The Carina Nebula in Three Colors
Stars, like people, do not always go gentle into that good night. The above Carina Nebula, also known as the Keyhole Nebula and NGC 3372, results from dying star Eta Carinae's violently casting off dust and gas during its final centuries. Eta ...
Water Found Around Nearby Star CW Leonis
Do worlds outside our Solar System have oceans of water like Earth? An indication that such worlds might exist was bolstered recently by new evidence that nearby star system CW Leonis harbors water. Recent observations with the Submillimeter ...
Io in True Color
The strangest moon in the Solar System is bright yellow. This picture, showing Io's true colors, was taken in 1999 July by the Galileo spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter. Io's colors derive from sulfur and molten silicate rock. The unusual ...
Solar System Web Cam
Ranging throughout the solar system, these pictures all have something in common. They were taken with an 8 inch diameter telescope, a size popular with amateur astronomy buffs, and slightly modified "web cam" of the type widely used to send ...
Welcome to the Moon Hotel
The most detailed proposal so far for a hotel and resort destination on the Moon (!) has been prepared by Dutch architect Hans-Jurgen Rombaut. The harsh lunar environment posed serious design challenges but the Moon's low, one-sixth-Earth ...
NGC 1850: Not Found in the Milky Way
A mere 168,000 light-years distant, this large, lovely cluster of stars, NGC 1850, is located near the outskirts of the central bar structure in our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. A first glance at this Hubble Space Telescope ...
Sudbury Indicates Nonstandard...
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) has been detecting so few neutrinos from the Sun that the Standard Model of fundamental particles in the universe may have to be revised. Pictured above is the SNO as it was being built. Now operating, ...
Air Pollution Earth
Where on Earth is the air most polluted? Recently released images from the Terra satellite show not only areas of high pollution, but also how polluted air moves. In the above image, locations of higher air pollution are shown in red. The ...
The Galactic Center in Infrared
The center of our Galaxy is a busy place. In visible light, much of the Galactic Center is obscured by opaque dust. In infrared light, however, dust glows more and obscures less, allowing nearly one million stars to be recorded in the above ...
A Close Encounter Of The Stellar Kind
The unassuming star centered in this sky view will one day be our next door stellar neighbor. The faint 9th magnitude red dwarf, currently 63 light-years away in the constellation Ophiucus, was recently discovered to be approaching our Solar ...
