Space Pictures This Week: Black Hole Blobs, Mars Rations

Blue Bauble

Image courtesy ESO

Feeling blue and scattered this winter? You're not alone: Starlight ricocheting off dust is giving an azure hue to the nebula M78, as seen in a newly released composite picture from the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

Two bright stars inside the nebula, HD 38563A and HD 38563B, are the main illuminators of M78, pumping out ultraviolet light that gets scattered into visible light by tiny dust grains.

Published February 17, 2011

Black Hole Blobs

Image courtesy Dana Berry/NASA and SkyWorks Digital

Hot blobs of matter (one pictured pink, one yellow), each about the size of the sun, orbit close to the maw of a supermassive black hole in a NASA illustration of the hole and its surrounding disk of matter. (Related: "'Comets' Found Orbiting Monster Black Hole.")

Scientists think all large galaxies host supermassive black holes at their centers. Black holes that are actively consuming matter, such as this one, are known as active galactic nuclei. It's been hard to tell just how massive these black holes are, because they're surrounded by bright, superhot disks of infalling material.

According to a new paper published this week in the journal Nature, 37 known central black holes are actually less massive than previously thought, based on measurements of the rotation speeds of orbiting matter.

Published February 17, 2011

Colorful Crater

Image courtesy U-Arizona/NASA

The light-toned rock faces and dark, windswept sands of Holden Crater stand in stark contrast in a new picture from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Holden Crater is one of four possible landing sites for the next Mars rover, Curiosity, slated to launch in the fall. The region is of interest because it's thought the lighter material could be sediment layers deposited by ancient lakes.

Published February 17, 2011

"Martian" Menu

Photograph courtesy DLR

Cereal, schnitzel, and fruit cups make up part of the daily food rations for each of the six volunteers participating in the Mars500 mock Mars mission, which is being run by Russia's Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency.

(See "Astronauts Walk on 'Mars,' Start Experiments.")

Mars500 was designed to study the psychological effects of a year-and-a-half-long, deep-space voyage to the red planet. As part of the project, researchers at the German Aerospace Center have been conducting a metabolism study to see how salt intake affects blood pressure under isolated, stressful conditions.

Published February 17, 2011

Moon Portrait

Image courtesy NASA

Saturn's moon Enceladus hangs like a ping-pong ball in front of the planet's rings in a newly released picture from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Enceladus is one of the most reflective bodies in the solar system, because it's constantly getting a fresh coat of ice particles, which spew from the famed geysers around the moon's south pole. (See pictures of new geysers recently found on Enceladus.)

Published February 17, 2011

WISE's Last Light

Image courtesy NASA/Caltech/UCLA

On February 1, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, took its last snapshot of the starry sky.

Launched in December 2009, the spacecraft spent 13 months surveying in infrared to catalog objects such as asteroids, brown dwarfs, and galaxies with unprecedented sensitivity. The craft ran out of coolant in October 2010 but was able to take pictures for a few months more.

Published February 17, 2011