Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse
Betelgeuse (sounds a lot like "beetle juice"), a red supergiant star about 600 light years distant, is seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image - the first direct picture of the surface of a star other than the Sun. While Betelgeuse is cooler ...
NGC 3603: From Beginning To End
From beginning to end, different stages of a star's life appear in this exciting Hubble Space Telescope picture of the environs of galactic emission nebula NGC 3603. For the beginning, eye-catching "pillars" of glowing hydrogen at the right ...
Methane Dwarf
While hunting through Sloan Sky Survey data in search of distant quasars, Princeton astronomers Xiaohui Fan and Michael Strauss came upon an undiscovered type of object very nearby - now dubbed a methane dwarf. Marked by white lines in this ...
Thermal Mars
It's 2 AM on Mars and surface temperatures range from -65C to -120C, as measured by the Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) onboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. TES data used to make this detailed temperature map were acquired while ...
A Gallery of Gravitational Mirages
The deeper you peer into the universe, the harder it is to see straight. The reason is that distant galaxies act as gravitational lenses, deflecting light that passes nearby. These deflections result in the distortion of background sources, and ...
Uranus' Moon 18
The discovery was there for the taking. An image of Uranus taken by Voyager 2 as it passed the giant planet 13 years ago apparently recorded a moon that had since gone unnoticed. The image on which Uranus' 18th moon was discovered was freely ...
Tycho Brahe Measures the Sky
Tycho Brahe was the most meticulous astronomical observer of his time. Brahe, who lived between 1546 and 1601, set out to solve the day's most pressing astronomical problem: to determine whether the Earth or the Sun was at the center of the ...
The Ecliptic Plane
The Plane of the Ecliptic is illustrated in this Clementine star tracker camera image which reveals (from right to left) the Moon lit by Earthshine, the Sun's corona rising over the Moon's dark limb, and the planets Saturn, Mars, and Mercury. The ...
Topographical Mars
Contrasting colors trace changing elevations in this new high-resolution topographic map of Mars. Just released, the data were gathered in 1998 and 1999 by the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) onboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. The ...
NGC 4603 and the Expanding Universe
NGC 4603, a galaxy with majestic spiral arms and intricate dust lanes, is 108 million light-years away. Its distance has been accurately measured by astronomers using one of the fundamental yardsticks of the extragalactic distance scale - ...
