Tag: photography
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Astronomy Picture of the Day – Hubble Peers Inside a Celestial Geode
In this unusual image, the Hubble Space Telescope captures a rare view of the celestial equivalent of a geode – a gas cavity carved by the stellar wind and intense ultraviolet radiation from a young hot star.
Hubble Peers Inside a Celestial Geode. Credit: ESA/NASA, Yäel Nazé (University of Liège, Belgium) and You-Hua Chu (University of Illinois, Urbana, USA)
Real geodes are handball-sized, hollow rocks that start out as bubbles in volcanic or sedimentary rock. Only when these inconspicuous round rocks are split in half by a geologist, do we get a chance to appreciate the inside of the rock cavity that is lined with crystals. In the case of Hubble’s 35 light-year diameter “celestial geode” the transparency of its bubble-like cavity of interstellar gas and dust reveals the treasures of its interior.
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Astronomy Picture of the Day | The Lure of the Rings
Resembling a diamond-encrusted bracelet, a ring of brilliant blue star clusters wraps around the yellowish nucleus of what was once a normal spiral galaxy in this image from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
The Lure of the Rings. Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)
The sparkling blue ring is 150,000 light-years in diameter, making it larger than our entire home galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy, cataloged as AM 0644-741, is a member of the class of so- called “ring galaxies.” It lies 300 million light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Dorado. This image was released to commemorate the 14th anniversary of Hubble’s launch on April 24, 1990 and its deployment from the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990.
