Top Deep Space Photos 2011
December 14, 2011 at 11:41 AM Leave a comment
Check out the “Top 24 Deep Space Pictures of 2011″ according to Discover magazine, here. Some of photos aren’t all that clear but some are magnificent:
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/K.Eriksen et al.; Optical: DSS
This may be the weirdest entry in the gallery this year: Tycho’s supernova remnant, looking for all the world (Universe?) like some sort of bizarre protozoan floating in space. It’s actually the expanding debris from a star first seen in 1572 by astronomer Tycho Brahe. This image was taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and shows very high-energy X-rays in blue, and lower energy X-rays in red (both have been superposed on a sky survey image of stars representing the location of the nebula).
Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Because they’re big, sometimes galaxies get close together. Too close. Close enough that their gravity can affect each other, drawing out long arms of gas and stars, distorting each other into weird and beautiful shapes. It happens a lot.
Such is Arp 273, seen here in a Hubble image taken to celebrate the observatory’s 20th anniversary in space. These two big galaxies passed each other in the recent past (like, a few million years ago). Both were probably normal enough before the encounter, but are now twisted and asymmetric.
Entry filed under: Nature. Tags: .
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