March’s Stellar Space Pictures
An illustration of potential plants on an alien planet that orbits two suns.
Mark Garlick
(Inside Science) -- This March, we take a look at images of space that echo the signs of spring we’re starting to see in the Northern Hemisphere. From budding potential life on other worlds, to a butterfly-shaped galaxy filled with young stars, these images evoke life and energy found in the most distant corners of the universe.
Scientists believe that extraterrestrial life might have a better chance at flourishing around binary systems, where the temperatures from both stars could create a wider habitable zone for the planets. This artist’s impression shows what budding life might look like on an alien planet that orbits around a binary star system. It portrays a picturesque scene with a distinctly otherworldly vibe, saturated in pink hues and dusted with strange multicolored plant life. (Mark Garlick )
This is Westerhout 40, a stellar nursery floating through our galaxy like a billowing butterfly. Hundreds of baby stars have their beginnings within its wings. The image comes from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and captures Westerhout 40 in infrared. Located 1,400 light-years from the Sun, near the center of the formation, is W40 IRS 1a, the most massive and hottest of these young stars. (NASA/JPL-Caltech )
The CaSSIS camera system, developed by the University of Bern in Switzerland, and orbiting Mars since April 2018, delivered this piece extracted from a larger panoramic of the Hellas basin in the Southern Hemisphere of Mars. The blue, circular depression on the right was caused by erosion, possibly by lakes or rivers. Using 3D glasses to view this image will better illustrate the dimension of the basin. CaSSIS also sent back its first images of NASA’s Mars lander InSight earlier this month. (ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS )
This composite photo captures the orange gas trailing behind a pulsar that is zooming through space about 6,500 light-years from Earth. The orange dot on the leftmost end of the trail is pulsar J0002+6216, traveling at nearly 700 miles per second away from the billowing shell of its supernova remnant. It was discovered in 2017 by citizen scientists as part of the Einstein@Home project. (NRAO )
NRAO/AUI/NSF/Composite by Jayanne English, University of Manitoba; F. Schinzel et al.; NRAO/AUI/NSF; DRAO/Canadian Galactic Plane Survey; and NASA/IRAS.
Here, an artist’s impression of galaxy MACS0416_Y1 is rendered in blushing red and purple hues. Using data from the ALMA array of ground telescopes in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers predict that the galaxy is filled with stellar clusters made from a mix of old and young stars. Located 13.2 billion light-years away, the galaxy contains much more dust than expected from such a young galaxy. This leads researchers to imagine that it went through staggered star formation with two intense starburst periods. (NAOJ )
