small body such as a comet or an asteroid crashes at high speed into another object in the Solar System, the collision dramatically heats up the surface at the impact site.
In the case of the large crater seen in this image, the heat produced by such a powerful smash melted the soil – a mixture of rock, dust and also, hidden deep down, water ice – resulting in a massive overflow that flooded the surrounding environment. Before drying up, this muddy fluid carved a complex pattern of channels while making its way across the planet’s surface. The melted rock–ice mixture also gave rise to the fluidised appearance of the debris blankets surrounding the largest crater. Based on the lack of similar structures near the small craters in this image, scientists believe that only the most powerful impacts – those responsible for forging the largest craters – were able to dig deep enough to release part of the frozen reservoir of water lying beneath the surface.
This image of the debris of an exploded star - known as supernova remnant 1E 0102.2-7219, or "E0102" for short - features data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. E0102 is located about 190,000 light years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the nearest galaxies to the Milky Way. It was created when a star that was much more massive than the Sun exploded, an event that would have been visible from the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth over 1000 years ago.
Chandra first observed E0102 shortly after its launch in 1999. New X-ray data have now been used to create this spectacular image and help celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Chandra's launch on July 23, 1999. In this latest image of E0102, the lowest-energy X-rays are colored orange, the intermediate range of X-rays is cyan, and the highest-energy X-rays Chandra detected are blue. An optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope (in red, green and blue) shows additional structure in the remnant and also reveals foreground stars in the field.
The Chandra image shows the outer blast wave produced by the supernova (blue), and an inner ring of cooler (red-orange) material. This inner ring is probably expanding ejecta from the explosion that is being heated by a shock wave traveling backwards into the ejecta. A massive star (not visible in this image) is illuminating the green cloud of gas and dust to the lower right of the image. This star may have similar properties to the one that exploded to form E0102.
Analysis of the Chandra spectrum gives astronomers new information about the geometry of the remnant, with implications for the nature of the explosion. The spectrum - which precisely separates X-rays of different energies - shows some material is moving away from Earth and some is moving toward us. When the material is moving away, its light is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum due to the so-called Doppler effect. Alternatively, when material is moving toward us, the light is bluer because of the same effect.
Caption: Chandra Telescope Team
The Heart and Soul nebulae are seen in this infrared mosaic from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The image covers an area of the sky over ten times as wide as the full moon, and eight times as high (5.5 x 3.9 degrees), in the constellation Cassiopeia.
Located about 6,000 light-years from Earth, the Heart and Soul nebulae form a vast star-forming complex that makes up part of the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. The nebula to the right is the Heart, designated IC 1805 and named after its resemblance to a human heart. To the left is the Soul nebula, also known as the Embryo nebula, IC 1848, or W5. The Perseus arm lies further from the center of the Milky Way than the arm that contains our Sun. The Heart and Soul nebulae stretch out nearly 580 light-years across, covering a small portion of the diameter of the Milky Way, which is roughly 100,000 light-years across.
The two nebulae are both massive star-making factories, marked by giant bubbles that were blown into surrounding dust by radiation and winds from the stars. WISE's infrared vision allows it to see into the cooler and dustier crevices of clouds like these, where gas and dust are just beginning to collect into new stars. These stars are less than a few million of years old -- youngsters in comparison to stars like the sun, which is nearly 5 billion years old.
Also visible near the bottom of this image are two galaxies, Maffei 1 and Maffei 2. Both galaxies contain billions of stars and, at about 10 million light-years away, are well outside our Milky Way yet relatively close compared to most galaxies. Maffei 1 is the bluish elliptical object and Maffei 2 is the spiral galaxy.
All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this image. Color is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is dominated by light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.
Caption: WISE Team
A Gaia test image of the young star cluster NGC1818 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, taken as part of calibration and testing before the science phase of the mission begins. The field-of-view is 212 x 212 arcseconds and the image is approximately oriented with north up and east left. The integration time of the image was 2.85 seconds and the image covers an area less than 1% of the full Gaia field of view.
Gaia’s overall design is optimised for making precise position measurements and the primary mirrors of its twin telescopes are rectangular rather than round. To best match the images delivered by the telescopes, the pixels in Gaia’s focal plane detectors are then also rectangular. In order to produce this image of NGC1818, the image has been resampled onto square pixels. Furthermore, to maximise its sensitivity to very faint stars, Gaia’s main camera does not use filters and provides wide-band intensity data, not true-colour images. The false-colour scheme used here relates to intensity only. The real colours and spectral properties of the stars are measured by other Gaia instruments.
An international team led by astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) and La Laguna University (ULL) has just released the first analysis of the observations of the Abell 2744 cluster of galaxies, a coordinated program of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. They have discovered one of the most distant galaxies known to date, which clearly shows the potential of the multi-year Frontier Fields project. The project uses a phenomenon called "gravitational lensing" where select foreground galaxy clusters amplify the faint light from far-more-distant background objects. By combining Hubble and Spitzer data, these astrophysicists have determined the properties of this young galaxy with a better precision than previous studies of other samples at similar cosmic epochs. This galaxy, named Abell2744_Y1, is about 30 times smaller than our galaxy, the Milky Way, but is producing at least 10 times more stars. From Earth, this galaxy is seen as it was 650 million years after the big bang. It is one of the brightest galaxies discovered at such a lookback time, say researchers. This study provides new constraints on the density and properties of the galaxies in the early universe. These results are accepted for publication in the scientific journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters.
In addition to the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) and La Laguna University (ULL), the team is composed of researchers from France (Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie and Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon), Switzerland (Geneva University and Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne), and the United States (University of Arizona). For more information about these results, visit: http://www.iac.es/divulgacion.php?op1=16&id=836&lang=en .
Caption: Hubble Heritage Team
The flower-like image of this star-forming region in Earth’s southern skies was imaged using a 64-megapixel Mosaic imaging camera on the National Science Foundation’s Victor M. Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
Cometary globules are isolated, relatively small clouds of gas and dust within the Milky Way. This example, called CG4, is about 1,300 light years from Earth. Its head is some 1.5 light-years in diameter, and its tail is about eight light-years long. The dusty cloud contains enough material to make several Sun-sized stars. CG4 is located in the constellation of Puppis.
The head of the nebula is opaque, but glows because it is illuminated by light from nearby hot stars. Their energy is gradually destroying the dusty head of the globule, sweeping away the tiny particles which scatter the starlight. This particular globule shows a faint red glow from electrically charged hydrogen, and it seems about to devour an edge-on spiral galaxy (ESO 257-19) in the upper left. In reality, this galaxy is more than a hundred million light-years further away, far beyond CG4. The image from the Blanco 4-meter telescope was taken in four filters, three of which are for blue, green and near-infrared light. The fourth is designed to isolate a specific color of red, known as hydrogen-alpha, which is produced by warm hydrogen gas.
Read NOAO Conditions of Use before downloading
MESSENGER has now surpassed 200,000 images acquired from orbit about Mercury! And there are still many more to come. In particular, acquiring NAC images when the spacecraft is closest to the planet is a priority for the remainder of the mission; such images will allow the highest resolution views of Mercury's surface to be captured. The four-image mosaic shown here is one of the first from the MDIS low-altitude imaging campaign. Among the details revealed are hollows that appear to have formed in one layer in the wall of this 15-kilometer-diameter crater.
This image was acquired as part of the MDIS low-altitude imaging campaign. During MESSENGER's second extended mission, the spacecraft makes a progressively closer approach to Mercury's surface than at any previous point in the mission, enabling the acquisition of high-spatial-resolution data. For spacecraft altitudes below 350 kilometers, NAC images are acquired with pixel scales ranging from 20 meters to as little as 2 meters.
Caption: Mercury Messenger Team
Just weeks after NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory began operations in 1999, the telescope pointed at Centaurus A (Cen A, for short). This galaxy, at a distance of about 12 million light years from Earth, contains a gargantuan jet blasting away from a central supermassive black hole.
Since then, Chandra has returned its attention to this galaxy, each time gathering more data. And, like an old family photo that has been digitally restored, new processing techniques are providing astronomers with a new look at this old galactic friend. This new image of Cen A contains data from observations, equivalent to over nine and a half days worth of time, taken between 1999 and 2012. In this image, the lowest-energy X-rays Chandra detects are in red, while the medium-energy X-rays are green, and the highest-energy ones are blue.
As in all of Chandra's images of Cen A, this one shows the spectacular jet of outflowing material - seen pointing from the middle to the upper left - that is generated by the giant black hole at the galaxy's center. This new high-energy snapshot of Cen A also highlights a dust lane that wraps around the waist of the galaxy. Astronomers think this feature is a remnant of a collision that Cen A experienced with a smaller galaxy millions of years ago.
The data housed in Chandra's extensive archive on Cen A provide a rich resource for a wide range of scientific investigations. For example, researchers published findings in 2013 on the point-like X-ray sources in Cen A. Most of these sources are systems where a compact object - either a black hole or a neutron star - is pulling gas from an orbiting companion star. These compact objects form by the collapse of massive stars, with black holes resulting from heavier stars than neutron stars.
The results suggested that nearly all of the compact objects had masses that fell into two categories: either less than twice that of the Sun, or more than five times as massive as the Sun. These two groups correspond to neutron stars and black holes.
This mass gap may tell us about the way massive stars explode. Scientists expect an upper limit on the most massive neutron stars, up to twice the mass of the Sun. What is puzzling is that the smallest black holes appear to weigh in at about five times the mass of the Sun. Stars are observed to have a continual range of masses, and so in terms of their progeny's weight we would expect black holes to carry on where neutron stars left off.
Although this mass gap between neutron stars and black holes has been seen in our galaxy, the Milky Way, this new Cen A result provides the first hints that the gap occurs in more distant galaxies. If it turns out to be ubiquitous, it may mean that a special, rapid type of stellar collapse is required in some supernova explosions.
Caption: Chandra Telescope Team
Russell Crater dunes are a favorite target for HiRISE images not only because of their incredible beauty, but for how we can measure the accumulation of frost year after year in the fall, and its disappearance in the spring.
The frost is, of course, carbon dioxide ice that often sublimates (going directly from a solid to a gas) during the Martian spring. HiRISE takes images of the same areas on Mars in order to study seasonal changes like this. In an area like Russell Crater--a very ancient impact crater about 140 kilometers in diameter--we can follow changes in the terrain by comparing images taken at different times. This helps give us a better understanding of active processes on the Red Planet.
Caption: HirRISE Science Team
This striking new image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, reveals a star in the process of forming within the Chamaeleon cloud. This young star is throwing off narrow streams of gas from its poles — creating this ethereal object known as HH 909A. These speedy outflows collide with the slower surrounding gas, lighting up the region.
When new stars form, they gather material hungrily from the space around them. A young star will continue to feed its huge appetite until it becomes massive enough to trigger nuclear fusion reactions in its core, which light the star up brightly.
Before this happens, new stars undergo a phase during which they violently throw bursts of material out into space. This material is ejected as narrow jets that streak away into space at breakneck speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second, colliding with nearby gas and dust and lighting up the region. The resulting narrow, patchy regions of faintly glowing nebulosity are known as Herbig-Haro objects. They are very short-lived structures, and can be seen to visibly change and evolve over a matter of years — just the blink of an eye on astronomical timescales.
These structures are very common within star-forming regions like the Orion Nebula, or the Chameleon I molecular cloud — home to the subject of this image. The Chameleon cloud is located in the southern constellation of Chameleon, just over 500 light-years from Earth. Astronomers have found numerous Herbig-Haro objects embedded in this stellar nursery, most of them emanating from stars with masses similar to that of the Sun. A few are thought to be tied to less massive objects such as brown dwarfs, which are "failed" stars that did not hit the critical mass to spark reactions in their centres. A version of this image was entered into the Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Judy Schmidt.
Caption: Hubble Heritage Team
Messier 82 (M82), the galaxy in which the nearest supernova in decades recently exploded, also is the closest galaxy that is undergoing a rapid burst of star formation, known as a starburst. About 12 million light-years away, it is seen nearly edge-on, as shown in the larger, visible-light image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The inset is a new radio image, made with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), that reveals fresh information about the central 5200 light-years of the galaxy.
The radio emission seen here is produced by ionized gas and by fast-moving electrons interacting with the interstellar magnetic field. The bright dots are a mix of star-forming regions and supernova remnants, the debris from stellar explosions; analysis of the VLA data tells scientists which of these are which. Scientists also are studying the faint, wispy features, many of which were previously unseen, to investigate their relationship with this galaxy's starburst-driven superwind. Supernova 2014J is located outside the inset, to the right. VLA observations to date show that, like all other supernovae of its particular type, SN 2014J has not yet been found to be emitting radio waves.
The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, beginning at 11:57 p.m. EST on Feb. 3, 2014, and peaking at midnight EST. NASA released images of the flare as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel.
To see how this event may impact Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. This flare is classified as an M5.2 flare. Updates will be provided as needed.
Just as Saturn's famous hexagonal shaped jet stream encircles the planet's north pole, the rings encircle the planet, as seen from Cassini's position high above. Around and around everything goes!
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 43 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 23, 2013 using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 97 degrees. Image scale is 93 miles (150 kilometers) per pixel.
Caption: Cassini Solstice Team
A storm of stars is brewing in the Trifid nebula, as seen in this view from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The stellar nursery, where baby stars are bursting into being, is the yellow-and-orange object dominating the picture. Yellow bars in the nebula appear to cut a cavity into three sections, hence the name Trifid nebula.
Colors in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared light detected by WISE. The main green cloud is made up of hydrogen gas. Within this cloud is the Trifid nebula, where radiation and winds from massive stars have blown a cavity into the surrounding dust and gas, and presumably triggered the birth of new generations of stars. Dust glows in infrared light, so the three lines that make up the Trifid, while appearing dark in visible-light views, are bright when seen by WISE.
The blue stars scattered around the picture are older, and they lie between Earth and the Trifid nebula. The baby stars in the Trifid will eventually look similar to those foreground stars. The red cloud at upper right is gas heated by a group of very young stars. The Trifid nebula is located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths, and cyan (blue-green) represents 4.6 microns, both of which come mainly from hot stars. Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebula, appear green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red, 22-micron light.
This scene combines images taken by the left-eye camera of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover during the midafternoon, local Mars solar time, of the mission's 526th Martian day, or sol (Jan. 28, 2014). The sand dune in the upper center of the image spans a gap, called "Dingo Gap," between two short scarps. The dune is about 3 feet (1 meter) high. The nearer edge of it is about 115 feet (35 meters) away from the rover's position when the component images were taken, just after a Sol 526 drive of 49 feet (15 meters).
The image has been white-balanced to show what the rocks would look like if they were on Earth. A version with 200-centimeter (79-inch) scale bars is available as Figure A.
For caption information and links to high-resolution images, please use the full-screen version of this gallery.
For more mind-blowing space photos, see the entire WIRED Space Photo of the Day collection.