Space Pictures This Week: Hubble's Rose, Glinting Lagoon

Hubble's Birthday Rose

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

Stars glitter like dew on a cosmic rose in a new picture of interacting galaxies, released to celebrate the 21st "birthday" of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The space shuttle Discovery deployed Hubble into orbit on April 24, 1990.

Collectively known as Arp 273, the two galaxies are being contorted into this flowery shape by gravitational effects. The bright blue "dewdrops" are clusters of hot, young stars giving off intense ultraviolet radiation.

(Related pictures: "Hubble Telescope at 20: NASA Astronomers' Top Photos.")

Published April 21, 2011

Ice Tongue

Image courtesy ESA

A thin ice shelf known as the Stancomb-Wills ice tongue sticks out into Antarctic waters in a newly released picture from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite.

Stancomb-Wills is linked to the Brunt ice shelf (left) via a mass of icebergs. Both the tongue and the shelf are attached to Caird Coast in eastern Antarctica. (Read a first-person account of visiting McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica.)

Published April 21, 2011

Dueling Auroras

Photograph courtesy BU/NASA

Simultaneous auroras light up both poles of Saturn in an ultraviolet picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. Captured during Saturn's equinox in 2009, the image was released this week along with a new proposal for finding alien planets.

Auroras on Earth, Saturn, and Jupiter give off distinct radio signatures that scientists at the University of Leicester say could be detectable coming from worlds as far away as 150 light-years.

(See pictures of deep-sky auroras.)

Published April 21, 2011

Glinting Lagoon

Photograph courtesy NASA

Seen from the International Space Station on April 2, a trick of sunlight makes an atoll off the African coast take on the semblance of a snow-covered island.

Sunglint—a bright reflection of sunlight on water—can be changed by rough seas, as seen in the difference in brightness between the atoll's shallow lagoon and the open ocean.

The Bassas da India atoll, seen above, lies between the coast of Mozambique and the island of Madagascar. Its thin ring of coral remains uninhabited because it's completely submerged at high tide.

Published April 21, 2011

Starlight Saber?

Image courtesy WISE/Caltech/NASA

A star-forming cloud known as Rho Ophiuchi (green) hangs above the center of the Milky Way (blue) in a closeup of an infrared sky map. Made with NASA's Wide-field Infrared Explorer, or WISE, and released April 14, the map represents 57 percent of the sky.

WISE surveyed the entire sky in four infrared wavelengths in 2010. The team plans to release all of the data by next year.

Published April 21, 2011

Mongolian Dunes

Image courtesy NASA

Sand dunes reveal their complex structures in a newly released elevation map of the Badain Jaran Desert of Inner Mongolia, China. Made with data from NASA's Terra satellite, the false-color map shows dune peaks in off-white and low-lying areas in green.

Despite the arid conditions of Badain Jaran, the area is famous for the many small lakes that dot the lower elevations between the dunes.

Published April 21, 2011