Space Pictures This Week: Superbubble, Kinky Galaxy, More

Shuttle's Descent

Photograph courtesy NASA

The space shuttle Atlantis creates a bright trail through Earth's atmosphere in a picture of the shuttle's landing taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station. Atlantis touched down at Kennedy Space Center on July 21, bringing the U.S. shuttle program to an end.

(Get our full coverage of the final space shuttle mission.)

Published July 28, 2011

Galaxy With a Twist

Image courtesy ESA/NASA/Caltech

The Milky Way is feeling kinky.

New images from the ESA Herschel Space Observatory show a mysterious shape to the dense ring of cold gas and dust that circles the center of our home galaxy. The ring appears as a yellow loop twisted into a figure eight in the false-color image above.

Astronomers had previously seen only parts of this ring—the Herschel shot is the first view of the entire structure, which stretches more than 300 light-years across. The scientists aren't yet sure why the kink in the ring exists, but it's thought the galaxy's ring structure in general was shaped by gravitational interactions with galactic companions, such as our large neighbor the Andromeda galaxy.

Published July 28, 2011

Painted Dune

Image courtesy U-Arizona/NASA

The gentle slopes of a sand dune on Mars are seen in a recently released picture from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Pictures such as this one are being used to help build the Mars Global Digital Dune Database, a U.S. Geological Survey project that aims to study the sizes, shapes, and movements of sand dunes for hints to the climatic and geologic processes happening on the red planet.

Published July 28, 2011

Orion Reflection

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

A spike of light from a young star cuts across a newly released picture of NGC 2023, a star-forming nebula in the constellation Orion. The spike in the image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is an optical effect created by light scattered in the camera's optics.

This relatively cold cloud of dust and gas in space doesn't shine with its own radiated light, and instead is visible to Hubble because it's reflecting light from the brilliant star nearby. Red dots show where new stars are forming inside the dense nebula.

Published July 28, 2011

Martian Terminator

Image courtesy Caltech/NASA

Dawn breaks over Mars's Gale crater in a computer-generated image of the red planet's terminator—the boundary between light and dark. The image was released July 22, along with the news that NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, will land at Gale.

The 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) crater hosts a 3-mile-high (5 kilometer-high) mountain rich in layered deposits, which scientists hope will offer clues to Mars's watery past and its potential to host carbon-based life.

Published July 28, 2011

Border Lake

Image courtesy JAXA/ESA

A picture from a Japanese satellite shows Lake Sulunga, a 15.5-mile-wide (25-kilometer-wide) lake in Tanzania that straddles the border between the country's Dodoma and Singida regions.

A major road and a railway can be seen running north of the lake, while agricultural plots pepper the surrounding areas. The European Space Agency, which supported operations for the satellite, released the image on July 15.

Published July 28, 2011