Space pictures
The joint NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission made some interesting discoveries on Jupiter, on the way to its final destination which was Saturn. This January 2001 composite infrared picture shows Jupiter’s south pole (left) and north pole (right). The bright green spots are the warmer areas, believed to be organic matter, specifically acetylene (ethyne; C2H2). This research allowed scientists to better understand the chemical interactions between sunlight and molecules in Jupiter’s stratosphere.
Not the human kind but birth of a celestial star.
The birth of a star is a fascinating process that has and will long continue to draw the attention of astronomers and scientists. This picture was based on the observations of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, and gave us a first look at a newborn star. Combination of Spitzer and ALMA are able to capture the infrared and sub-millimeter light spectrums; thus a allowing a rare glimpse inside the the dark cosmic cloud around Herbig-Haro (HH) object 46/47. The blue areas show gas energized by out flowing jets representing the shorter wavelength light, with the blueish-green areas caused by hydrogen gas. The redder areas are the longer wavelength and are created by excited carbon monoxide gas in this new star.
NASA’s Deep Space probe took this picture of Comet Tempel 1 (designation 9P/Tempel), which is a comet in the Jupiter system. It was taken by Deep Space probe’s impactor targeting sensor, about five minutes before it deliberately impacted/crashed with Comet Tempel 1. This comet is relatively small in size, 7.6 km × 4.9 km in diameter and has a rotational period of 40.7 hours.
The two purple/magenta coloured spots in this picture show a massive black hole in the center of the Circinus Galaxy and a smaller black hole beside it. The smaller black hole belongs to a class called ultraluminous X-ray sources, or ULXs. It was what lead to this discovery, where the larger black hole is believed to be around one hundred times the size of our Sun. The Circinus galaxy is located about 13 million light years away from Earth in the Circinus constellation.
The X-ray data came from NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescopic Array (NuSTAR) mission managed by JPL-Caltech.
NASA’s Voyager 1 took this grainy picture of Enceladus on November 12, 1980 from a distance of 655,000 kilometers (393,000 miles).
Enceladus is the sixth largest moon/satellite of the planet Saturn and the fourteenth satellite, ordered by distance from the planet. It seems to be composed of (liquid) water under an icy surface. This creates a lack of visible surface detail on the satellite and makes it very different from other, larger Saturnian moons. Enceladus is named after the Giant Enceladus of Greek mythology.
