Space Pictures This Week: Star Jelly, Mars Pit, Wispy Moon

Mystery Rings

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE

In visible light, the planetary nebula known as NGC 1514 resembles a pale jellyfish swimming through the vastness of space. But a new picture from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer shows that the cosmic jelly is trapped in a glowing "hamster wheel."

In reality, the nebula is made of two elderly stars. One object is already a type of stellar corpse called  a white dwarf. The other object is a dying giant star that used to be like our sun but is now expanding and shedding its outer layers to form a bubble around both stars.

Jets of material from the white dwarf are thought to have smashed into this bubble's wall. The areas where the jets hit appear as orange rings in the WISE image, because the heated dust in the rings glows in infrared.

Published November 19, 2010

Mars Rift

Image courtesy ESA

A deep chasm cuts through winding fault lines in the Phoenicis Lacus region of Mars, as seen in a newly released picture taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.

Phoenicis Lacus is thought to have been formed by episodes of intense geologic activity driven by nearby volcanoes. The 1.8-mile-deep (3-kilometer-deep) pit was made when part of the landscape collapsed.

Published November 19, 2010

Fractured Moon

Image courtesy NASA

Ghostly tendrils seem to creep over the surface of Saturn's moon Dione in a new picture from NASA's Cassini orbiter released this week.

The Voyager 1 probe in the 1970s became the first to take pictures of Dione's wispy features. High-resolution images from Cassini later revealed that the bright veins are relatively young fractures in icy terrain.

Published November 19, 2010

Star Sculptor

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

A dying star crafts a cosmic bow tie as seen in a new near-infrared picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

When sunlike stars near death, they puff up and begin to shed their outer layers of gas, as seen above. Later the process may result in a colorful cloud of debris called a planetary nebula.

Hubble spied this nebula, dubbed IRAS 20068 4051, during a short-lived early stage, when the escaping gases are still relatively cool and so shine mostly in near-infrared. Eventually, when the star is a full-fledged planetary nebula, IRAS 20068 4051 will be hot enough to make the surrounding gas glow brightly in visible light.

Published November 19, 2010