Breaking News & Random Musings on Space, Technology, Sci-Fi & the View From A Writer’s Window
Isn’t this just an astonishing image? We thought we knew Cassiopeia A, but we were wrong.
“Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) view of Cas A displays a very violent explosion at a resolution previously unreachable at these wavelengths. This high-resolution look unveils intricate details of the expanding shell of material slamming into the gas shed by the star before it exploded.” Learn much more about the image and the history of our study of Cas A, go here: https://esawebb.org/news/weic2330/
The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission captured this beautiful view of Mercury’s rich geological landscape on June 23, 2022 as the spacecraft flew past the planet for a gravity assist maneuver.
The image was taken by the Mercury Transfer Module’s Monitoring Camera 2, when the spacecraft was within about 920 km from the surface of Mercury. Closest approach of about 200 km took place shortly before.
Read all about the details of the image here: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2022/06/BepiColombo_surveys_Mercury_s_rich_geology
Originally posted on Twitter.
This morning, the European Space Agency and NASA have unveiled the closest images of the Sun ever taken by a spacecraft: high-resolution pictures taken by their newly launched Solar Orbiter spacecraft. Already, the pictures are revealing weird phenomena on the Sun that we’ve never seen in such detail.
“We didn’t really expect the first images to turn out really this great,” Daniel Müller, ESA’s project scientist for the Solar Orbiter mission, tells The Verge. “They’re not only really sharp and perfectly exposed from the technical perspective, but they really show things that we have not seen before.”
Thanks to these images, scientists have discovered what appear to be relatively “tiny” solar flares peppered across the Sun’s surface. The scientists behind the mission have dubbed these small flares “campfires,” as they are millions to billions of times smaller than the massive, energetic flares that periodically erupt from the Sun. Dozens of these campfires can be seen at any give time within the field of view of Solar Orbiter’s camera. “What is intriguing is that they seem to be happening everywhere on the Sun all the time,” says Müller.
ESA's CHEOPS spacecraft launched this week. We're about to learn a LOT more about exoplanets.
CHEOPS stands for the Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite. It’s a partnership between ESA and Switzerland, with 10 other EU states contributing. Its mission is not to find more exoplanets, but to study the ones we already know of.
It’ll watch as these exoplanets transit in front of the star, the same way we’ve found most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered to date. But CHEOPS will be focusing on the dips in starlight with a specific intent: to find the planets’ size.
Originally posted on Twitter.
Mars Is Heaven: https://buff.ly/2nlVuSm by @BadAstronomer. Grab the full, high-res version of this amazing image taken by @esascience #MarsExpress here: https://buff.ly/2nx28oD
Originally posted on Twitter.
The sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy. This is what a trillion stars look like! (Credit: NASA/ESA) : https://twitter.com/WorldAndScience/status/1119039189939642368
Originally posted on Twitter.
From the author's Twitter post: "One of my favorite kinds of image is one where it doesn’t look like much… until you understand what you’re seeing.
For example: Just a bunch of dots, right? But every single one of those dots *is an entire galaxy*.
And there are a lot of dots. A LOT." (Tweet)
The image is from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey. And because the survey wasn't able to look at every point in the sky, for every dot you see here, there are 200 more across the sky Herschel wasn't able to see, for a total of some 17 million galaxies.
And even that is a pittance compared to the estimated 2 trillion galaxies filling the universe.
You know, somehow I don't think I'm going to run out of story ideas anytime soon....😋
