Copyright: If one black hole looks strange, what about two? Light rays from accretion disks around a pair of orbiting supermassive black holes make their way through the warped space-time produced by extreme gravity in this detailed computer visualization. The simulated accretion disks have been given different false color schemes, red for the disk surrounding […]
Copyright: Jose Antonio Hervas What’s causing those lines? Objects in the sky sometimes appear reflected as lines across water — but why? If the water’s surface is smooth, then reflected objects would appear similarly — as spots. But if the water is choppy, then there are many places where light from the object can reflect […]
Copyright: How fast can a black hole spin? If any object made of regular matter spins too fast — it breaks apart. But a black hole might not be able to break apart — and its maximum spin rate is really unknown. Theorists usually model rapidly rotating black holes with the Kerr solution to Einstein’s […]
Copyright: Like Earth’s moon, Saturn’s largest moon Titan is locked in synchronous rotation with its planet. This mosaic of images recorded by the Cassini spacecraft in May of 2012 shows its anti-Saturn side, the side always facing away from the ringed gas giant. The only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, Titan […]
Copyright: The most massive young star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud is NGC 346, embedded in our small satellite galaxy’s largest star forming region some 210,000 light-years distant. Of course the massive stars of NGC 346 are short lived, but very energetic. Their winds and radiation sculpt the edges of the region’s dusty molecular […]
Copyright: The first to orbit inner planet Mercury, the MESSENGER spacecraft came to rest on this region of Mercury’s surface on April 30, 2015. Constructed from MESSENGER image and laser altimeter data, the projected scene looks north over the northeastern rim of the broad, lava filled Shakespeare basin. The large, 48 kilometer (30 mile) wide […]
Copyright: Daniel Korona Sometimes, the sky itself seems to smile. A few days ago, visible over much of the world, an unusual superposition of our Moon with the planets Venus and Saturn created just such an iconic facial expression. Specifically, a crescent Moon appeared to make a happy face on the night sky when paired […]
Copyright: Natan Fontes Where are Saturn’s ears? Galileo is credited, in 1610, as the first person to see Saturn’s rings. Testing out Lipperhey’s recently co-invented telescope, Galileo did not know what they were and so called them “ears”. The mystery deepened in 1612, when Saturn’s ears mysteriously disappeared. Today we know exactly what happened: from […]
Copyright: Francis Bozon & Cecil Navick (AstroA. R. O.) This cosmic skyscape features glowing gas and dark dust clouds alongside the young stars of NGC 3572. A beautiful emission nebula and star cluster, it sails far southern skies within the nautical constellation Carina. Stars from NGC 3572 are toward top center in the telescopic frame […]
Copyright: What is creating the strange texture of IC 418? Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool, planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns that are not well understood. Perhaps they are related to chaotic winds from the variable central star, which changes brightness unpredictably in just a few […]
Copyright: This stunning portrait of NGC 5335 was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Some 170,000 light-years across and over 200 million light-years away toward the constellation Virgo, the magnificent spiral galaxy is seen face-on in Hubble’s view. Within the galactic disk, loose streamers of star forming regions lie along the galaxy’s flocculent spiral arms. […]
Copyright: Main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson is about 8 kilometers long and 3.5 kilometers across. On April 20, this sharp close-up of the asteroid was captured at a distance of about 1100 kilometers by the Lucy spacecraft’s long range camera during its second asteroid encounter. Named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, discoverer of the Lucy […]
Copyright: Daniel Stern Beautiful emission nebula NGC 6164 was created by a rare, hot, luminous O-type star, some 40 times as massive as the Sun. Seen at the center of the cosmic cloud, the star is a mere 3 to 4 million years old. In another three to four million years the massive star will […]
Copyright: Koen van Barneveld This surprising sky has almost everything. First, slanting down from the upper left and far in the distance is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. More modestly, slanting down from the upper right and high in Earth’s atmosphere is a bright meteor. The dim band of light across the […]
Copyright: Rich Addis What’s different about this Moon? It’s the terminators. In the featured image, you can’t directly see any terminator — the line that divides the light of day from the dark of night. That’s because the featured image is a digital composite of many near-terminator lunar strips over a full Moon. Terminator regions […]
