Tag: nasa

  • How far can black hole jets extend? A new record was found just recently with the discovery of a 23-million light-year long jet pair from a black hole active billions of years ago. Dubbed Porphyrion for a mythological Greek giant, the impressive jets were created by a type of black…

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  • The new comet has passed its closest to the Sun and is now moving closer to the Earth. C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is currently moving out from inside the orbit of Venus and on track to pass its nearest to the Earth in about two weeks. Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, pronounced “Choo-cheen-shahn At-less,”,…

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  • Is this really the famous Pleiades star cluster? Known for its iconic blue stars, the Pleiades is shown here in infrared light where the surrounding dust outshines the stars. Here, three infrared colors have been mapped into visual colors (R=24, G=12, B=4.6 microns). The base images were taken by NASA’s…

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  • Shockwaves ripple across the glare as a launch eclipses the setting Sun in this exciting close-up. Captured on September 17, the roaring Falcon 9 rocket carried European Galileo L13 navigation satellites to medium Earth orbit after a lift-off from Cape Canaveral on Florida’s space coast. The Falcon 9 booster returned…

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  • The twenty galaxies arrayed in these panels are part of an ambitious astronomical survey of tidal stellar streams. Each panel presents a composite view; a deep, inverted image taken from publicly available imaging surveys of a field that surrounds a nearby massive galaxy image. The inverted images reveal faint cosmic…

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  • In 1716, English astronomer Edmond Halley noted, “This is but a little Patch, but it shows itself to the naked Eye, when the Sky is serene and the Moon absent.” Of course, M13 is now less modestly recognized as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, one of the brightest globular…

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  • This dusty region is forming stars. Part of a sprawling molecular cloud complex that resembles, to some, a rampaging baboon, the region is a relatively close by 500 light-years away toward the constellation Corona Australis. That’s about one third the distance of the more famous stellar nursery known as the…

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  • The defining astronomical moment of this September’s equinox is at 12:44 UTC on September 22, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator moving south in its yearly journey through planet Earth’s sky. That marks the beginning of fall for our fair planet in the northern hemisphere and spring in the…

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  • Spanning light-years, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula floats in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, dark nebula is part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard…

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  • Only natural colors of the Moon in planet Earth’s sky appear in this creative visual presentation. Arranged as pixels in a framed image, the lunar disks were photographed at different times. Their varying hues are ultimately due to reflected sunlight affected by changing atmospheric conditions and the alignment geometry of…

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  • This snapshot from the International Space Station was taken on August 11 while orbiting about 430 kilometers above the Indian Ocean, Southern Hemisphere, planet Earth. The spectacular view looks south and east, down toward the planet’s horizon and through red and green curtains of aurora australis. The auroral glow is…

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  • This spectacular mosaic of images from the James Webb Space Telescope peers into the heart of young star cluster NGC 1333. A mere 1,000 light-years distant toward the heroic constellation Perseus, the nearby star cluster lies at the edge of the large Perseus molecular cloud. Part of Webb’s deep exploration…

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  • Ringed ice giant Neptune lies near the center of this sharp near-infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The dim and distant world is the farthest planet from the Sun, about 30 times farther away than planet Earth. But in the stunning Webb view, the planet’s dark and ghostly…

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  • About 70,000 light-years across, NGC 247 is a spiral galaxy smaller than our Milky Way. Measured to be only 11 million light-years distant it is nearby though. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from our perspective, it dominates this telescopic field of view toward the southern constellation Cetus. The pronounced void…

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