September’s Stunning Space Pictures
Cassini’s final image, taken by the spacecraft as it looks towards Saturn’s night side.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
(Inside Science) -- This September brought pictures depicting a plethora of unusual phenomena. From a ring of galactic proportions filled with black holes or neutron stars, to a “Star Trek” alien world look-alike, artists’ illustrations bring us closer to the strangeness of the universe.
Between 300 and 900 million years ago, our galaxy suffered a near collision that sent ripple effects into the present. Gaia -- the European Space Agency’s star-mapping mission -- observed millions of stars in the Milky Way disc and found they were moving in a snail shell-like pattern. This artist’s impression illustrates that ripple, undulating across the Milky Way. (ESA )
The planet Vulcan from the TV series Star Trek is not a real planet, but it existed within a real three-star system -- 40 Eridani. This month, astronomers discovered a super-Earth just on the edge of the habitable zone of the system’s most massive star. The look-alike homeworld of Mr. Spock, shown here in an artist’s impression, was found only 16 light-years from Earth by the Dharma Planet Survey. (University of Florida )
This month, the Hubble Space Telescope brought back the first data from its new endeavor, the Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields And Legacy Observations survey. Known also as BUFFALO, the survey will observe six massive galaxy clusters to better understand the evolution of the earliest galaxies in the universe. This fresh image is of Abell 370, a galaxy cluster 5 billion light-years away. It is circled by a multitude of gravitationally lensed galaxies. (NASA, ESA/Hubble, HST Frontier Fields )
NASA, ESA/Hubble, HST Frontier Fields
NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory revealed this composite image of a ring of neutron stars or black holes about 300 million light-years from Earth. The ghostly blue ellipse on the right of the image appears to be leftovers from a galaxy that had been punched through by another galaxy. (NASA/CXC/INAF/A. Wolter et al/STScI )
This artist’s impression shows a pulsar wind nebula, a concept proposed to explain a curious infrared light emission from a nearby neutron star. The nebula is thought to be a product of outflow winds from the star combining with gaseous material in the interstellar medium. The observation is particularly unusual because this star is the first neutron star to have been surveyed for an extended period in only infrared light. (NASA/ESA/N. Tr’Ehnl )
Space Telescope Science Institut
