The high altitude and dry air of the Chajnantor plateau give the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), operated by ESO and its international partners, an optimal window to study the cold dark universe. In this striking picture, the rolling, rusty and barren landscape of the plateau feels more like an alien world, rather than our own planet.
Thankfully, a familiar friend brings us back to Earth — the full Moon rising at sunset. Over the different lunar phases, the moon rises and sets at different times, while over the course of the year, it rises and sets in different locations on the horizon. Set against the horizon during its rise, the moon often seems to loom larger than usual. But this is only a trick on your eyes due to a famed optical illusion.
Like a ship plowing through cosmic seas, runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi produces the arcing interstellar bow wave or bow shock seen in this stunning infrared portrait. In the false-color view, bluish Zeta Oph, a star about 20 times more massive than the Sun, lies near the center of the frame, moving toward the left at 24 kilometers per second. Its strong stellar wind precedes it, compressing and heating the dusty interstellar material and shaping the curved shock front. What set this star in motion? Zeta Oph was likely once a member of a binary star system, its companion star was more massive and hence shorter lived. When the companion exploded as a supernova catastrophically losing mass, Zeta Oph was flung out of the system. About 460 light-years away, Zeta Oph is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if it weren't surrounded by obscuring dust. The image spans about 1.5 degrees or 12 light-years at the estimated distance of Zeta Ophiuchi. In January 2020, NASA placed the Spitzer Space Telescope in safe mode, ending its 16 successful years of exploring the cosmos.
This colorful skyscape spans about three full moons across nebula rich starfields along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the royal northern constellation Cepheus. Near the edge of the region's massive molecular cloud some 2,400 light-years away, bright reddish emission region Sharpless (Sh)2-155 is at the center of the frame, also known as the Cave Nebula. About 10 light-years across the cosmic cave's bright walls of gas are ionized by ultraviolet light from the hot young stars around it. Dusty bluish reflection nebulae, like vdB 155 at the left, and dense obscuring clouds of dust also abound on the interstellar canvas. Astronomical explorations have revealed other dramatic signs of star formation, including the bright reddish fleck of Herbig-Haro (HH) 168. At the upper left in the frame, the Herbig-Haro object emission is generated by energetic jets from a newborn star.
Sometimes, it's the stars that are the hardest to see that are the most interesting. IC 348 is a young star cluster that illuminates surrounding filamentary dust. The stringy and winding dust appears pink in this recently released infrared image from the Webb Space Telescope. In visible light, this dust reflects mostly blue light, giving the surrounding material the familiar blue hue of a reflection nebula. Besides bright stars, several cool objects have been located in IC 348, visible because they glow brighter in infrared light. These objects are hypothesized to be low mass brown dwarfs. Evidence for this includes the detection of an unidentified atmospheric chemical, likely a hydrocarbon, seen previously in the atmosphere of Saturn. These objects appear to have masses slightly greater than known planets, only a few times greater than Jupiter. Together, these indicate that this young star cluster contains something noteworthy -- young planet-mass brown dwarfs that float free, not orbiting any other star.
This is image is little over 12MB, good wallpaper...
The Vela constellation is visible with the naked eye in the southern sky, but you might miss a lot of details hidden there, like those shown in this image. This is a small patch of the Vela supernova remnant, the intricate leftovers of the explosion of a massive star 11,000 years ago. This image is part of a huge and detailed mosaic captured with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean desert.
Pink and orange filamentary clouds swarm around in this picture, resembling the ghostly shadow of a cosmic bird with wide orange wings, a long pink body, and a bright pinkish star as an eye. A myriad of stars are sprinkled all over the image.
When massive stars reach the end of their life they explode as a supernova, expelling their outer layers. These explosions send out shock waves that move through the surrounding gas, compressing and reshaping it. This is what creates the intricate structure of filaments seen here, which shine brightly because of the energy released during the explosion.