Interstellar 2014

Infant Star’s Artistic Outburst

The artistic outburst of an extremely young star, in the earliest phase of formation, is captured in this spectacular image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The colourful wisps, found in the lower left of the image, are painted onto the sky by a young star cocooned in the partially illuminated cloud of obscuring dust seen to the upper right.

Pictured punching through the enshrouding dust is an extremely hot, blue jet of gas released by the young star. As this jet speeds through space, it collides with cooler surrounding material. The result is the colourful object to the lower left, produced as the cooler material is heated by the jet (opo9524a, potw1307a).

This wispy object is known as HH34 and it is an example of a Herbig–Haro (HH) object. It resides approximately 1400 light-years away near the Orion Nebula, a large star formation region within the Milky Way. HH objects exist for a cosmically brief time — typically thousands of years — with changes seen in observations taken only a few years apart (heic1113).

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Saturn and its largest moon reflect their true colors http://ift.tt/1lnhm8l

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pls listen to this star war theory

hubble’s panorama of the carina nebula, some 7500 light years away from earth, and about fifty light years in length here. stars old and new illuminate clouds of cosmic dust and gas, like the clumping hydrogen from which they were born. 

the top star seen at the bisection of the first two panels, part of the eta carinae binary star system (most stars are in binary systems), is estimated  to be more than a hundred times the mass of the sun - large enough to go supernoava in about a million years. 

it also produces four million times as much light as the sun, and was once the second brightest star in the night sky. but surrounding dust and gas has dimmed our view of the star, though it’s still visible in the night sky to all but those in the most light polluted cities.

the fifth panel shows ‘the mystic mountain,’ where nascent stars in the dust cloud are spewing hot ionized gas and dust at 850,000 miles an hour. eventually, the ultraviolet radiation from these stars will blow away the dust, leaving visible the stars, like the cluster seen at the top of the panel, which were formed only half a million years ago.

Pluto’s heart

This high-resolution image captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows the bright expanse of the western lobe of Pluto’s “heart,” or Sputnik Planitia, which is rich in nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane ices.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

How do you feel about space movies like Gravity or the Martian etc?

I thought they were great. I watched them both here aboard the International Space Station. Movie night looks like this!

Astronaut Leland Melvin includes his rescued dogs in best NASA portrait ever.