A cosmic tadpole, Jupiter's shrinking spot and Nasa's flying saucer – in pictures
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Version 0 of 1. The dark regions in this image are cosmic clumps so dark, dense and dusty that they throw the deepest shadows ever recorded. The clumps were discovered within a huge cosmic cloud of gas and dust. Infrared observations by Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope are helping to reveal how the brightest stars form. This is Rabe Crater, an impact crater on Mars 108 kilometres across. The dark material is probably sediment that has been shaped by prevailing winds. A rare view from behind of the solar wings built for the European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle. This is the side that points away from the sun and so is not covered in solar cells. An engineer is seen here, at Dutch Space in Leiden, checking the hinges used to deploy the wings. The SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft just before it was released by the International Space Station's Canadarm2 robotic arm on 18 May. The craft returned to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico. This new Hubble image shows a young star cloaked in a haze of golden gas and dust. It appears to be embedded within a strange squiggle of dark sky. This dark region is known as the Circinus molecular cloud. It has a mass around 250,000 times that of the sun and is filled with gas, dust and young stars. The shadow of Saturn's rings are cast on the planet in the bottom half of this image snapped by the Cassini spacecraft. A star cluster in the Flame Nebula, about 1,400 light years from Earth. This is a composite image showing x-ray data (purple) from Nasa's Chandra X-ray Observatory and infrared data from its Spitzer Space Telescope (red, green and blue). A technician works on the thrust chamber of a rocket launcher at EADS Airbus Space Transportation in Ottobrunn, Germany. Star trails circling the south celestial pole over the Atacama Desert in Chile. The trails show the apparent path of the stars in the sky as the Earth slowly rotates. Just rising above the horizon is the southern Milky Way, showing the pinkish glow of the Carina Nebula. This picture was taken looking up from the bottom of the mobile launch gantry for Esa’s Vega launcher in French Guiana. The 50-metre tall mobile gantry houses all the equipment needed to assemble and check Vega, the newest member of Europe’s launcher family. Jupiter's Great Red Spot – a swirling storm feature larger than Earth – has shrunken to its smallest size since measurements began in the 1930s. Astronomers have followed this downsizing since the 1930s. This series of images documents the storm over time, beginning in 1995. This is probably a supernova remnant – the remnants of a star that exploded. The image was taken by the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The magnetic field of our Milky Way galaxy as seen by Esa’s Planck satellite. Darker regions correspond to stronger polarised emission, and the striations indicate the direction of the magnetic field projected on the plane of the sky. The dark band corresponds to the galactic plane. The largest known galaxy cluster in the distant universe is living up to its nickname, El Gordo ("the fat one"). By measuring how much its gravity warps images of far more distant galaxies in the background, astronomers have calculated its mass to be as much as three million billion times the mass of our Sun. Nasa workers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory prepare the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator test vehicle for shipment to Hawaii, where it was launched high into the atmosphere by a balloon and then dropped back to Earth on Sunday. The flying-saucer-shaped vehicle will help land large space payloads on Mars. This new image from a telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the star cluster NGC 3590 in one of our galaxy's pinwheel arms. These stars shine brightly in front of a dramatic landscape of dark patches of dust and richly hued clouds of glowing gas. This photograph was taken from the Russian part of the International Space Station looking out of a viewport at the station's solar wings and the European Cupola observatory module as the Sun sets behind Earth. |