Space pictures
This February 25, 2014 solar event was a major X-class (X4) solar flare and coronal mass ejection (CME). The image captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the massive and powerful x-class ejection from the Sun, which looks a lot like a shrimp. Thankfully there was no major damage to electrical systems on Earth or on the many satellites in orbit.
The moon of Uranus, Miranda, was discovered by the Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Peter Kuiper in 1948. It was named after the the daughter of the wily Prospero in Shakespeare’s classic “The Tempest.” This picture of Miranda was taken by the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1986 and the NASA mission greatly increased the amount of data scientists had to study this natural satellite of Uranus. The surface of Miranda, is composed of ice and rock and its rare planetary geology features numerous cliffs and valleys.
Given the vastness of space and the universe, it is difficult to fathom the size of or the dimensions of these regions. But measuring and mapping the magnetic field, from light which was polarized when it was emitted by or scattered off dust and other surfaces, makes it possible to create a “map” using the technique of convolution. The ESA and NASA joint venture Planck satellite helped compile this view of the magnetic field of the Milky Way galaxy.
The dark band running horizontally across the center of the image corresponds to the galactic plane. The darker regions in the rest of the image correspond to stronger polarized emissions, and the striations indicate the direction of the magnetic field projected onto the plane of the sky.
The circle of life and death is truly universal and as previously we have shown the birth of a star, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope we can now look at the impending death of a star. The large tadpole-shaped objects are called “cometary knots” due to their resemblance to comets (glowing heads and gossamer tails). They are believed by scientists to be the last gasp of a dying star. The scale/size involved in these cometary knots is quite astounding, with the gaseous head believed to be twice the size of our solar system alone and each comet like tail stretching for up to 100 billion miles (1,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun).
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) looked back and took this picture of the Earth and Moon from Mars, using its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. Taken from approximately 142 million miles (88 million km) away, one can barely make out the west coast of South America in the lower right hand portion of the partial Earth image.
