Space Pictures This Week: "Runaway" Star, Shuttle Flyby

Thin Blue Line

Photograph courtesy NASA

The tiny dot of the moon seems to graze Earth's atmosphere as seen by an Expedition 26 astronaut aboard the International Space Station on March 6.

Expedition 26 will come to a close March 16, when three of the six crew members return to Earth aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. The remaining crew will start Expedition 27 and will welcome three new astronauts due to arrive at the station on March 31.

Published March 11, 2011

Stellar Speed Demon

Image courtesy NASA/Caltech/UCLA

Some stars just have a need for speed.

The bright, supergiant star Alpha Camelopardalis—aka Alpha Cam—sits smack in the center of the above frame, a newly released picture from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

Unlike some of its slower neighbors, this "runaway" star is zipping through space at between 1.5 and 9.4 million miles (2.4 and 15.1 million kilometers) an hour. At such speeds, radiation from Alpha Cam is slamming into and compressing interstellar gas and dust, creating a bow shock, seen in red.

Published March 11, 2011

Farewell, Discovery

Labeled photograph by Tamas Ladanyi, TWAN

The space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station streak across the sky over Hungary on March 8 in a picture taken as the shuttle separated from the ISS for the last time. Discovery landed at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on March 9, bringing the orbiter's distinguished career to a close.

(See pictures from Discovery's final mission.)

Discovery appears surrounded by haze because the shuttle was in the process of dumping wastewater when the long-exposure image was taken. (Watch time-lapse video of the shuttle and ISS flyby.)

Published March 11, 2011

Death Spasms

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

The Westbrook Nebula is a so-called protoplanetary nebula being formed by the death of a sunlike star. This newly released picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope combines visible and near-infrared light to reveal the jets of toxic gases, including carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, spewing from the hidden star.

When stars like the sun die, they don't explode. Instead they puff up and expand, eventually shedding their outer gas layers. The stellar cores become white dwarfs, which heat up the expelled material to create bright planetary nebulae. A protoplanetary nebula represents such a brief stage in this process that only a few hundred are known in the Milky Way.

Published March 11, 2011

Iceberg Bottleneck

Image courtesy Aster/NASA/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS

When a magnitude 6.3 earthquake hit Christchurch, New Zealand, on February 21, the temblor broke a 30-million-ton iceberg off the Tasman Glacier. That hunk of ice broke into smaller fragments after falling into Tasman Lake.

On March 2 NASA's Terra satellite snapped this false-color picture of the scene, which shows the pieces of the iceberg congregated at the far end of the lake, near the terminal moraine—a mound of rock that marks the retreating glacier's former extent.

Published March 11, 2011

Dark Eye

Image courtesy CXC/NASA, INGTLP, JKT, NSF/NRAO/VLA

It's not an eye that can pierce all shadows, but NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory can "see" the black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 4151.

The galaxy's central region has been dubbed the Eye of Sauron, due to its striking resemblance to the supernatural peeper in the Lord of the Rings movies. In the above composite picture released March 10, Chandra captures x-rays (blue) being emitted by the actively feeding black hole.

Visible light (yellow) and radio data (red) complete the illusion of a fiery, lidless eye around the black hole "pupil."

Published March 11, 2011