Pierścień Einsteina z byczym okiem

1998-03-30

Can one galaxy hide behind another? Not in the case of B1938+666. Here the foreground galaxy acts like a huge gravitational lens, pulling the light from the background object around it, keeping it visible. Here the alignment is so precise that ...

NGC 3293: Jasna młoda gromada otwarta

1998-03-29

Hot blue stars shine brightly in this beautiful, recently formed galactic or "open" star cluster. Open cluster NGC 3293 is located in the constellation Carina, lies at a distance of about 8000 light years, and has a particularly high abundance of ...

Koło Von Brauna

1998-03-28

Orbiting 1,075 miles above the Earth, a 250 foot wide, inflated, reinforced nylon "wheel" was conceived in the early 1950s to function as a navigational aid, meteorological station, military platform, and way station for space exploration by ...

Pył księżycowy i taśma klejąca

1998-03-27

Why is the Moon dusty? On Earth, rocks are weathered by wind and water, creating soil and sand. On the Moon, the long history of micrometeorite bombardment has blasted away at the rocky surface creating a layer of powdery lunar soil or regolith. ...

Galaktyki z dala

1998-03-26

This striking pair of galaxies is far, far away ... about 350 million light-years from Earth. Cataloged as AM0500-620, the pair is located in the southern constellation Dorado. The background elliptical and foreground spiral galaxy are ...

Mgławica planetarna NGC 7027 w...

1998-03-25

NGC 7027 is one of the smallest known planetary nebulae. Even so, NGC 7027 is 14,000 times larger than the Earth-Sun distance. Planetary nebula are so named because the first few discovered appeared similar to planets. Planetary nebula are ...

Galaktyka dla dzieci

1998-03-24

What's the farthest galaxy known? The answer keeps changing as astronomers compete to find new galaxies which top the list. The new record holder is now the faint red smudge indicated in the above image by the arrow. Detected light left this ...

Plamy słoneczne: Depresje magnetyczne

1998-03-22

Our Sun has spots! These spots appear dark in photographs like the one above, but in fact sunspots are quite bright - they are just dark compared to the rest of the Sun. Sunspots are about the size of the Earth and frequently occur in groups, as ...

Niebo w promieniach gamma

1998-03-21

What if you could "see" gamma rays? If you could, the sky would seem to be filled with a shimmering high-energy glow from the most exotic and mysterious objects in the Universe. In the early 1990s NASA's orbiting Compton Observatory, produced ...

Mars: Grzbiety w pobliżu bieguna...

1998-03-20

No, it's not breakfast ... but looking down from an orbiting spacecraft, the odd intersecting ridges covering this area of Mars do present a waffle-like appearance. The cause of the ridge pattern is unknown but it suggests that more complex ...