The Hubble space telescope discovered this luminescent cluster of stars, officially called NGC 3603, last December. The cluster is about 20,000 light years away and is nestled in the Carina constellation, which already contains a bright claim to fame: Canopus, the second brightest star in the night sky. But the most mind-blowing images of NGC 3603 are yet to come—because of their large masses, they will eventually produce supernova explosions when they burn through their fuel.
NASA
The crazy colors in this full-sky photo, released on July 5 by the European Space Agency, show the universe's microwave radiation. The image was taken by the Planck satellite, which launched last year to capture the universe's cosmic microwave background—traces of the first light that appeared after the big bang. "It's the first light of the universe," said Nazzareno Mandolesi, the director of the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics in Italy. Scientists are hoping that images from the Planck satellite will help explain how the universe expanded after the Big Bang.
ESA / LFI and HFI Consortia
For four minutes on July 11, along a small stretch of land from the Cook Islands to the Southern tip of Chile in South America, the Sun disappeared. The total eclipse, which occurs when the moon blocks the light of the sun, was the only one that will occur this year. Williams College Astronomy professor Jay Pasachoff traveled to Easter Island with some of his students to catch a glimpse of the event. "I am sad that so few people will be able to view this year's eclipse since it doesn't pass over major cities," said Pasachoff.
Daniel Fischer
On July 10, the Lunetta spacecraft did a fly-by of 21 Lutetia, an asteroid first discovered by Hermann Goldschmidt in 1852. At 81 miles wide and 4.5 billion years old, the asteroid has puzzled scientists for years. It has characteristics of two types of asteroids—one that is left over from the Solar System's formation and one that is a fragment of the core from a larger, metallic asteroid. "I think this is a very old object," said Holger Sierks of the Max Planck Institute after the new images of Lutetia arrived. "Tonight we have seen a remnant of the Solar System's creation."
ESA 2010 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA
With the help of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers recently discovered photographic evidence of a hotspot of star formation in the depths of a dark spot. "We believe we've managed to observe this dark cloud in a very early phase of star formation before its most massive stars have ignited," said Matthew Povich, an astronomer at Penn State. The bright nebula in the center of the photograph has been known for years as a productive star factory, but not until Spitzer's images came out were astronomers able to recognize the dark spot as a "stellar nursery." More than 480 stars were detected to be in development in the dark cloud and Povich predicts another 10,000 are forming but were too faint to be seen by the telescope.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Matthew Povich (Penn State)
On June 3, there was a mysterious flash of light on Jupiter bright enough to be visible from Earth. Astronomers were on the hunt for a telltale black spot which normally appear when objects collide, but detailed images from the Hubble telescope taken days later reveal the cause of the flash: a giant meteor-burning well above the planet's clouds. The new pictures also revealed changes to Jupiter's atmosphere recently, such as a layer of white ammonia ice crystal clouds. "Weather forecast for Jupiter's South Equatorial Belt: cloudy with a chance of ammonia," said Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute.
NASA
It's easy to understand why these two nebulae are called the Heart and Soul. Together they comprise a big star-forming compound on an arm of the Milky Way galaxy. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) captured the nebulae, which are marked by bubbling clouds, in nearly one million frames so far. "This new image demonstrates the power of WISE to capture vast regions," said Ned Wright, the mission's principal investigator at UCLA. "We're looking north, south, east and west to map the whole sky."
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
Earlier this month, a section of Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier about one-eighth the size of Manhattan broke and fell into the water. The breakup of the ice is literally groundbreaking, but not for the fact of the shrinking glacier. The fact that researchers monitoring the glacier movement were able to detect the movement within hours of it occurring and with such detail is novel. "While there have been ice breakouts of this magnitude from Jakonbshavn and other glaciers in the past, this event is interesting because it occurs on the heels of a warm winter that saw no sea ice form in the surrounding bay," said Thomas Wagner, cryospheric program scientist at NASA Headquarters.
NASA
The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) is still relatively new to the European Southern Observatory, but the biggest telescope in the world used for mapping the cosmos is already producing some fantastic images. The sheer size of the VISTA allows it to capture wide areas of the sky in great detail, producing images of flaming stars in the Flame Nebula once occluded by dust clouds, and another single image containing roughly one million stars.
VISTA Consortium, ESO
Mmmm, WASP-12b… this exoplanet burns brightly—it's the hottest planet in the Milky Way—but, like Icarus, it's orbiting too close to a really, really hot star that will eventually devour it. At just 2 million miles from its parent star, the gravitational pull is reconfiguring the planet into an oblong shape, with the outer reaches of its atmosphere actually touching the star. Just 10 million more years to go before the WASP-12b is gobbled up in a fantastic rage of flame and gas. Plenty of time to think of a more creative name.
NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon
Using images from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, British scientists located the heaviest known star in the Universe. R136a1 once had a mass 320 times greater than the Sun's, though it's now a svelte 265 solar masses as it has lost 20% of its mass during the million years it's been around. The star is estimated to have a surface temperature of more than 40,000 degrees Celsius and is 10 million times brighter than the Sun. It's likely that R136a1 will hold the heaviest record for a long time. "Owing to the rarity of these monsters, I think it is unlikely that this new record will be broken any time soon," said Professor Paul Crowther, the chief researched of the British team.
European Southern Observancy / AP Photo
