Public Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What's that rising up from the Earth? When circling the Earth on the International Space Station early in July, astronaut Nicole Ayers saw an unusual type of lightning rising up from the Earth: a gigantic jet. The powerful jet appears near the center of the featured image in red, white, and blue. Giant jet lightning has only been known about for the past 25 years. The atmospheric jets are associated with thunderstorms and extend upwards towards Earth's ionosphere. The lower part of the frame shows the Earth at night, with Earth's thin atmosphere tinted green from airglow. City lights are visible, sometimes resolved, but usually creating diffuse white glows in intervening clouds. The top of the frame reveals distant stars in the dark night sky. The nature of gigantic jets and their possible association with other types of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) such as blue jets and red sprites remain active topics of research.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This butterfly can hatch planets. The nebula fanning out from the star IRAS 04302+2247 may look like the wings of a butterfly, while the vertical brown stripe down the center may look like the butterfly's body -- but together they indicate an active planet-forming system. The featured picture was captured recently in infrared light by the Webb Space Telescope. Pictured, the vertical disk is thick with the gas and dust from which planets form. The disk shades visible and (most) infrared light from the central star, allowing a good view of the surrounding dust that reflects out light. In the next few million years, the dust disk will likely fragment into rings through the gravity of newly hatched planets. And a billion years from now, the remaining gas and dust will likely dissipate, leaving mainly the planets -- like in our Solar System. Explore the Universe: Random APOD Generator

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How much of planet Earth is made of water? Very little, actually. Although oceans of water cover about 70 percent of Earth's surface, these oceans are shallow compared to the Earth's radius. The featured illustration shows what would happen if all of the water on or near the surface of the Earth were bunched up into a ball. The radius of this ball would be only about 700 kilometers, less than half the radius of the Earth's Moon, but slightly larger than Saturn's moon Rhea which, like many moons in our outer Solar System, is mostly water ice. The next smallest ball depicts all of Earth's liquid fresh water, while the tiniest ball shows the volume of all of Earth's fresh-water lakes and rivers. How any of this water came to be on the Earth and whether any significant amount is trapped far beneath Earth's surface remain topics of research.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

When the sun sets on September 7, the Full Moon will rise. And on that date denizens around much of our fair planet, including parts of Antarctica, Australia, Asia, Europe, and Africa can witness a total lunar eclipse, with the Moon completely immersed in Earth's shadow. As the bright Full Moon first enters Earth's shadow it will darken, finally taking on a reddish hue during the total eclipse phase. In fact, the color of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse is due to reddened light from sunrises and sunsets around planet Earth. The reddened sunlight is scattered by a dense atmosphere into the planet's otherwise dark central shadow. When the sun set on August 22, this telephoto snapshot of red skies, blue sea, and the Mangiabarche Lighthouse was captured from Sant'Antioco, Sardinia, Italy.

Photo by When the sun sets on September 7

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Also known as NGC 104, 47 Tucanae is a jewel of the southern sky. Not a star but a dense cluster of stars, it roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy along with some 200 other globular star clusters. The second brightest globular cluster (after Omega Centauri) as seen from planet Earth, 47 Tuc lies about 13,000 light-years away. It can be spotted with the naked eye close on the sky to the Small Magellanic Cloud in the constellation of the Toucan. The dense cluster is made up of hundreds of thousands of stars in a volume only about 120 light-years across. Red giant stars on the outskirts of the cluster are easy to pick out as yellowish stars in this sharp telescopic portrait. Tightly packed globular star cluster 47 Tuc is also home to a star with the closest known orbit around a black hole.

Photo by Carlos Taylor

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy's boxy, bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane. NGC 4565 lies around 40 million light-years distant while the spiral galaxy itself spans some 100,000 light-years. That's about the size of our own Milky Way. Easily spotted with small telescopes, deep sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.

Photo by José Rodrigues

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How soon do jets form when a supernova gives birth to a neutron star? The Africa Nebula provides clues. This supernova remnant surrounds Circinus X-1, an X-ray emitting neutron star and the companion star it orbits. The image, from the ThunderKAT collaboration on the MeerKAT radio telescope situated in South Africa, shows the bright core-and-lobe structure of Cir X-1’s currently active jets inside the nebula. A mere 4600 years old, Cir X-1 could be the "Little Sister" of microquasar SS 433*. However, the newly discovered bubble exiting from a ring-like hole in the upper right of the nebula, along with a ring to the bottom left, demonstrate that other jets previously existed. Computer simulations indicate those jets formed within 100 years of the explosion and lasted up to 1000 years. Surprisingly, to create the observed bubble, the jets need to be more powerful than young neutron stars were previously thought to produce. Open Science: Browse 3,700+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the orange emission nebula at the far right of the featured picture. The horse-head feature is dark because it is really an opaque dust cloud that lies in front of the bright emission nebula. Like clouds in Earth's atmosphere, this cosmic cloud has assumed a recognizable shape by chance. After many thousands of years, the internal motions of the cloud will surely alter its appearance. The emission nebula's orange color is caused by electrons recombining with protons to form hydrogen atoms. Toward the lower left of the image is the Flame Nebula, an orange-tinged nebula that also contains intricate filaments of dark dust.

Photo by Daniel Stern

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Its surface is the most densely cratered in the Solar System -- but what's inside? Jupiter's moon Callisto is a battered ball of dirty ice that is larger than the planet Mercury. It was visited by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s and 2000s, but the recently reprocessed featured image is from a flyby of NASA's Voyager 2 in 1979. The moon would appear darker if it weren't for the tapestry of light-colored fractured surface ice created by eons of impacts. The interior of Callisto is potentially even more interesting because therein might lie an internal layer of liquid water. This potential underground sea is a candidate to harbor life -- similar with sister moons Europa and Ganymede. Callisto is slightly larger than Luna, Earth's Moon, but because of its high ice content is slightly less massive. ESA's JUICE and NASA's Europa Clipper missions are now headed out to Jupiter to better investigate its largest moons.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What created this unusual planetary nebula? Dubbed the Pillow Nebula and the Flying Carpet Nebula, NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in the featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope. In modern times, though, for reasons unknown, it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in brown) in specific directions that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners. What lies at the nebula's center is unknown, with one hypothesis holding it to be a close binary star system where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star. NGC 7027, about 3,000 light years away, was first discovered in 1878 and can be seen with a standard backyard telescope toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A young crescent moon can be hard to see. That's because when the Moon shows its crescent phase (young or old) it can never be far from the Sun in planet Earth's sky. But even though the sky is still bright, a slender sunlit lunar crescent is clearly visible in this early evening skyscape. The telephoto snapshot was captured on August 24, with the Moon very near the western horizon at sunset. Seen in a narrow crescent phase about 1.5 days old, the visible sunlit portion is a mere two percent of the surface of the Moon's familiar nearside. At the Canary Islands Space Centre, a steerable radio dish for communication with spacecraft is tilted in the direction of the two percent Moon. The sunset sky's pastel pinkish coloring is partly due to fine sand and dust from the Sahara Desert blown by the prevailing winds.

Photo by Marina Prol

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The diffuse hydrogen-alpha glow of emission region Sh2-27 fills this cosmic scene. The field of view spans nearly 3 degrees across the nebula-rich constellation Ophiuchus toward the central Milky Way. A Dark Veil of wispy interstellar dust clouds draped across the foreground is chiefly identified as LDN 234 and LDN 204 from the 1962 Catalog of Dark Nebulae by American astronomer Beverly Lynds. Sh2-27 itself is the large but faint HII region surrounding runaway O-type star Zeta Ophiuchi. Along with the Zeta Oph HII region, LDN 234 and LDN 204 are likely 500 or so light-years away. At that distance, this telescopic frame would be about 25 light-years wide.

Photo by Katelyn Beecroft