Illustrated here is a geologic map of Venus’s northern hemisphere, based off radar data from the Venera 15 and 16 orbiters, Pioneer Venus orbiter, and Earth-based radar telescopes. The colors indicate various features on the surface, such as plains in yellow and light green; mountains in purple, green and blue; and volcanoes in light red and pink. (View More Planetary Maps at the Telegraph)
22 years ago today, on April 24th, 1990, NASA launched its Hubble Space Telesecope. However, soon after launch, it is realized that the telescope’s mirror was ground incorrectly, and the flaw was unable to be corrected until December 1993, during a shuttle mission.
Taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, the uniquely warped shape of Centaurus A, according to NASA, shows “evidence for a past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting shockwaves cause hydrogen gas clouds to compress, triggering a firestorm of new star formation. These are visible in the red patches in this Hubble close-up.”
This is Abell 520, a galaxy about 2.4 billion light-years away from Earth. These beautiful colors are far from meaningless, as the orange hues represent starlight, greens are hot gases, and blues are the densest parts of the galaxy, comprised of dark matter. (via)
Physicists may be inching closer to a possible to answer to a mystery that has preoccupied their minds for years: if matter and antimatter exist throughout the universe in equal proportions, why is our universe primarily matter?
A finding has been recently confirmed by an American team of physicists, concluding that certain matter particles actually decay differently than antimatter, a trait that is outside our current understanding of physics. Scientists believe that these differences could hold the key to an explanation of the presence off far more matter than antimatter within our cosmos.
An artist’s rendering, made using data collected by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows a quasar galaxy with a jet of high-energy particles extending more than 100,000 light-years from the supermassive black hole at its center. The object, located 12 billion light-years from Earth, is the most distant such jet ever detected. These quasar jets are formed when electrons emitted from a black hole impact with cosmic background radiation left by the big bang, giving astronomers clues about the conditions in the early universe.
At about 450 light-years away from Earth, this red streak pictured above is a huge string of cosmic dust trailing off the Taurus molecular cloud. To view a video of this dust, head on over to Space.com.
Pictured above is the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, which is otherwise known as Messier 13. At about 25,000 light years away, it is a cluster of approximately 300,000 stars.
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a segment of the Veil Nebula
This photograph, by Marco Lorenzi of Italy, won the Astronomy Photograph of the Year 2011 in the Deep Space Category. It displays the aftermath of a supernova explosion, which occurs when a star many times larger and older than our sun violently dies, that occurred over 10,000 years ago. This expanding shell of heated bass and debris now covers an area of the sky which is twenty times bigger than the disc of the full Moon.
Distant “Waterworld” is Confirmed
A new class of planet has been confirmed by astronomers, after the discovery exoplanet GJ 1214b in 2009. This planet is referred to as a “Super Earth”, as it is a waterworld that is about 2.7 times the time Earth’s diameter and almost 7 times as heavy, with a thick and steamy atmosphere.
Since the planet was originally discovered by a land-based telescope in 2009, it required the use of the Hubble telescope to confirm that a large portion of its mass is water. Previously, in 2010, astronomers released measurements of its atmosphere, suggesting that the exoplanet’s atmosphere was most likely composed of water; however, it was just as likely that it was comprised of a haze similar to Titan’s.
The planet orbits a red-dwarf star at a distance of just two million kilometers, thus inducing temperatures most likely higher than 200˚C on its atmosphere. These high temperatures could signify the existence of exotic materials.
Star V838 Monocerotis’s (V838 Mon) light echo, which is about six light years in diameter, is seen from the Hubble Space Telescope in this February 2004 handout photo released by NASA on December 4, 2011. Light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of Monoceros the unicorn. It became the brightest star in the Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002 when its outer surface greatly expanded suddenly.
Image of a Big Bang Experiment within Particle Accelerators at CERN
A collection of tracks left by subatomic particles in a bubble chamber. A bubble chamber is a container filled with liquid hydrogen which is superheated - momentarily raised above its normal boiling point by a sudden drop in pressure in the container. Any charged particle passing through the liquid in this state leaves behind a trail of tiny bubbles as the liquid boils in its wake. These bubbles are seen as fine tracks, showing the characteristic paths of different types of particle.
