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
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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
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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
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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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Slide: 1 / of 6 .
Caption: The Prawn Nebula is one of constant “cosmic recycling.” It’s been a hotbed for star production over millions of years because of the many aging stars and supernova explosions that keep new stars forming. ESO
Slide: 2 / of 6 .
Caption: A photo of Mars’ Nili Fossae plains, the largest deposit of carbonate minerals on the planet. Scientists analyzed this spot and learned the planet’s atmosphere would have had to have double the amount of carbon that it does today. NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL/Univ. of Arizona
Slide: 3 / of 6 .
Caption: Messier 96 is a bit out of whack. The gorgeous spiral galaxy’s core isn’t quite centered, and the spiral arms asymmetrically spread out from the pull of other nearby galaxies in the M96 Group. Messier 96 is the same size of the Milky Way and some 35 million light-years away. ESA/Hubble & NASA and the LEGUS Team, Acknowledgement: R. Gendler
Slide: 4 / of 6 .
Caption: Hubble has taken 2,753 images of blue star clusters in the Andromeda galaxy in order to learn about star formation. This photo is a combination of 414 images showing a multitude of stars and star clusters as bright blue bunches. Scientists are using the image to determine the Initial Mass Function (IMF), the percentage of stars that have a specific mass within a cluster. : NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), and the PHAT team
Slide: 5 / of 6 .
Caption: This photo is a close up of six clusters extracted from the previous image, each one 150 light-years across. Through the study, astronomers have learned the universe produces stars in steady batches from large to small. It’s the same throughout the galaxy regardless of the varying size and age. : NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), and the PHAT team
Slide: 6 / of 6 .
Caption: New Horizons has returned another close-up of Pluto, showing young mountains rising some 11,000 feet. It’s been dubbed the Norgay Mountains and was shot during the spacecraft’s closest approach to the dwarf planet. Even more detailed images are to come on September 5. NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI
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Slide: 1 / of 5 .
Caption: The Twin Jet Nebula has beautiful, illuminated “wings” of gas caused by the last stages of an old star “of low to intermediate mass.” The star’s outer layers are gone, leaving the core exposed and glowing. The Twin Jet Nebula is a bipolar nebula, meaning it contains two stars. Astronomers believe this is the reason for the distinctive wing shape as the dying stars expel gases. ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Slide: 2 / of 5 .
Caption: Astronomers discovered a “radio phoenix.” They believe two galaxy clusters collided, causing faded electron clouds to come back to life, bursting with radio frequencies. X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Hamburg
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