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Astronaut Homecoming
Photograph courtesy Bill Ingalls, NASA
Support workers help astronauts out of a Russian Soyuz capsule shortly after landing in a remote part of Kazakhstan on Tuesday, local time. The capsule carried NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, and Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa back to Earth after the three men had spent more than five months aboard the International Space Station.
The landing marks the first time astronauts have returned to Earth from the space station since NASA retired its space shuttle fleet in July.
Published November 25, 2011
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Jabbah the Star
Image courtesy Caltech/UCLA/NASA
Although from Earth it appears to be a single star, the bright spot known as Jabbah (seen surrounded by red dust at right) is actually a system of multiple stars—perhaps as many as seven.
The massive stars light up a nearby cloud of gas and dust called IC 4592, as seen in this newly released picture from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, space telescope.
Other bright stars in this frame are part of what's known as the Upper Scorpius Association. Astronomers think these stars were born in the same cluster about five million years ago, but the stars have since been moving apart and are probably no longer bound to each other by gravity.
Published November 25, 2011
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Portrait of a Black Hole
Illustration courtesy DSS and M. Weiss, CXC/NASA
An illustration of the Cygnus X-1 system shows a black hole drawing matter off a nearby star. The infalling material creates a disk around the black hole that emits powerful x-rays, which were first detected more than 50 years ago.
Using the multiple radio observatories that make up the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array, astronomers recently collected enough data to paint a more accurate picture of the black hole in the famous system.
The scientists calculate that the black hole lies 6,070 light-years from Earth, is more than 15 times as massive as our sun, and is spinning more than 800 times a second.
Published November 25, 2011
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Make It a Double
Photograph courtesy Gianluca Lombardi, ESO
Two distinct arcs of green appear over the setting sun in a recently released picture of a rare "green flash" taken from Cerro Paranal, a 8,530-foot-high (2,600-meter-high) mountain in the Atacama Desert of Chile.
The flashes are optical effects created when sunlight is bent and broken into its component colors by Earth's atmosphere. This effect is magnified when the sun is close to the horizon and its light passes through the densest atmospheric layers.
When conditions are just right, shorter wavelengths such as green are bent more than longer wavelengths such as orange, and a flash of green light appears near the top of the solar disk.
Published November 25, 2011
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Saturn Storm
Image courtesy SSI/Caltech/NASA
Saturn's orderly bands of clouds and rings are interrupted by a blotchy patch of turbulence in a false-color picture of the gassy planet's huge northern storm. The image, released this week, is a composite of three wavelengths of near-infrared light captured last December by NASA's Cassini orbiter.
(See "Giant Saturn Storm Revealed; Wider Than Earth.")
Red and orange indicate clouds that are deep in the Saturnian atmosphere. Yellow and green indicate intermediate clouds, while white and blue mark high clouds and haze.
Published November 25, 2011
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