Slide: 1 / of 7 .
Caption: This is planetary nebula called PK 329-02.2 (sometimes referred to as Menzel 2, or Mz 2). A planetary nebula is formed when a star around the mass of the sun reaches the end of its life. They shed outer layers which appear as glowing clouds of gas. While not usually symmetrical, the Menzel 2 has blue clouds that perfectly align with two stars at its center. The nebula will continue this display for tens of thousands of years, but will eventually fade away and become a white dwarf. ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Serge MeunierESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Serge Meunier
Slide: 2 / of 7 .
Caption: New Horizons give us the first color photos of Pluto’s atmospheric hazes, which was a beautiful blue. The haze is likely from chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane cause by the sun, leading to small, soot-like particles (or tholins) that grow as they settle toward the surface. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
Slide: 3 / of 7 .
Caption: In this starry field contains the globular cluster NGC 6553 which has a mysterious microlensing event. Microlensing is where the light from a background source is bent by the gravitational field of a fore ground object, creating an amplified image of the background object The object causing the microlensing in NGC 6553 bent the light of a red giant star in the background (marked with an arrow). If this object lies in the cluster — something the scientists believe might only have a 50/50 chance of being correct — the object could be a black hole with a mass twice that of the Sun, making it the first of its kind to be discovered in a globular cluster. It would also be the oldest known stellar-mass black hole ever discovered. However, further observations are needed to determine the true nature of this lensing object for sure. ESO
Slide: 4 / of 7 .
Caption: A collection of new images has been released by the Chandra X-ray Observatory archive. They include SN 1987A, the brightest supernova and nearest one to Earth in the last century and galaxy cluster MS 0735.6+7421, home to one of the most powerful eruptions ever observed.
Slide: 5 / of 7 .
Caption: A photo of martian sand dunes from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images provide information about erosion and movement of surface material, about wind and weather patterns, even about the soil grains and grain sizes. However, looking past the dunes, these images also reveal the nature of the substrate beneath. Within the spaces between the dunes, a resistant and highly fractured surface is revealed. The fractured ground is resistant to erosion by the wind, and suggests the material is bedrock that is now shattered by a history of bending stresses or temperature changes, such as cooling. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Slide: 6 / of 7 .
Caption: This image shows the sky around the nearby young star AU Microscopii. It was created from images forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. AU Mic appears just below the centre of the image as an orangish star of moderate brightness. Because the photographs through different coloured filters that were used to make this picture were taken many years apart, AU Mic appears double, as the star’s own proper motion has moved it a small distance across the sky in the intervening time. ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2
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Slide: 7 / of 7 .
Caption: A view from the “Kimberley” formation on Mars taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The strata in the foreground dip towards the base of Mount Sharp, indicating flow of water toward a basin that existed before the larger bulk of the mountain formed. The colors are adjusted so that rocks look approximately as they would if they were on Earth, to help geologists interpret the rocks. This “white balancing” to adjust for the lighting on Mars overly compensates for the absence of blue on Mars, making the sky appear light blue and sometimes giving dark, black rocks a blue cast. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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Slide: 1 / of 7 .
Caption: New findings from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) provide the strongest evidence yet that liquid water flows intermittently on present-day Mars. Using an imaging spectrometer on MRO, researchers detected signatures of hydrated minerals on slopes where mysterious streaks are seen on the Red Planet. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Slide: 2 / of 7 .
Caption: A stunningly detailed photo of emerging gas jets streaming from a region of newborn stars. The Herbig-Haro 24 Complex contains no less than six jets streaming from a small cluster of young stars embedded in molecular cloud. Gemini Observatory/AURA/B. Reipurth, C. Aspin, T. Rector
Slide: 3 / of 7 .
Caption: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon – and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history. New Horizons captures the best color and highest resolution images yet of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon. The photo reveals a surprisingly complex and violent history. There is a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the equator, stretching more than a thousand miles across Charon. It’s four times as long as the Grand Canyon and twice as deep in some places. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Slide: 4 / of 7 .
Caption: Galaxy cluster SPT-CLJ2344-4243, nicknamed the Phoenix Cluster, is always breaking records. It has the highest rate of cooling hot gas and the most powerful producer of X-rays of all known clusters. Astronomers have now observed x-ray cavities caused by what they believe to be one of the largest black hole energy outbursts ever recorded. NASA
Slide: 5 / of 7 .
Caption: Dark narrow streaks, called “recurring slope lineae,” emanate from the walls of Garni Crater on Mars, in this view constructed from observations by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The dark streaks here are up to few hundred yards long. They are hypothesized to be formed by flow of briny liquid water on Mars. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona
Slide: 6 / of 7 .
Caption: A color-coded topographic map of Occator crater on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. Blue is the lowest elevation, and brown is the highest. The crater, which is home to the brightest spots on Ceres, is approximately 56 miles (90 kilometers wide). NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Slide: 7 / of 7 .
Caption: NGC 613’s core looks bright and uniformly white in this image, but lurking at the center of this brilliance lies a dark secret. As with nearly all spiral galaxies, a monstrous black hole resides at the heart. Its mass is estimated at about 10 times that of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole and it is consuming stars, gas and dust. As this matter descends into the black hole’s maw it radiates away energy and spews out radio waves. However, when looking at the galaxy in the optical and infrared wavelengths used to take this image, there is no trace of the dark heart. ESA/Hubble & NASA and S. Smartt
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Slide: 1 / of 6 .
Caption: NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has unveiled a small section of the expanding remains of a massive star that exploded about 8,000 years ago. Known as the Veil Nebula, the debris is one of the best-known supernova remnants, deriving its name from its delicate, draped filamentary structures. The entire nebula is 110 light-years across, covering six full moons on the sky as seen from Earth, and resides about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team
Slide: 2 / of 6 .
Caption: This new image of the rose-colored star forming region Messier 17 was captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. It is one of the sharpest images showing the entire nebula. It not only reveals its full size but also retains fine detail throughout the cosmic landscape of gas clouds, dust and newborn stars. ESO
Slide: 3 / of 6 .
Caption: Astronomers identify a medium-sized black hole in the central region of galaxy NGC1313. NGC1313 is 50,000 light-years across and lies about 14 million light-years from the Milky Way in the southern constellation Reticulum. ESO
Slide: 4 / of 6 .
Caption: A color composite of the Omega Nebula (M 17) made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximately 4.7 x 3.7 degrees. ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2
Slide: 5 / of 6 .
Caption: ASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, stellar winds flowing out from the fast-moving star Zeta Ophiuchi are creating a bow shock seen as glowing gossamer threads, which, for this star, are only seen in infrared light. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Slide: 6 / of 6 .
Caption: Look closely and you just might see Saturn’s moons, hidden in the planet’s rings. Prometheus (53 miles or 86 kilometers across) and Pandora (50 miles or 81 kilometers across) orbit along side Saturn’s narrow F ring, which is shaped, in part, by their gravitational influences. Their proximity to the rings also means that they often lie on the same line of sight as the rings, sometimes making them difficult to spot. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
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Slide: 1 / of 6 .
Caption: A prominent lobate fault scarp in the Vitello Cluster is one of thousands discovered in Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera images (LROC). Topography derived from the LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) stereo images shows a degraded crater has been uplift as the fault scarp has formed (blues are lower elevations and reds are higher elevations). NASA/LRO/Arizona State University/Smithsonian Institution
Slide: 2 / of 6 .
Caption: The Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy, pictured in a new image from the Wide Field Imager camera, installed on the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, is a close neighbor of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Despite their proximity, both galaxies have very distinct histories and characters. This galaxy is much smaller, fainter and older than the Milky Way and appears here as a cloud of faint stars filling most of the picture. ESO
Slide: 3 / of 6 .
Caption: Majestic Mountains and Frozen Plains: Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon. The smooth expanse of the informally named Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) high, including the informally named Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline. The backlighting highlights more than a dozen layers of haze in Pluto’s tenuous but distended atmosphere. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
Slide: 4 / of 6 .
Caption: NGC 3921 — found in the constellation of Ursa Major (The Great Bear) — is an interacting pair of disk galaxies in the late stages of its merger. Observations show that both of the galaxies involved were about the same mass and collided about 700 million years ago. You can see clearly in this image the disturbed morphology, tails and loops characteristic of a post-merger. ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Slide: 5 / of 6 .
Caption: On Sept. 17, 2015, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly captured images and video from the International Space Station during an early morning flyover of the United States. NASA
Slide: 6 / of 6 .
Caption: This image of the sky around the Sculptor Dwarf Galaxy was created from pictures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The galaxy appears as a small faint cloud close to the centre of the picture. ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2
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Slide: 1 / of 7 .
Caption: The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower. So the nickname for this cosmic object — the Sunflower Galaxy — is no coincidence. Galactic arms, sunflowers and whirlpools are only a few examples of nature’s apparent preference for spirals. For galaxies like Messier 63 the winding arms shine bright because of the presence of recently formed, blue–white giant stars and clusters, readily seen in this Hubble image. ESA/Hubble & NASA
Slide: 2 / of 7 .
Caption: This synthetic perspective view of Pluto, based on the latest high-resolution images to be downlinked from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shows what you would see if you were approximately 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) above Pluto’s equatorial area, looking northeast over the dark, cratered, informally named Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains informally called Sputnik Planum. The entire expanse of terrain seen in this image is 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) across. NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Slide: 3 / of 7 .
Caption: Astronomers have discovered a rare beast of a galaxy cluster whose heart is bursting with new stars. The unexpected find, made with the help of NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, suggests that behemoth galaxies at the cores of these massive clusters can grow significantly by feeding on gas stolen from other galaxies. The cluster in the new study, referred to by astronomers as SpARCS1049+56, has at least 27 galaxy members, and a combined mass equal to nearly 400 trillion suns. NASA, ESA, STScI, JPL-Caltech, and T. Webb (McGill University)
Slide: 4 / of 7 .
Caption: This five-frame sequence of images from the New Horizons spacecraft captures the giant plume from Io’s Tvashtar volcano. NASA/JHU Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Slide: 5 / of 7 .
Caption: Petrified sand dunes captured by the Mars Curiosity rover. Large-scale crossbedding in the sandstone of this ridge on a lower slope of Mars’ Mount Sharp is typical of windblown sand dunes that have petrified. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Slide: 6 / of 7 .
Caption: This image, made using images taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, shows Occator crater on Ceres, home to a collection of intriguing bright spots. NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA
Slide: 7 / of 7 .
Caption: Why does Saturn look like it’s been painted with a dark brush in this infrared image, but Dione looks untouched? Perhaps an artist with very specific tastes in palettes? The answer is methane. This image was taken in a wavelength that is absorbed by methane. Dark areas seen here on Saturn are regions with thicker clouds, where light has to travel through more methane on its way into and back out of the atmosphere. Since Dione (698 miles or 1,123 kilometers across) doesn’t have an atmosphere rich in methane the way Saturn does, it does not experience similar absorption — the sunlight simply bounces off its icy surface. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
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