October’s Spooky Space Pictures
The Southern Lights, as captured by an astronaut on the International Space Station, spread an ethereal green hue across our atmosphere.
NASA/JSC
(Inside Science) -- This October, even the stars seem haunted with mysterious stellar phenomena. The Hubble Space telescope imaged a skull-shaped galaxy collision and a pale, blue visitor from outside our solar system. We also feature stellar pretzels and pumpkins among our weird and wonderful pictures this month.
These twin baby stars glow in a gaseous network reminiscent of a popular Oktoberfest snack. This Bavarian pretzel-shaped set of circumstellar disks is located 600-700 light-years away in the Barnard 59 dark nebula. There, the baby stars grow and feed on the gas and dust constituting their surrounding knot-shaped birth disk. (ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Alves et al. )
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), Alves et al.
Suspended among the stars are two galaxies, colliding in a pattern that resembles a spooky skeletal face. Each galaxy seems to glow like eyes out of a pale, blue skull. The Hubble Space Telescope captured this system, known as Arp-Madore 2026-424, leering at a distance of 704 million light-years from Earth. (NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and M. Durbin (University of Washington) )
Space Telescope Science Institut/NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and M. Durbin (University of Washington)
It took seven telescopes to compile this image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, colored like a pumpkin. For its first picture, the eROSITA telescope took a series of exposures of the neighboring galaxy, wherein the supernova remnant SN1987A shines the brightest in the center. The picture features many more nebulous structures, presenting the galaxy in a new light. (F.Haberl, M. Freyberg and C. Maitra, MPE/IKI )
Pictured here is a ghostly visitor from beyond our solar system -- Comet 2I/Borisov. This is the clearest picture so far taken of the object, courtesy of NASA’S Hubble Space Telescope. As of this month, the passerby was approximately 420 million kilometers from Earth. (NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA) )
NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)
These ominous glowing red fireballs resemble a mysterious monster, lurking in ancient dust clouds. This month, astronomers accidentally discovered mysterious light that seemed to be coming from nowhere -- a previously unknown galaxy. This is an artist’s impression of that galaxy as it may have looked in the early universe. (James Josephides/Christina Williams/Ivo Labbe )
