Space Pictures This Week: Sinking Moon, Frosty Leo, More

Biggest Black Holes

Illustration courtesy Lynette Cook, AURA/Gemini

An artist's conception shows stars spinning around a supermassive black hole that's ten billion times as massive as our sun.

Scientists recently used the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to track the motion of stars in nearby galaxies. In two elliptical galaxies, the stars' orbits revealed that the stellar bodies are being affected by the gravitational pull of otherwise hidden central black holes.

The two newfound black holes are now considered to be the most massive such objects yet found in our nearby cosmological neighborhood.

Published December 9, 2011

Sinking Moon

Photograph courtesy NASA  

The full moon appears to sink into Earth's atmosphere in a newly released picture taken in November from the International Space Station.

The bottom of the moon seems distorted because its light is being refracted by Earth's atmospheric layers.

(Also see "Total Lunar Eclipse This Weekend—Last One Until 2014.")

Published December 9, 2011

Mercury Splatter

Image courtesy JHUAPL/CIW/NASA

Bright rays of material ejected by an impact contrast with the darker surface around Mena Crater in a new picture from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, currently in orbit around Mercury.

A gap in the rays to the southwest may be due to the object that formed the crater coming in at an angle. Or the gap could exist because Mena formed on the edge of a larger, preexisting crater, as seen in this frame.

Published December 9, 2011

Asteroid Minerals

Image courtesy U. Tenn, SI, and Caltech/NASA

Seen under a microscope, minerals in a meteorite look like laundry scattered across black velvet in a newly released picture.

The sample is from a so-called HED—howardite, eucrite, and diogenite—meteorite found in Antarctica. HED meteorites are believed to originate from the asteroid Vesta. The texture of this rock is what would be expected from the crystallization of molten magma.

NASA hopes to compare such samples to data from the Dawn spacecraft, which is currently orbiting Vesta in the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Published December 9, 2011

Solar Overdrive

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

In late November the sun went into overdrive, producing about a dozen coronal mass ejections in just eight days. The above frame shows some of the larger solar eruptions as seen by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, spacecraft.

The dark rings are created by SOHO's coronagraph, an instrument used to block out the main body of the sun so that the probe can see structures in the sun's fainter upper atmosphere, or corona.

Corresponding pictures of the sun were later scaled down and superimposed on the coronagraph images.

Published December 9, 2011

Frosty Lion

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

A recently released Hubble Space Telescope picture shows IRAS 09371+1212, nicknamed the Frosty Leo Nebula, because it's rich in grains of water ice and lies in the constellation Leo, the Lion.

The object is what's called a protoplanetary nebula—a cloud of dust and gas formed from material shed by an aging central star similar in mass to our sun.

Published December 9, 2011