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Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has spotted a star system that could have left behind a “zombie star” after an unusually weak supernova explosion. A supernova typically obliterates the exploding white dwarf, or dying star. On this occasion, scientists believe this faint supernova may have left behind a surviving portion of the dwarf star -- a sort of zombie star. While examining Hubble images taken years before the stellar explosion, astronomers identified a blue companion star feeding energy to a white dwarf, a process that ignited a nuclear reaction and released this weak supernova blast. This supernova, Type Iax, is less common than its brighter cousin, Type Ia. Astronomers have identified more than 30 of these mini-supernovas that may leave behind a surviving white dwarf. Seen here is an inset panel with a pair of before-and-after Hubble Space Telescope images of Supernova 2012Z in the spiral galaxy NGC 1309. The white X at the top of the galaxy image marks the location of the supernova. The 2005 and 2006 panel shows what astronomers believe to be a helium star transferring material to a white dwarf, causing the supernova in the 2013 panel. The team plans to use Hubble again in 2015 to observe the area, giving time for the supernova’s light to dim enough to reveal any possible surviving ”zombie star” and helium companion. Credit: NASA, ESA, C. McCully and S. Jha (Rutgers Univ.), and R. Foley (Univ. of Illinois) #nasa #hubble #zombie #zombies #stars #universe #hst #space; -
After a decade-long journey chasing its target, ESA’s Rosetta has today become the first spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet, opening a new chapter in Solar System exploration. This image, taken by Rosetta’s Onboard Scientific Imaging System (OSIRIS) on August 6, 2014, shows close up detail of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, focusing on a smooth region on the ‘base’ of the ‘body’ section of the comet. The image clearly shows a range of features, including boulders, craters and steep cliffs. The image was taken from a distance of 80 miles (130 kilometers) and the image resolution is 8 feet (2.4 meters) per pixel. The three U.S. instruments aboard the spacecraft are the Microwave Instrument for Rosetta Orbiter (MIRO), an ultraviolet spectrometer called Alice, and the Ion and Electron Sensor (IES) are part of a suite of 11 science instruments aboard the Rosetta orbiter. U.S. scientists are partnering on several non-U.S. instruments and are involved in seven of the mission's 21 instrument collaborations. NASA's Deep Space Network is supporting ESA's Ground Station Network for spacecraft tracking and navigation. Launched in March 2004, Rosetta was reactivated in January 2014 after a record 957 days in hibernation. Composed of an orbiter and lander, Rosetta's objectives upon arrival at comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August are to study the celestial object up close in unprecedented detail, prepare for landing a probe on the comet's nucleus in November, and track its changes as it sweeps past the sun. Comets are time capsules containing primitive material left over from the epoch when the sun and its planets formed. Rosetta's lander will obtain the first images taken from a comet's surface and will provide the first analysis of a comet's composition by drilling into the surface. Rosetta also will be the first spacecraft to witness at close proximity how a comet changes as it is subjected to the increasing intensity of the sun's radiation. Observations will help scientists learn more about the origin and evolution of our solar system and the role comets may have played in seeding Earth with water, and perhaps even life. Credit: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS; -
Two Years Ago, Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars, Captures Image of Mount Sharp This image was captured by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shortly after it landed on the Red Planet on the evening of Aug. 5, 2012 PDT (morning of Aug. 6 EDT), near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. The image shows the rover's main science target, Mount Sharp. The rover's shadow can be seen in the foreground, and the dark bands beyond are dunes. Rising up in the distance is Mount Sharp, whose peak is 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) high, taller than Mt. Whitney in California. The actual summit is not visible from this vantage point -- the highest elevation seen in this view is about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the rover. On June 24, 2014, Curiosity completed one Martian year -- 687 Earth days -- having accomplished the mission's main goal of determining whether Mars once offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. One of Curiosity's first major findings after landing in August 2012 was an ancient riverbed at its landing site. Nearby, at an area known as Yellowknife Bay, the mission met its main goal of determining whether the Martian Gale Crater ever was habitable for simple life forms. The answer, a historic "yes," came from two mudstone slabs that the rover sampled with its drill. Analysis of these samples revealed the site was once a lakebed with mild water, the essential elemental ingredients for life, and a type of chemical energy source used by some microbes on Earth. If Mars had living organisms, this would have been a good home for them. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech #2YearsOnMars #Landiversary #JourneyToMars #MarsCuriosity #Mars #Planet #RedPlanet #SolarSystem #Rover; -
Algae blooms are a regular occurrence on Lake Erie in summer. But it’s not every year that a bloom leads to the shutdown of water supplies in an American or Canadian city. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color view of an algae bloom in the west end of Lake Erie. The image of the coastal waters off of Ohio, Michigan, and southwestern Ontario was acquired at 2:50 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (1850 Universal Time) on August 3, 2014. NASA's MODIS data is being incorporated into NOAA's Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) alerts for Lake Erie and is supported by NASA's Earth Science Division's Applied Sciences Program. Image credit: NASA, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team #nasa #space #earth #earthscience #lakeerie #algae #water #modis; -
The Eye of Saturn Like a giant eye for the giant planet, Saturn's great vortex at its north pole appears to stare back at Cassini as Cassini stares at it. Measurements have sized the “eye” at a staggering 1,240 miles (2,000 kilometers) across with cloud speeds as fast as 330 miles per hour (150 meters per second). The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 2, 2014 using a combination of spectral filters which preferentially admit wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 748 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.2 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 43 degrees. Image scale is 8 miles (13 kilometers) per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute #nasa #cassini #saturn #solarsystem #space #planet;
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From above, Arctic ice looks quite different in summer than it does in winter. A sheen of white covers most surfaces in winter due to snowfall and frigid weather. As temperatures rise in the summer, turquoise splotches of color begin to speckle the ice surfaces. The splashes of blue are melt ponds, areas where snow has melted and pooled in low spots on glaciers and sea ice. A digital camera on NASA’s ER-2 airplane captured this top-down view of a melt pond atop a glacier in southeastern Alaska on July 16, 2014. Chunks of ice float on the pond’s turquoise water. When it took this photograph, the ER-2 was flying at 64,000 feet (20,000 meters), about twice as high as a commercial jet. In addition to the camera, the ER-2 was carrying the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar (MABEL). MABEL is a laser altimeter designed to measure the elevation of glaciers, mountains, forests, and other landforms below. Scientists are using MABEL’s measurements to design algorithms for the upcoming Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) mission. MABEL is similar to an instrument that will fly on ICESat-2, and scientists can use its measurements now to better understand how the instrument works and what the data will look like when they start making measurements from space. The 2014 MABEL campaign was launched, in part, to study melt ponds and other features of summer ice. Engineers added a new camera system that made it possible to match the MABEL measurements with a photographic glimpse of the ground. The digital camera took a picture every 3 seconds, with each frame capturing an area about 2.5 by 1.5 kilometers (1.6 by 0.9 miles). Credit: NASA/MABEL team; -
Hubble Eyes Galaxy as it Gets a Cosmic Hair Ruffling From objects as small as Newton's apple to those as large as a galaxy, no physical body is free from the stern bonds of gravity, as evidenced in this stunning picture captured by the Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Here we see two spiral galaxies engaged in a cosmic tug-of-war — but in this contest, there will be no winner. The structures of both objects are slowly distorted to resemble new forms, and in some cases, merge together to form new, super galaxies. This particular fate is similar to that of the Milky Way Galaxy, when it will ultimately merge with our closest galactic partner, the Andromeda Galaxy. There is no need to panic however, as this process takes several hundreds of millions of years. Not all interacting galaxies result in mergers though. The merger is dependent on the mass of each galaxy, as well as the relative velocities of each body. It is quite possible that the event pictured here, romantically named 2MASX J06094582-2140234, will avoid a merger event altogether, and will merely distort the arms of each spiral without colliding — the cosmic equivalent of a hair ruffling! These galactic interactions also trigger new regions of star formation in the galaxies involved, causing them to be extremely luminous in the infrared part of the spectrum. For this reason, these types of galaxies are referred to as LIRGs, or Luminous Infrared Galaxies. This image was taken as part of as part of a Hubble survey of the central regions of LIRGs in the local Universe, which also used the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) instrument. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Luca Limatola #nasa #hubble #universe #galaxy #galaxies #space; -
Iberian Peninsula at Night One of the International Space Station crew members recorded this early evening photo of the entire Iberian Peninsula (Spain, and Portugal) on July 26, 2014. Part of France can be seen at the top of the image and the Strait of Gibraltar is visible at bottom, with a very small portion of Morocco visible near the lower right corner. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #space #iss #exp40 #spain #portugal #spacestation #morocco #france #gibraltar; -
Our Research Shows Giant Asteroids Battered Early Earth: More than four billion years ago the surface of Earth was heavily reprocessed - or melted, mixed, and buried - as a result of giant asteroid impacts. A new terrestrial bombardment model, calibrated using existing lunar and terrestrial data, sheds light on the role asteroid collisions played in the evolution of the uppermost layers of the early Earth during the geologic eon called the "Hadean" (approximately 4 to 4.5 billion years ago). An artistic conception of the early Earth, showing a surface pummeled by large impact, resulting in extrusion of deep seated magma onto the surface. At the same time, distal portion of the surface could have retained liquid water. Image Credit: Simone Marchi #nasa #asteroid #earth #science; -
First Image of the Moon Taken by a U.S. Spacecraft: Ranger 7 took this image, the first picture of the moon by a U.S. spacecraft, on July 31, 1964 at 13:09 UT (9:09 AM EDT), about 17 minutes before impacting the lunar surface. The Ranger series of spacecraft were designed solely to take high-quality pictures of the moon and transmit them back to Earth in real time. The images were to be used for scientific study, as well as selecting landing sites for the Apollo moon missions. Ranger 7 was the first of the Ranger series to be entirely successful. It transmitted 4,308 high-quality images over the last 17 minutes of flight, the final image having a resolution of 0.5 meter/pixel. Ranger 7 was launched July 28, 1964 and arrived at the moon on July 31, 1964. Image Credit: NASA #space #nasa #moon #otd #onthisday #throwbackthursday #tbt #ranger7 #science;
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We selected proposals for two new instruments that will observe changes in global vegetation from the International Space Station. The sensors will give scientists new ways to see how forests and ecosystems are affected by changes in climate or land use change. This image of the Amazon rainforest is from a 2010 global map of the height of the world’s forests based on multiple satellite datasets. Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory #nasa #space #spacestation #earth #earthrightnow #iss #science; -
Liftoff! The European Space Agency’s (ESA) fifth and final Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV-5) launched Tuesday atop an Ariane 5 rocket from Kourou, French Guiana, at 7:47 p.m. EDT. The ATV-5 will take a two week trip to the International Space Station docking to the Zvezda service module on Aug. 12 at 9:43 a.m. with 7 tons of science, food, fuel and supplies. En route to the station, the Georges Lemaitre will pass 3.9 miles beneath the space station Aug. 8 so European flight controllers can test new rendezvous sensors. Engineers may use the new sensors in the design and manufacture of future European spacecraft. After the “fly-under”, the ATV-5 will pass in front, above and behind the station for the final four days of its rendezvous with Zvezda. Credit: ESA–S. Corvaja, 2014 #esa #atv #ariane5 #iss #spacestation #exp40 #nasa; -
Go get your 3-D glasses, you know, the blue-red ones with the red lens on the left. This stereo view from our Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity will appear three-dimensional. The view combines several images taken by Opportunity's Pancam and was obtained on the rover's 3,644th Martian day (sol) of exploration (April 24, 2014). Part of the rover is visible at bottom, including its rear solar arrays and low-gain antenna - the antenna appears incomplete here due to combining images with different camera pointings. Each day's drive by Opportunity sets a new record for longest travel on wheels on a world other than Earth. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ. #nasa #mars #marsrovers #science #3d; -
Geysers on icy Saturn moon! Scientists using mission data from our Cassini spacecraft have identified 101 distinct geysers erupting on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, suggesting it is possible for liquid water to reach moon's surface from its underground sea. This view looks across the geyser basin of Saturn's moon Enceladus, along fractures spewing water vapor and ice particles into space. Image Credit: NASA #saturn #nasa #enceladus #science #moon #space #cassini; -
Caught between the sun and our Solar Dynamics Observatory... the moon. The phenomenon, called a lunar transit, was observed on July 26, 2014, from 10:57 a.m. to 11:42 a.m. EDT. This happens approximately twice a year, causing a partial solar eclipse that can only be seen from SDO's point of view. Images of the eclipse show a crisp lunar horizon, because the moon has no atmosphere that would distort light. Image Credit: NASA #space #nasa #sun #sdo #science #moon;
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