Space Pictures This Week: Lunar Eclipse, Sun Spurts, More

Solar Spurts

Image courtesy SDO/NASA

A closeup view of the sun in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths shows relatively small loops and spurts of charged helium gas shooting up from the solar surface on June 16.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a sun-watching satellite, observed as the tongues of plasma leaped out and then retreated back into the sun over about 13 hours.

Published June 23, 2011

Yukon Labyrinth

Image courtesy Envisat/ESA

Alaska's Yukon River branches into a tangle of tributaries as it nears the Bering Sea in a false-color satellite picture released June 17 by the European Space Agency.

The Yukon is North America's fifth longest river system, flowing about 1,982 miles (3,190 kilometers) from the northern border of British Columbia in Canada and across central Alaska before emptying into Norton Sound.

Published June 23, 2011

"Ice Queen" Moon

Image courtesy SSI/Caltech/NASA

Gully-like features add texture to Saturn's small moon Helene in a closeup image from NASA's Cassini orbiter taken June 18.

The picture of the icy moon—named for Helen of Troy—comes from Cassini's closest flyby yet, when the spacecraft flew within 4,330 miles (6,968 kilometers) of Helene's surface.

Published June 23, 2011

Martian Opal

Image courtesy ASU/NASA

Bands of mineral deposits curl through sand dunes in a high-resolution satellite picture of the Valles Marineris region of Mars released June 7 and taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Scientists studying the minerals have detected the chemical signatures of exotic components likely formed by water in Mars's distant past—including light-colored bands that may be made of opal.

Unfortunately for jewelry lovers, the Martian deposits are not likely to include gemstone quality rocks. But the bands may hold treasure of a different sort: Opals on Earth are known to preserve fossils and other biological evidence.

Published June 23, 2011

Black Hole Belch

Image courtesy Andrew Levan, University of Warwick

An artist's rendering shows twin jets of high-energy gamma rays coming from a supermassive black hole—a re-creation of what scientists think happened when an actual black hole 3.8 billion light-years away consumed a star.

"The mass of the star fell into the black hole, but along the way it heated up and produced a burst of energy in the form of a powerful jet of radiation, [which] we were able to detect through space-based observatories," Joshua Bloom, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, told National Geographic News on June 16.

(Get the full story of the black hole that ate a star.)

Published June 23, 2011

Potash Pond

Image courtesy EO-1/NASA

Like a gem buried in sand, the turquoise and emerald waters of a solar evaporation pond seem to emerge from the dunes of the Taklimakan Desert of China, as seen in a NASA satellite picture released June 19. The ponds allow miners to harvest potash, a potassium-based nutrient used in fertilizers.

In the prehistoric past, this region of the desert hosted a large, brackish lake, which left behind potash deposits as it dried up and vanished.

Published June 23, 2011

Mercury's Terminator

Image courtesy John Hopkins/Carnegie/NASA

The fine line between night and day—also known as the terminator—brings the cratered face of Mercury into sharp relief in a new color picture from NASA's MESSENGER orbiter released June 21.

The closest planet to the sun, Mercury spins around on its axis three times for every two orbits. This means that a year on Mercury lasts for half a day.

Published June 23, 2011