White Boat Rock on Mars
What caused this rock to have an unusual shape? Earlier this month the robot Spirit rover on Mars stopped to examine a rock dubbed "white boat", named for its unusually light color and shape. White boat, the large rock near the image center of ...
X-Rays Indicate Star Ripped Up by...
What could rip a star apart? A black hole. Giant black holes in just the right mass range would pull on the front of a closely passing star much more strongly than on the back. Such a strong tidal force would stretch out a star and likely ...
Heaven on Earth
If sometimes it appears that the entire Milky Way Galaxy is raining down on your head, do not despair. It happens twice a day. As the Sun rises in the East, wonders of the night sky become less bright than the sunlight scattered by our own ...
The M7 Open Star Cluster in Scorpius
M7 is one of the most prominent open clusters of stars on the sky. The cluster, dominated by bright blue stars, can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky in the tail of the constellation of Scorpius. M7 contains about 100 stars in total, is ...
The Spiral Arms of NGC 4622
While stirring a morning cup of coffee and thinking cosmic thoughts many astronomers would glance at this Hubble Space Telescope image of spiral galaxy NGC 4622 and assume that the galaxy was rotating counterclockwise in the picture. One hundred ...
SN1987A's Cosmic Pearls
In February 1987, light from the brightest stellar explosion seen in modern times reached Earth -- supernova SN1987A. This Hubble Space Telescope image from the sharp Advanced Camera for Surveys taken in November 2003 shows the explosion site ...
McNeil's Nebula
It was a clear, cold western Kentucky night on January 23rd as seasoned amateur astronomer Jay McNeil tried out his recently acquired 3-inch refracting telescope by imaging the area around a familiar object, the M78 reflection nebula in Orion. ...
Anvil Cloud Over Sicily
The cloud poses no danger to the building. Appearing to float above a remote monastery in Sicily, Italy, the anvil cloud's shape shows several classic cloud features. The cloud itself is composed of millions of very small droplets of water and ...
Galaxy Cluster Lenses Farthest Known...
Gravity can bend light, allowing whole clusters of galaxies to act as huge telescopes. Almost all of the bright objects in this just-released Hubble Space Telescope image are galaxies in the cluster known as Abell 2218. The cluster is so ...
A Patch of Spherules on Mars
Some patches of Mars are full of mysterious tiny spherules. The microscopic imager on board the Opportunity rover on Mars recorded, last week, the above image showing over a dozen. The image was taken near a rock outcrop called Stone Mountain ...
