January’s Stellar Space Pictures
A stunning image of the Milky Way bulge, studded with glittering stars of all different sizes.
NASA/ESA/T. Brown (STScI)
(Inside Science) – In this month’s slideshow, we feature a range of fresh space images for the new year. They include a bedazzled snapshot of the center of our galaxy, as well as faraway mysteries in our universe.
This artist’s impression illustrates a mysterious star in the cluster NGC 3201. Astronomers at the Very Large Telescope in Chile were intrigued by this star’s strange behavior -- it seemed to be lassoed by the gravity of an invisible object four times the mass of our sun. Here, the star, along with the veiled black hole it circles, are conceptually depicted in the heart of their globular star cluster. (ESO/L. Calçada/spaceengine.org )
ESO/L. Calçada/spaceengine.org
n this star-studded snapshot, the Hubble Telescope gives us a stunning look at the heart of our own galaxy. Countless red giants; small, white, sunlike stars and younger blue stars circle one other at different speeds in a structure called the Milky Way bulge, 26,000 light-years away from our own solar system. (NASA/ESA/T. Brown (STScI) )
Space Telescope Science Institut/Image: NASA, ESA, and T. Brown (STScI) Science: NASA, ESA, W. Clarkson (University of Michigan-Dearborn), and A. Calamida and K. Sahu (STScI)
Earlier this month, NASA announced the discovery of K2-138, the first planetary system identified by citizen scientists. This is an artist’s concept of the system, known to have at least five planets between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. It was found as part of a program called Exoplanet Explorers and is the first system to be discovered entirely through crowdsourcing. (NASA/JPL-Caltech )
Dark cosmic dust cuts across a landscape of golden stars in this image of Lupus 3, a star-forming region 600 light-years away. This is the most detailed image of this region ever taken, and was created from images captured using the VLT Survey Telescope and the MPG/ESO 2.2 meter telescope. (ESO/R. Colombari )
ESO/R. Colombari
In another record-breaking image, the Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the farthest galaxy yet seen through gravitational lensing. While the highlighted region above might look blurry and pixelated to most people, to astronomers it reveals how young galaxies might have typically appeared soon after the Big Bang. Measuring less than 2,500 light-years across, its diameter is about 40 times smaller than that of our own Milky Way galaxy. (NASA/ESA/B. Salmon (STScI) )
Space Telescope Science Institut/NASA, ESA, B. Salmon (STScI)
